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| A film festival with no viewers? It's the wilderness out there. |
Dir. Roney
Starring: Grace Glowicki, Cotey Pope
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Suppose you make a movie. Well, obviously you want people to see it and maybe, just maybe, you decide to launch the film by hosting your very own film festival. You make your own flyers, post them around, set up a makeshift theatre in your front yard and then, wait for the crowds to pour in.
This is, in a nutshell, what the two young women (Grace Glowicki, Cotey Pope) at the centre of Roney's debut film do. It is, however, a bit more complicated than that. Their lives and, by extension Roney's film itself become infused with magic. Inspiration is all around them, to be sure. They live in an isolated country house surrounded by peace and natural beauty. They spend inordinate amounts of time watching 70s movies with tough, kick-butt female heroines, they drive along the empty highways and byways of the rural municipality they find themselves in, emulating the poses and dialogue of the movies, but using that inspiration as a springboard for their own imaginations.
And of course, they harvest the mysterious glitter infusing their bucolic surroundings. Glitter, you see, especially in the world of magic realism (which Roney's film has in spades) has oh-so mysterious ways. However, magic will only get you so far and these two women have a lot more going for them. They mine the gold with sheer determination.
This is one fine debut. The Vancouver-born Roney, who studied at Ryerson University, displays an assured hand behind the camera. She guides this tale with a talent that seems natural. She feels like someone with filmmaking hard-wired into her DNA. Her compositions are rich, she has a natural propensity for hitting the proper dramatic beats to drive the film forward (with plenty of cinematic poetry) and she elicits fine performances from her two leads.
There is, as it turns out, a strange melancholy to the fun proceedings. These women, these friends, these artists, are working in the wilderness and I can't help but think of the patriarchal nature of the film industry itself. They're on their own and it shouldn't have to be that way. So while Glitter's Wild Women offers plenty of entertainment value, it also delivers plenty of food for thought.
As it should be, really.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***1/2 Three and a Half Stars
Glitter's Wild Women premieres in the Short Cuts program at TIFF 2018.