Blue Car | Review

Debut feature offers some more of the same.

What I find amusing about these festivals is that you sometimes don’t know who’ll be among your presence during a screening, well the people who were seating right in front of me were the two principle actors of the feature film whom appeared to be taking in their first viewing of the completed product. The Montreal Film Festival and other film festivals like it are the best venue for independent features such as this one where the competition is more focused towards first time directors such as Karen Moncrieff and her first feature,- Blue Car. A far departure from the world of soaps-this family drama is guided with the vision of a female auteur that thankfully doesn’t chose the route of the male Lolita point of view. Instead, the socially delicate and somewhat taboo picture is injected with a tone that offers an ensemble piece with a cast of weak characters under a compelling humane light.

A non-present single mother has two-latch key kid daughters-with the father out of the portrait there isn’t much attention to go around. The youngest daughter who’d rather be with the angels leaves a bigger mark on her older sister. In her late teens Meg played by Agnes Bruckner expresses herself through poetry having her teacher Mr. Auster David Strathairn (A Map of the World) take notice. The relationship- similar to the act one story element in Storytelling, provides Meg with a support system that she badly needed and the fathering that she never had. Her poem entitled Blue Car is in reference to the memories of her father and the image of him departing from the family nest. Bruckner’s performance is key in showing the character’s weakened state of vulnerability as well as her resilience, while Strathairn shows that he can excel in the most difficult of roles-his performance in A Map of the World equally as brilliant.

My view of this film was that the rough spots like dreary emblematic theme of teacher preying on the student or the criminality of the parents who don’t give the proper care to their children were noticeably lacklustre plot points. Does this mean that the film wasn’t interesting? Not exactly, there are moments-especially in the film’s conclusion where we witness the victimized heroine protagonist in her moment of personalized glory-sort of like Sarah Polley’s character in The Sweet Hereafter who takes denouncing matters in her own hands. This is the type of film that might fly under the radar screen and get the sort of attention as last year’s first-time director Todd Field’s Miramax feature In the Bedroom got and this might be the best young first performance of an actress since Michelle Rodriguez in the independent feature, Girlfight.

Rating 2 stars