Review: Deragh Campbell cements reputation as Canada’s most fearless performer in Matt and Mara | Canada Voices

Matt and Mara

Directed by Kazik Radwanski

Written by Kazik Radwanski and Samantha Chater

Starring Deragh Campbell, Matt Johnson and Avery Nayman

Classification N/A; 80 minutes

Opens at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto Oct. 4, expanding to other cities throughout the fall

Critic’s Pick

There is brave, and then there is Deragh Campbell brave.

One of the most fearless actresses of her generation, the rising Canadian star possesses a determined and fiercely curious desire to claw under the skin of a character, evaporating the line between fabrication and fact to a wisp of thin air. Watching Campbell walk such a kind of cinematic high-wire act in the 2019 character study Anne at 13,000 ft. or the forthcoming psychological drama Measures for a Funeral is to witness performances that are wonderfully audacious dares. There is an intensity and commitment in Campbell’s work that mesmerizes, even frightens, with its sheer boldness.

Yet in her new movie, the romantic dramedy Matt and Mara, which reunites the actress with her Anne at 13,000 ft. director Kazik Radwanski, Campbell might pull off the most courageous act of her career so far: drinking water straight from the sidewalk splash-pad fountain at Toronto’s grody Yonge-Dundas Square. Get this woman on Fear Factor.

There is a joke there, but just barely. The Toronto-set Matt and Mara – in both Radwanski’s construction and Campbell’s performance – so thoroughly engages in the world around it that the production often feels like a bold gambit a in semi-engineered drama that hits the jackpot several times over. If everything in the film feels so natural, so nakedly real, that is because everyone involved in it worked so determinedly to make that magic act happen. To bleed the manufactured into the organic.

Matt and Mara is a continuation and levelling up of Radwanski’s filmography, which through Anne, How Heavy This Hammer and Tower has focused on the uneasiness of urban connection.

An anti-meet-cute, the story here follows the back-and-forth relationship between Campbell’s creative writing professor Mara and the charismatic ex who pops back into her life after he’s become a semisuccessful bad-boy novelist. Campbell’s Anne co-star Matt Johnson plays the other half of the film’s title, sanding the edges of his more brash work in BlackBerry and Nirvanna the Band the Show just right, his slick confidence colliding nicely against Mara/Campbell’s more tentative energy.

There is of course a good reason why Mara takes baby steps in rekindling any connection with Matt: She’s married with a young child, though both her musician husband (Mounir Al Shami) and adorable toddler (Avery Nayman) seem to be either nerve-wracking stressors or causes for distraction. There are several moments in Mara’s domestic life – such as a dinner-party scene in which she hilariously confesses to not liking music, any music, all that much – in which she feels yearning for any form of rescue, emotionally disastrous or not.

As Mara and Matt grow closer – including a road trip that painfully tears apart a host of assumptions – Radwanski’s film builds to a thoughtfully messy conclusion, the kind of which make all of his films so intimate and beguiling. This isn’t a movie that asks the question will they or won’t they so much as it ponders why any of us want, or feel we deserve, something from someone else. (I wonder, too, if the title shouldn’t be reversed, as smoothly as Matt and Mara rolls off the tongue.)

Shot over the course of months and months, and working with a close crew of collaborators and friends – cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov and editor Ajla Odobasic both worked on Anne, while baby Avery is the son of Toronto film critic Adam Nayman – the film straddles the divide between tight and loose with careful calculation. There is an improvisatory air to it all, but guided by exacting vision. And whereas Anne was all raw, up-close-and-personal intensity, with Michaylov’s camera as shaky as the film’s title character was emotionally unstable, the visual language here is quieter, perhaps more confident.

Radwanski also hits the Canadian film industry gold mine by once again pairing Campbell and Johnson, who together create characters and scenarios brimming with multiple meanings and interpretations.

It doesn’t feel a coincidence that Radwanski decided to conceive Mara and Matt as writers, either – these are people who are experts at hiding truth between the lines. The way that the performers gradually inch so close to one another, as if the entire urban landscape of downtown Toronto is pushing them together, feels both cinematic and literary – the kind of story that might be stacked in the semi-famed “plotless fiction” section of local bookstore Type. Just don’t drink the water.