Shook is about a struggling novelist from Scarborough, Toronto’s often-ignored multicultural epicentre.Peter Hadfield/Elevation Pictures
Amar Wala is “shocked” by the big laughs his scripted feature debut Shook has been getting at early screenings, including its Toronto International Film Festival premiere last fall, with recurring bits about South Asian names spelled out on coffee cups tempting some to categorize it as comedy.
“We thought it was mostly a drama and it had some funny bits in it,” Wala says on a Zoom call with The Globe and Mail, the latest in a series of conversations with the filmmaker and his leads Saamer Usmani and Amy Forsyth, which began on the film’s Scarborough set two years prior.
He is discussing his approach to a fictional story that mines a formative period from his own past, one in which he had to navigate his parents’ divorce, then his father’s Parkinson’s diagnosis – material that doesn’t naturally lend itself to laugh-out-loud reactions, which the co-writer and director nevertheless welcomes. “We always wanted to give you the opportunity to laugh, or the permission to laugh, at all of this stuff,” he says. “People are calling it a dramedy, which I guess I’m okay with.”
The anything-but-normal reality of making a Canadian film
Shook is a bit of a reset for Wala, who emerged on the Canadian film scene more than a decade ago with The Secret Trial 5, a documentary about Muslim men unjustly imprisoned in Canada without charge. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, he has taken on an activist role, pushing for more meaningful onscreen representation and co-founding the Racial Equity Media Collective as part of that pursuit.
With Shook, he isn’t tackling directly sociopolitical subject matter. Instead, he’s making a film both intimate and personal, processing experiences from which he now has more than a decade of distance.
But there’s more to it. His story is about a struggling novelist who, like the director, happens to be a brown guy from Scarborough, Toronto’s often-ignored multicultural epicentre. His protagonist, Ash – short for Ashish – feels limited by the tropes the literary world imposes on him, the same tropes Wala subverts in Shook.
Bernard White plays the main character’s father in the film, which opens Aug. 8.Peter Hadfield/Elevation Pictures
This is not the oft-told story about a diaspora or immigration issues, featuring conservative (or sexless), one-dimensional South Asian families and the adorkable Indian male lead that Western cinema has made us accustomed to. Instead, it’s a film that embraces how hot Usmani is and how messy a South Asian family can be, which are all choices as elegant and intentional as some of Shook’s crafty visuals.
Even the comedy tends to be pointed, like a gag about Toronto’s blue night bus. His characters are forced to endure the long journey home to Scarborough, with eruptions of vomit and brawls, because they partied just a tad too late in the city, in hip venues largely populated by (and catering to) white people, and missed the last subway train.
“It’s meant to be funny in the movie,” Wala says, “but really, if you think about it, it’s kind of ridiculous that last call is 2 a.m. but the subway trains stop running at 1:35. It just goes to show you who these systems are built for and who they’re not built for.”
“My politics are going to seep their way into my movie,” he adds. “It also just wouldn’t be realistic to have an honest portrayal of life as a brown person that didn’t have some of these politics embedded into them. They’re just a part of our lives. They are how we move about this city.”
An intimate and funny film, Shook is a love letter to Scarborough
I should divulge that I’m a “brown guy from Scarborough,” too, and have frequented many of the locales featured in Shook, among them the Malvern Medical Centre, which has since moved to the other side of town. That’s the location I visited two years ago to see the formerly pastel-hued waiting room I spent gruelling hours in repurposed as a film set, with more clinical colours.
On the day I visited the set, Wala and his assistant director, Aiden Shipley, were managing a major wrench in their plans. The actor meant to play a doctor offering advice on Parkinson’s treatment tested positive for COVID-19. They had to quickly recast, leaving Sammy Azero, who took on the role, a single day to learn 14 pages of dialogue, with scenes opposite Ash, his father (Bernard White) and real-life Parkinson’s patients. Essential material they had planned to shoot over two days was now being squeezed into one.
“Of course things went awry, and it doesn’t all go according to plan, but everyone was in such great spirits and there was a lot of respect,” Forsyth said, summing up exactly the vibe I witnessed on set.
The filmmakers and crew weren’t losing their heads. Instead, they were grabbing what shots they could without Azero – Ash puking into a trash can, close-ups on the hands of real people living with Parkinson’s – before breaking off with a splinter crew to discreetly steal some shots outside Malvern Town Centre.
From its people to its story, Morningside is pure Scarborough
“Amar’s from the doc world, where there’s nothing you can plan for,” Usmani said. “More narrative filmmakers should have done docs because you have to think on the fly.”
“Really, it’s just about being calm in the moment,” Wala says when I bring up that moment years later, “and being confident that no matter what happens you know the story, and know the text well enough, that you could adapt. As long as you are getting the core of what those scenes mean, you are still going to have a film that’s intact.”
That same logic could apply to Wala’s approach to the comedy, specifically the ad libs and jokes White would throw into the mix with the room Wala left for his cast to improvise and make the material their own – even if that meant reframing how his movie could be received.
“What doc has taught me is that if you can roll with the punches and you can adapt to what’s happening in the moment, the work might end up being even better than you imagined.”
Shook opens in theatres Aug. 8.
Special to The Globe and Mail
