Clement Virgo says he wanted to ‘create a space of my own’ with Steal Away.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
If his 2022 Scarborough-set drama Brother marked something of a homecoming for Toronto filmmaker Clement Virgo after a long stretch working in American television, then his follow-up feature Steal Away is another defiant departure.
Loosely based on Karolyn Smardz Frost’s non-fiction book Steal Away Home, which chronicles the journey of a teenage slave named Cecelia Reynolds from Kentucky to Canada and back again, Virgo’s film is half Afrofuturistic fairy tale, half psychosexual potboiler, and entirely impossible to pinpoint geographically.
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Mallori Johnson and Angourie Rice star in Steal Away, loosely based on Karolyn Smardz Frost’s non-fiction book Steal Away Home.TIFF/Supplied
As Virgo follows the lives of two young women – the naive white teen Fanny (Angourie Rice), whose wealthy family has taken in the bolder and more cynical Black refugee Cécile (Mallori Johnson) – the film imagines an alternate reality caught between eras and continents. The unnamed country that Fanny and Cécile must navigate could be occupied France, or the Antebellum South, or the anachronistic Germany of Christian Petzold’s Transit. In other words: It could not be further from the familiar Toronto corners of Virgo’s dramas Brother or Lie with Me, to say nothing of his period-accurate work on the CBC’s The Book of Negroes.
“When I made my first film, Rude, I didn’t really know what I was doing – and my first instinct was to create a world of my own, and that’s what I did. But I went away from that because there was a sense I had to be more naturalistic and realistic,” Virgo says today, a few weeks before Steal Away makes its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. “But with this one, I wanted to go back to that first instinct. To create a space of my own. What Guillermo del Toro did with Pan’s Labyrinth or David Lynch with Blue Velvet.”
As such, Steal Away speaks as much to the past as it speculates on the future, with fairy-tale tropes (the film opens with the words “Once upon a time …” while its official subtitle calls it a tale of “two princesses”), fantastical costumes and wild lighting employed to reflect the barely hidden evils of society.
Partly, Virgo’s approach is allegorical, especially once it becomes clear just how Fanny’s family came to rule the land. But it is also aesthetically experimental – a deliberately bold departure from Virgo’s prolific small-screen work with such streaming giants as Netflix (The Madness) and Apple TV+ (Dear Edward).
“I wanted to be bold with it, to use that sort of Afrofuturist imagery, because when I work in television, I end up shooting a lot of cellphones and screens and things like TVs, and I didn’t want to do that this time,” Virgo says. “I wanted to construct a universe that had its own rules, and to immerse the audience in that, and have them come along for the journey.”
That said, Steal Away isn’t completely Virgo going down an untrodden path. The film is produced by the director’s long-time behind-the-scenes partner Damon D’Oliveira, whom Virgo has known since they studied together at the Canadian Film Centre in the early 1990s; it co-stars Lauren Lee Smith, who headlined Virgo’s scandalous 2005 erotic drama Lie with Me; and it was written alongside Virgo’s partner, the novelist Tamara Faith Berger, who also co-wrote Lie with Me.
(That last connection makes Virgo and Berger one of many real-life filmmaking couples arriving at TIFF this year, including Dead Lover’s Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie, The Testament of Ann Lee’s Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, and Honey Bunch’s Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer.)
“Whenever I write a script, Tamara is my first reader – she understands how I process things. And whenever she writes a script or a novel, I’m usually her first reader, so we have that exchange,” says Virgo. “You know each other’s language intuitively.”
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Whereas Brother was a heavily masculine work – with Virgo drawing tough yet touching performances from Lamar Johnson and Aaron Pierre as two diametrically opposed siblings – Steal Away is about the inner lives of two women. How they see the world as a threat, and how the world is in turn threatened by their burgeoning sexuality. While Berger was a guiding light here for Virgo, he also found strength in his two leading performers.
“Mallori was a revelation to me. She spoke really eloquently about the story and the character. And Angourie was someone that I’ve loved for a while, from Mean Girls and beyond,” the filmmaker says. “I’m a middle-aged man so you know, all I have are my instincts around what feels authentic and emotionally truthful. I gave them this to create, and they showed me who these characters are.”
After Brother’s TIFF 2022 premiere, the film went on to break records at the Canadian Screen Awards, scoring 12 wins, including Best Picture. While the film’s reception certainly restarted some conversations about Virgo’s film career, it more so awakened his own cinematic ambitions and audacity.
“Between my last film and Brother, it was about 10 years. Brother was where I decided that I wanted to stop doing television for a bit, because that is a way of making money and sustaining a career, a family,” Virgo says.
“So, I thought, let me just make another film. Maybe my career might be over, but I want to try, and with such a personal film, because it was a conversation with the history of my own immigrant family. And the experience really reawakened me. Steal Away is a bit more of a fun experiment, to be able to test things.”
Maybe a chance, even, for Virgo to find his own happily ever after.
Steal Away screens at TIFF on Sept. 5, 6 and 12 (tiff.net).
