‘I was terrified to even admit that I wanted to be a filmmaker because it felt like such a lofty dream,’ says Chandler Levack, whose new rom-com Mile End Kicks screens at TIFF on Sept. 4, 9 and 13.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Montreal is the place where anglo Canadians come to speak broken French and fumble their creative pursuits, so suggests Canadian writer-director Chandler Levack in her new rom-com Mile End Kicks, which is having its world premiere on the Toronto International Film Festival’s opening night.
Levack’s autobiographical second feature sees Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira), a skittish 24-year-old music critic in 2011, move from Toronto to Montreal to write a book about Alanis Morissette’s seminal album Jagged Little Pill.
This well-meaning move is a bid to freshen up her circumstances after leaving Merge Weekly, a fictionalized alt-weekly magazine, where she published hundreds of articles for a slimy editor (Jay Baruchel) who owes her a hefty fee. Upon Megabus-ing to Quebec, Grace faces a chaotic accumulation of vicenarian crises: a book that will not write itself, a sloppy love triangle, a Craigslist roommate (Juliette Gariépy), and, inevitably, ego death.
Enamoured by Montreal’s music mythos – the modest origins of Grimes, Mac DeMarco and Arcade Fire – Grace quickly finds herself at a loft concert, which she dorkily compares to a cotillion. On stage are Bone Patrol, a four-piece band performing whispery, Pavement-esque tunes. Lead singer Chevy (Stanley Simons) immediately catches Grace’s eye. A foot to his right is Archie (Devon Bostick), a sensitive guitarist from PEI, who over-enunciates the t’s in “Toronto.”
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Grace is not just oblivious to Chevy’s red flags but endeared by them – a rite of passage for 20-something Montreal transplants. Levack wrote the first draft of the script in 2015, after spending a month, as she put it, “ruminating on the most pivotal and cinematic time of my life.”
“I was terrified to even admit that I wanted to be a filmmaker because it felt like such a lofty dream,” says Levack, whose nerves about the upcoming premiere are apparent. “Both my movies are about people who are terrified to make art and avoid it the entire time, while constantly talking about the thing they want to make.”
Levack’s 2022 debut I Like Movies, about a curmudgeonly teen cinephile (Isaiah Lehtinen, also in Bone Patrol) working at a video store, similarly engages a media-obsessed lead with destructive tendencies. “The gender reversal in I Like Movies – which was both heavily fictionalized and very autobiographical – allowed me to have some distance from the character,” Levack says in an interview. “But that shifts when the protagonist is a young woman with a physical resemblance to you who is also wearing your old SPIN Magazine T-shirts.”
Barbie Ferreira plays a skittish 24-year-old music critic in 2011, who moves from Toronto to Montreal to write a book about Alanis Morissette’s seminal album Jagged Little Pill.HO/The Canadian Press
Ferreira, an American actress and Euphoria alum with a sparkling screen presence, is Levack’s proxy here, with bangs, thick-framed glasses and a studied English Canadian accent to boot. The director gushes over Ferreira’s “generous, risky and authentic” portrayal: “I needed somebody who was going to be a formidable leading lady or rom-com heroine, but also who could understand the pain and vulnerability at the heart of this person.”
Levack presents the abuse, indifference and humiliation embedded in Grace’s seemingly ordinary interactions without languishing in her suffering. The character does not pretend to know how to act in these demoralizing circumstances, and the director’s hindsight at no point edges in to save her. “Sometimes when you fictionalize something, you make it more true,” she adds.
Levack, a former contributor to The Globe and Mail, also reflects on her dual position as a director and a critic: “There aren’t a lot of movies that portray female journalists, and certainly not female critics. If they do, the journalists are always conniving or use their sexuality as a kind of weapon to get the story.” Grace seems to refuse the standard of steadfast, cunning female reporters in film, instead embodying an irresolute young woman “standing on the periphery of the conversation,” barred from entry for her ostensibly girlish taste.
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“I’ve been thinking about how my entire sensibility is made of the films I’ve loved, the music I’ve valorized, all the male artists I was interviewing and canonizing in my criticism,” says Levack. “That’s why it’s so important that Grace is writing the Alanis book – when I was eight years old, that was the first record I loved and the thing that made me go, ‘Oh, culture is for me.’”
Levack giddily offers many salient cinematic influences in Mile End Kicks, including, of course, Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, about a 15-year-old Rolling Stone critic playing groupie for an up-and-coming band on tour. “I loved that movie so much I wanted to live inside of it,” says Levack, who dropped out of university to become a critic at 20.
Other guiding texts were “movies where people are having a really bad summer,” like Éric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale or The Collector, or “mature rom-coms,” like Broadcast News or When Harry Met Sally.
Levack encouraged Ferreira to watch Bridget Jones’s Diary to build Grace’s character, and she also referenced “brilliantly directed” sex scenes from HBO’s Girls, which she watched alongside the intimacy co-ordinators of Mile End Kicks. “People don’t think about sex scenes as scenes,” Levack explains. “A sex scene is an incredible way to reveal character – what somebody wants, or doesn’t want, what they desire.”
The production details of Mile End Kicks were also well-laboured upon to construct the early 2010s twee. The book pages we see Grace writing are, in fact, penned by Levack, and one need only look to the director’s casual crowdsourcing for a highly specific violet dolphin dildo last year to understand she was serious about set dressing. Levack describes the process of excavating old Facebook photo albums and cringey Tumblr posts, trying to replicate “how a certain slant of light hits someone on Bernard Street at 2 a.m. after a loft party.”
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To ground the film in Quebec’s storied music scene, Mile End Kicks also features original music by Montreal indie-rock band TOPS, which Levack considers the “soundtrack” to her life. Levack gave them a brief on the imagined band’s aesthetic and also suggested song lyrics and titles.
When they returned with finessed tracks – which the director then guided: “a guitar solo here, all members singing here” – the actors took part in a “band camp” hosted by TOPS guitarist David Carriere, who helped them inhabit a group posture. Simons, acting as Bone Patrol’s singer, is a real-life musician (the solo songs Chevy performs in the film are his own), but Bostick and Lehtinen learned to play guitar and bass, respectively, for the roles.
“What’s unfortunate about Canadian cinema is we think in order to appeal to American marketplaces, everything has to become this generic, sanitized version of anywhere, USA,” Levack sighs. “All the Canadian movies I love are incredibly localized.” With the film being an Ontario-Quebec co-production, Levack wanted to ensure that this “very anglophone portrait” of moving to Montreal didn’t caricaturize its francophone residents.
Mile End Kicks’s homespun production comes shortly before Levack was tapped to direct the Adam Sandler-produced Roommates, a Netflix comedy with a far glitzier price tag than her first two features. She describes finishing post-production on Mile End Kicks while simultaneously shooting her next project – a quick succession that appears mutually energizing and exhausting.
Ahead of the film’s TIFF premiere, Levack reflects on where she’d like her filmmaking practice to eventually take her. “I’d love to try and be omnivorous,” she says, citing horror-comedy hybrids and documentaries as potential career footsteps. “I’m not ruling anything out.”
Mile End Kicks screens at TIFF on Sept. 4, 9 and 13 (tiff.net).
Special to The Globe and Mail
