Anne at Thirteen Thousand Feet (Kazik Radwanski, 2019)

(First of all, memo to Mike D'Angelo for future reference: the title above appears onscreen, in contrast to the numerals and abbreviations used in the "official" title. Calibrate accordingly.)

I'm a fan of Kaz, and although we are not exactly friends, we have communicated over the years. Of course, that's the case with virtually every experimental filmmaker I've written about, so that hardly compromises my objectivity (or if it does, I'm profoundly sunk). But I've seen and appreciated Radwanski's two previous features, Tower and How Heavy This Hammer, as well as his recent short film Scaffold which, in its own odd way, was like a 15-minute featurette. Like his latest, Radwanski's older films are essentially cinematic equivalents of Chuck Close portraits, individuals framed in close-up who Kaz invites us to intellectually explore over time (not to say "dissect" -- there's a fair amount of humanist reserve here).

But over the course of those three earlier films, Radwanski seemed to be getting more and more controlled, adopting an almost structuralist approach to characterization with respect to the frame. That's to say, we were invited to zero in on a person as they bobbed around their environment, and that often that figure/ground relationship was fairly abstract to us. The protagonist in How Heavy This Hammer edged toward maddening opacity, and in Scaffold, the lead character was virtually unseen, offering the viewer a tension between his own personality (which came through despite his anonymity) and our tendency to project onto him.

By contrast, Anne at Thirteen Thousand Feet is a film that abjures distance almost completely. After some initial scenes that place Anne (Deragh Campbell) in the context of her friend group and her work environment, Radwanski locks onto his lead performer and pretty much never turns loose. We are in a fairly aggressive Cassavetean space for most of the film, relying on a tense synergy between Radwanski, Campbell, and cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov for the generation of moment-to-moment syntax. Ajla Odobasic's fragmented editing also serves to keep the viewer off-balance, but as we get further into Anne and understand what the film is articulating, this nonlinear approach, oddly enough, is almost beside the point.

Anne is a worker at a Toronto daycare center. She is a co-teacher with a more experienced mentor who doesn't appreciate Anne's somewhat lackadaisical approach to the job. Fortunately she has a friend at work, Sarah (Dorothea Paas) who offers her support. At Sarah's wedding, Anne meet's the best man, Matt (Matt Johnson), who helps her out when she's falling down drunk. The two begin to date. Anne also takes outside babysitting gigs for one of the kids at the daycare, the precocious, shark-obsessed Oliver. ("I admit nothing!") 

And it is fairly obvious that Anne is an unmedicated manic depressive. From one shot to the next, she is seen antagonizing her boss, delivering a too-personal Maid of Honor toast, interacting with the children in borderline-inappropriate ways, or surprising Matt by taking him to meet her family and introducing him as a fiance. At certain points she simply breaks down in sobs. At other points her behavior is simply bizarre and inexplicable, all hidden behind a childlike affectation, as if she did not know that the rules she was breaking even existed, and besides, why should they?

My friend Jeremy Heilman, who did not like Anne, argued that the film used the conceit of mental illness as an engine for suspense. That's to say, the character's unpredictability from scene to scene was a cinematic tool, generating a kind of one-woman Pialat extravaganza. I see his point, although I don't entirely agree. I think there is a high degree of integrity to Campbell's performance, and although it often demands that she turn on a dime, there is coherence there that unifies her sense of psychological dispersal. Nevertheless, Radwanski does sacrifice the formalism of his previous work for an immediacy that feels limiting here. We are never given the chance to understand Anne from the perspective of others, as if that outside perspective were somehow anathema to empathy. (Compare this to Dan Sallitt's Fourteen, a film that understands that we can feel deeply for people precisely because we don't understand them.) 

As for using skydiving as its central metaphor, it feels both irritatingly on the nose and maddeningly abstract. Of course Anne is only "herself" when in freefall. But given that she is surrounded by people who ostensibly care about her, like her mother (Lawrene Denkers), not to mention the social safety net of the white Canadian middle class, why should she need to jump out of a plane in order to find her parachute?