LUCIDMEDIA

Telling Toronto's Stories

Written by Catherine Kustanczy Tuesday, 16 December 2008 10:53

“I thought of Joyce and Dubliners,” says Weaver. “It’s very specific and very universal at the same time… they’re Toronto stories, yes, but they’re city stories as well.”

Citing Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, the films of Rossellini and the European neo-realist movement, Weaver, director of the 2001 film Century Hotel, is plain in his love for the urban environment, and the variation of stories and histories they offer. Equally, he’s entranced by the continuing, open-ended quality of city life. “The thing about the city is, lives go on. There isn’t any sort of end. That’s what so amazing –these stories are very open-ended.”

From the film’s first tale through to its last, stories and characters are as diverse as the city they’re set in, and yet are deeply linked to the modern Toronto we know. All four featurettes are linked together by an African boy who lands at Pearson International Airport in the opening scene; he makes brief but poignant appearances in each of the directors’ works The Brazilian, by broadcaster/musician Sook-Yin Lee, explores the complex dynamics of modern relationships, particularly those faced by single urban women; Windows is Sodz Sutherland’s look at urban violence and how affects those caught in the crossfire of race and class. Shoelaces, directed by Aaron Woodley,is an old-fashioned fairy tale with modern touches; cell phones and streetwise language combine with child-like wonder and curiosity, with a dark subtext of domestic abuse woven in. Weaver’s own featurette, Lost Boys, chronicles the life of Henry, a homeless man who finds purpose, wit a storied and tragic past. Gil Bellows, perhaps best-known as Billy, the love interest on the television series Ally McBeal, plays Henry, with a shaved head, piercing stare, and pained expression..

“The first thing I did was call my agent,” Bellows says of his reaction to Weaver’s script, “and I told him it’s important I talk to David immediately, I have to do it. We got on the phone, and while were speaking I knew I had somebody who was looking at things the way I was.”

The passion with which Bellows initially responded to the material translates onscreen, as his pathos and desperation of a man given in to his own demons is clearly expressed. The demons are given added depth, as the character of Henry is, in fact, based on a real person. While attending the University of Toronto in the 1990s, Weaver befriended an older student who had returned to school to get his degree, although he’d already published his own poetry and his work had appeared in journals.

“He was unbelievably well-read and a very passionate speaker,” Weaver says of his old friend, “ I was nineteen or twenty. I loved this guy. We were very close for about a year and a half, then he dropped out of university.” Weaver says the next thing he heard, the man had given up on academia and had gone into copywriting; when Weaver attended film school in the U.S., they lost touch. When he came back to Toronto seven years later, he heard the man had been bouncing from one agency to another, eventually getting fired and vanishing. A lawyer friend from Weaver’s school days spotted the man many years later in the courtyard of the Scotiabank plaza. It wasn’t the man either of them had known. “He was screaming at the pigeons. Something had happened. That crazy energy, that passion he had, had flipped to another side.” In the original draft of the script for Lost Boys, says Weaver, “Henry is called Professor by someone at the soup kitchen,” as a nod to his friend. “I wanted there to be this sense of someone who had this psychic break, and who is now on the other side of it.” The other inspiration behind Lost Boys relates to a story Weaver read about a missing child, and a homeless man who had tried to alert police as to the boy’s whereabouts, only to be shrugged away: “They had him in a category of guys you don’t listen to.”

With the crisp economy and subtle nuance of an Italo Calvino story, Lost Boys, like all the featurettes in Toronto Stories, seamlessly blends characterization and story in a small but powerful package. Weaver thinks short films operate on along the same principles as short stories, believing the “elusiveness” is integral to the audience’s appreciation of the material. “The characters or their history aren’t fully explained, but there are gestures towards them, and it was always in my mind to try to make that happen.” Henry’s obsession with finding the African boy becomes the driving force of the narrative, and Bellows says it becomes a potent symbol of his character’s journey, both past and present. “(His obsession) is something I consciously felt hanging over the story, in the way that finding that boy was a very small version of reclaiming a moment he could never really reclaim (from his own life). He realized in that flicker of seeing the boy going down the stairs that (he) was in potentially serious trouble, and so he was trying to do everything he could to get someone else to help, before he realized he was the only person able to do it. And he didn’t walk away from that. It was the best part of who he was that emerged.” Lost Boys is the final featurette in the quartet that makes up Toronto Stories; it leaves the viewer with a question, and veers away from a simplistic ending. Bellows says he can only guess at what the future might hold for his character, but the journey Henry took is what he hopes audiences take, too. “It’s a case of him relaxing back into the life that he lives now,” Bellows notes. “I don’t know that things will improve or not –my guess is probably not –but being able to walk away knowing that child was okay is a way of honouring the memory of all the things that have been haunting him for so long, and it’s something we can all identify with.” The ending, says Bellows, asks a simple question that’s applicable to viewers in all cities: “Everyone’s made mistakes, but when faced with another version of the same situation, are you going to behave, and be able to do something about it this time? Are you going to be part of the solution instead of denying you’re part of the problem?” The answer, it would seem, lies along the city streets, and within the stories of those who walk them. Run info: Toronto Stories is running at the Royal Cinema on College Street. www.mytorontostories.com