If folks are free Thursday evening at 7PM in Hamilton, I’ll be moderating a Q&A with Terrance Odette after a screening of his 2002 film Saint Monica at The Playhouse.
If you don’t know Odette, he’s a proto-diy Hamilton filmmaker.
His first feature Heater dates back to 1999 and he now already five features to his activity (alongside music-videos and television shows). Working with modest budgets, Odette’s able to create these complex characters usually going through these very intense days and nights.
In terms of his creative process, Odette describes how seeing how actors read his dialogue is one of his favorite things about being a director, and I would add how he is able to film them integrated within a very specific local setting is one of my favorite things about being one of their spectators.
The style of his films recalls that of John Cassavetes and the Italian neorealist.
In Heater two unlikely guys-experiencing-homelessness in Winnipeg on a snowy day come together to attempt to return a boxed heater. How they react to their hardship is so vivid and powerful and following them you get to see the downtown city from an on-the-street perspective.
The coffee-and-donut shop is a reoccurring setting in his films and through them he shows different ways people interact with it. In Heater it’s where the guys go for warmth and the public washroom, while in Fall (2014) and Bike (2024) it’s the spot where they go so that they can reconnect with past friends and family and have intimidate conversations.
Bike, which played at The Playhouse already this year, is noteworthy for its “beautifully apocalyptic” portrayal of Hamilton (thank you Spectator for this apt description of the city). There’s a sense of authenticity to Odette’s cinema and after the Winnipeg of Heater, Toronto’s Little Portugal in Saint Monica, and Niagara Falls and Sault Ste. Marie in Fall, Odette finally captures with Bike one of the best portrayals of Hamilton that I’ve seen (up there with Stephen Hosier’s Attilla).
Bike, tells the story of “Bike,” a rougher-around-the-edges older guy, that collects empty beer cans from local recycling bins on garbage night and steels bikes when he needs to. Bike gets wrapped up in a real-estate murder conspiracy, which forces his hand o
n how he has to resolve some of his family, lawyer and police issues. It’s really gripping. The feature-version (in contrast to the web-series) maybe has Odette’s funnest film references (in a filmography rather sober in them) and the lurking criminals give the whole proceedings an ominous sense of foreboding.
I think it should of have been more widely seen and it’s a shame that the funding for a sequel wasn’t approved.
But to return to the subject at hand, the reason I think Saint Monica is my favorite of Odette’s films is that in contrast to the heaviness of Heater and Fall – about an end-of-career protestant pastor questioning his life –, Saint Monica takes on a certain reoccurring opacity and mystery that’s there throughout his films, but from the perspective of a young ten-year-old girl, who steals a pair of angel wings meant to be used as part of a procession. It has a religious quality, that of little girl trying to talk to God, which is so powerfully captured through the simplicity of her minimal performance. The film almost feels like a miracle, and as such reminded me of other religious films like Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), Rossellini’s Stromboli(1950) and Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966). Rarely has cinema been this great.
It’s a great feat that a 35mm print of Saint Monica will be showing at The Playhouse on the big screen this Thursday.
I can’t recommend it enough.