“Does the print look really beat up? Or does it look like a nice, clean print?”
Lynne Stopkewich, on the phone from her New York hotel, can be forgiven for sounding a mite anxious. In the seven months since her film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Kissed, the Vancouver filmmaker’s mesmerizing study of sex, death, and the lusty space in between, has toured the festival circuit to almost unanimous praise. Among other prizes, Kissed has won a special jury citation in Toronto and, for Stopkewich, the Best New Western Feature Film Director award at last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival.
But now, with Kissed set to open at multiplexes across North America on April 11, Stopkewich wants to know how it looks on the big screen back home. One last double-check can’t hurt.
She needn’t worry. Kissed is a daring and visually impressive experience that easily holds its own against more mainstream fare. Even so, its director is still pinching herself, barely able to believe her good fortune. “What’s happened to us is a complete surprise,” she says, “and it happens so rarely, I think it still hasn’t sunk in.”
Stopkewich’s date with the morgue began three years ago while researching female erotica for Notell Motel, a film she still plans to make someday about a woman’s sexual self-discovery. In her reading, she chanced upon Barbara Gowdy’s short story ‘We So Seldom Look on Love’, the spiritually charged account of a female necrophile, and Stopkewich realized she had found the perfect hook for her first feature.
Still, she insists that her film is not about necrophilia, per se. “I really liked the inner life of the character and her take on growing up female in North America. She’s definitely marching to the beat of her own drum, yet at the same time the sensibility with which she approaches things — which is one of fearlessness, one of curiosity, one of bluntness and sensitivity — is something I can relate to as an individual.”
Fearlessness and curiosity enabled Stopkewich to go ahead with her project even though she had no budget to speak of and a crew that, with few exceptions, had never worked on a feature film before. And then there was the small problem of finding someone to play Sandra Larson, the woman for whom formaldehyde is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Enter Molly Parker. The Pitt Meadows native, then 22, says she took the role because she was excited by the prospect of working with a female director, particularly on a film that explored sexuality from a decidedly female point of view. She was “shocked” when she read the script — but not for the reason you might expect.
“I was so surprised,” says Parker. “Lynne had told me what it was about, and it certainly piqued my interest, but I was shocked because I found it to be so poetic and so beautiful, and this character was so engaging. It doesn’t happen very often, but once in a while you read a script where you go, ‘I really want to play this character!'”
(Luckily for Parker, Stopkewich ignored the bit in Gowdy’s story which describes Sandra as a blonde Doris Day lookalike. Parker herself didn’t read the story until after shooting was finished, but she “laughed out loud” when she came to that passage. “I’m glad I didn’t read that before!” she says.)
Music was integral to the film’s creation. Although the film is set in the 1970s, it proved too expensive to acquire the rights to period-specific songs; as a result, the soundtrack boasts a somewhat anachronistic collection culled from the Nettwerk roster, including some effectively ethereal vocals by Rose Chronicles’ Kristy Lee Thirsk.
Stopkewich was particularly inspired by Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling towards Ecstasy, which she says she listened to constantly while writing the screenplay’s first draft. By coincidence, that album also played a significant role in what Stopkewich calls “The Scene”.
Before mating with a cadaver, Sandra typically goes through a ritualistic dance around the gurney, preparing to take in the spiritual energy that comes from the corpse. But according to Parker, the low-budget equipment on the set threatened to ruin the mood in what was supposed to be her character’s most vulnerable scene. “When we first started to do it, all I could hear was this squeaky dolly and four pairs of feet softly padding behind it, running after me. And I stopped and broke out in hysterical laughter, and I just went, ‘I can’t do this! This is all I can hear!'”
The solution? Fumbling towards Ecstasy, of course, which Parker plopped into a stereo on the set. “We put it on very, very loud and played it all day, and it took us all to this otherworldly place. It was sort of magical, and it helped me to not be so anxious.”
And when it came time to score the Bergmanesque final scene, Stopkewich turned to that album’s title track. “There was something about the quality of her voice and the kind of lyrics she was writing that resonated for me, somehow, with the movie,” she says.
Some observers have remarked that Kissed, along with David Cronenberg’s Crash and Pierre Gang’s Sous-sol, may reflect a distinctly Canadian obsession with, to put it mildly, unconventional sex. (Stopkewich even wrote a carwash scene a la Crash into her film, though it is notably more innocent.)
Stopkewich isn’t entirely sure what to make of that analysis, but she has a theory or two. “I think Canadians have a fixation on trying to define themselves. And I think sex and sexuality is such a raw issue for people in terms of how they portray themselves to the world. I think the reason we’re seeing this kind of offbeat sexuality has a lot to do with us trying to come to terms with who we are, as individuals and as a country.”
Parker is not so sure. For one thing, she notes, Canadians are a lot like independent filmmakers south of the border: they take risks that major Hollywood producers simply won’t. And, she points to other sources as well. “I think it comes out of living in a time when sex is dangerous and can kill you. I myself have grown up being aware of that fact for the past ten years, which has, for me, changed the way I think about sexuality. Man people these days are looking at the darker side of sexuality.”
In the three years since Kissed wrapped, Parker has been a ubiquitous presence on Vancouver sets, appearing in everything from Blake Corbet’s short The Chain to the TV disaster movie Titanic — she even appeared in one of Hard Core Logo‘s many band shots — but she’s now preparing to move to Toronto, where she just finished shooting Twitch City, a “weird, dark, satirical comedy” in six episodes, with Bruce McDonald and Don McKellar.
For her part, Stopkewich hopes to plant her roots even deeper into the Vancouver scene.
Ironically, Notell Motel, the project that inspired Stopkewich’s current notoriety, may have to wait a few more years while she sifts through the “crazy, fantastic” offers she’s been getting. Legalities prevent her from saying what, exactly, Boneyard Film Company will do next — but she does hope the company she shares with her partner John Pozer can translate its success into a mentoring system for new filmmakers.
“We’d love to be there to support a first-timer,” says Stopkewich. “It took a large measure of support from the community to create our first film, and we want to return some of that support to the community.”
— A version of this article was first published in Festival Cinemas Guide.
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