Winter Lily
Directed by Roshell Bissett, 1998
35mm, colour, 90 mins.
Winter Lily is the first of seven films dubbed the B&B Mystery Collection, all set in remote bed & breakfasts around the world. Using one location drastically reduces costs. It also makes the use of new talent, in front of and behind the camera, much more viable.
As B Movies go, this one's a C-. It's Montreal director Roshell Bissett's second major project, her first feature. Considering the talent she was able to line up - Danny Gilmore (Lilies), Dorothée Berryman (The Decline of the American Empire) as well as a strong newcomer, Kimberly Laferrière (as Lily) - in addition to financing, it's something of a coup.
Producing any kind of indie movie in English in Quebec isn't exactly a walk in the park. The hard work of executive producers Yuri Yoshimura-Gagnon and Claude Gagnon securing pre-sales, film investment credits and Aska Film Distribution's involvement sealed the deal.
The "B-Movie" label usually involves a little more exaggeration than is evident in Winter Lily though. While the plot certainly has it—weird sexual liaisons, obsession, murder involving axes and knives, jealousy, and so on—the costuming and art direction leave it all a little flat. Winter Lily looks like any indistinct non-period piece you could see on mainstream television.
Hitting its stride only about half way through, the film creeps out of the starting blocks. Part of this, to be honest, has become part of a Canadian cinematic aesthetic. What in an American film would be shown in two shots, in our cinema can take three or four.
It makes for a snail-paced first 40 minutes, that out of nowhere, accelerates into a comparatively super-fast paced denouement and ending, replete with various plot twists.
Part of the problem is the flimsy story. After a certain point in a film's production, how much can any one do to rescue it from a weak and uneven script?
Clive (Danny Gilmore), a young photographer on the road, books into a rural B&B, Memory Lane, and becomes obsessed with the photographs he sees of a young girl. The bait - the pictures and her diary - draw him into a surreal family nightmare involving deception, drugs, manipulation and violence.
The plot deteriorates into a string of clichés - from the gorgeous virginal teenager with raging hormones just "looking for love" to the line one partner says to the other about "getting on with our lives". (That one probably gets repeated in a soap opera somewhere on our continent at least once a day.) The sometimes lurid content of the script, probably written in for shock-value, doesn't exactly do justice to the director and the cast.
The concept is eminently bankable - Canadian murder-mysteries featuring new and established talent. Turn your TV on any night of the week and between PBS, A&E and Showcase alone, you'll probably find a murder-mystery on. Winter Lily proves the people with the skills do live in Canada. For the next film, an intrepid script that stands strong alone as a story might be a better place to start.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, published 2000
As B Movies go, this one's a C-. It's Montreal director Roshell Bissett's second major project, her first feature. Considering the talent she was able to line up - Danny Gilmore (Lilies), Dorothée Berryman (The Decline of the American Empire) as well as a strong newcomer, Kimberly Laferrière (as Lily) - in addition to financing, it's something of a coup.
Producing any kind of indie movie in English in Quebec isn't exactly a walk in the park. The hard work of executive producers Yuri Yoshimura-Gagnon and Claude Gagnon securing pre-sales, film investment credits and Aska Film Distribution's involvement sealed the deal.
The "B-Movie" label usually involves a little more exaggeration than is evident in Winter Lily though. While the plot certainly has it—weird sexual liaisons, obsession, murder involving axes and knives, jealousy, and so on—the costuming and art direction leave it all a little flat. Winter Lily looks like any indistinct non-period piece you could see on mainstream television.
Hitting its stride only about half way through, the film creeps out of the starting blocks. Part of this, to be honest, has become part of a Canadian cinematic aesthetic. What in an American film would be shown in two shots, in our cinema can take three or four.
It makes for a snail-paced first 40 minutes, that out of nowhere, accelerates into a comparatively super-fast paced denouement and ending, replete with various plot twists.
Part of the problem is the flimsy story. After a certain point in a film's production, how much can any one do to rescue it from a weak and uneven script?
Clive (Danny Gilmore), a young photographer on the road, books into a rural B&B, Memory Lane, and becomes obsessed with the photographs he sees of a young girl. The bait - the pictures and her diary - draw him into a surreal family nightmare involving deception, drugs, manipulation and violence.
The plot deteriorates into a string of clichés - from the gorgeous virginal teenager with raging hormones just "looking for love" to the line one partner says to the other about "getting on with our lives". (That one probably gets repeated in a soap opera somewhere on our continent at least once a day.) The sometimes lurid content of the script, probably written in for shock-value, doesn't exactly do justice to the director and the cast.
The concept is eminently bankable - Canadian murder-mysteries featuring new and established talent. Turn your TV on any night of the week and between PBS, A&E and Showcase alone, you'll probably find a murder-mystery on. Winter Lily proves the people with the skills do live in Canada. For the next film, an intrepid script that stands strong alone as a story might be a better place to start.
Published in The Ottawa Xpress, published 2000
