Focus on Canadian Film: Beginning of the 3rd Millennium 2005 / The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess / Canada 2004
A colourfully assembled mosaic demonstrating that the life of a walking Barbie doll needn’t be all roses. Inspired heavily by pop culture, in the director’s words the film is “an entertaining and mysterious spectacle, a cross between a musical and a surrealistic collage.”
Images of a mixed-bag of aesthetic qualities alternate on-screen – comic book animation, kitschily arranged nooks of Hollywood romance, the alienatingly mocked-up décor of diverse environments, scenes that look like authentic footage.... On top of that, there are exaggerated colours and breakneck turnarounds in the plot. One could describe the narrative style, oscillating between melodrama, musical, quasi-documentary, and a tale of biting irony, as a flamboyantly assembled picture book featuring the upheavals of a voluptuous blonde. The director uncovers the drama of heroine Gillian Guess gradually, and the starting point for his expeditions to various time planes is the bizarre and bombastically tasteless sets at the TV station where Gillian uninhibitedly participates in some kind of porno talk show. The film is dominated by an ostensibly rather simplifying psychoanalytic formula leading to the discovery that Gillian’s provocativeness and her brazen obscenities are only a reaction
to wounds suffered in the past.
93 min / Color, 35 mm
Director Bruce McDonald
/ Screenplay Angus Fraser
/ Dir. of Photography Danny Nowak
/ Music Broken Social Scene
/ Editor Karen Porter
/ Producer Hugh Beard, Debra Beard, John Ritchie, Rob Bromley
/ Production Force Four Entertainment
/ Cast Joely Collins, Hugh Dillon, Ben Bass, Jessica Amlee
/ Contact Telefilm Canada, Force Four Entertainment
www: www.forcefour.com
Bruce McDonald (b. 1959, Kingston, Ontario) grew up and studied in Toronto. He has made short dramatic, documentary and experimental films since the beginning of the eighties; the first of these efforts, about young creators of film and graffiti, won an award for best Canadian student film. In 1989 he debuted in features with Roadkill, and his other work includes a project following a punk band on a tour of western Canada, Hard Core Logo (1996, screened in the Forum of Independents section at the 1997 KV IFF). The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess (2004), starring singer Phil Collins’ daughter, is the director’s fifth feature. Other works: Highway 61 (1991), Dance Me Outside (1994, screened at the KV IFF in 1995), Picture Claire (2001). Chance meetings play a significant role in McDonald’s films, and he likes to combine dramatic tension with a psychological interest in his characters.
Telefilm Canada
360, rue Saint-Jacques, Suite 600, H2Y 1P5, Montreal, Quebec
Canada
Phone: +1 514 283 636 3
Fax: +1 514 283 236 5
E-mail: [email protected]
Force Four Entertainment
202-221 East 10th Ave, V5T 4V1, Vancouver
Canada
Phone: +1 604 669 4424
Fax: +1 604 669 4535
E-mail: [email protected]
Brigitte Hubmann
Film Institution Rep.
Bruce McDonald
Film Director, Film Director
Joely Collins
Actor
Jean Claude Mahé
Film Institution Rep.
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