Joan Carr-Wiggin

  • The Bet (2020)

    The Bet (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) I continue to be dumbfounded by filmmakers who think that drawn-out awkwardness is an acceptable substitute for comedy. But as The Bet shows, sometimes that’s exactly what they want. It doesn’t take a long time to figure out that the film will be a drawn-out exercise in discomfort and dumb plotting, as it begins with a sequence in which a bored estranged married couple makes a bet that she can get the next person to walk in the restaurant to eventually propose marriage to her. Never mind that it is both implausible and too depressing for words —The Bet is determined that this is the plotting hook that it will develop, all better ideas to the contrary be damned. One implausibly quirky character entering the restaurant later, we’re off to the races in a story with terrible people, ludicrous plotting, constant coincidences and far more frowns than laughs. To be fair, I don’t think writer/director Joan Carr-Wiggin ever intended The Bet to be a comedy — it barely qualifies by virtue of not ending horribly (well, except for the secondary characters whose marriage explodes along the way of servicing our loathsome protagonists) but it’s clear through the mirth-free duration and false victories quickly taken back that the film is not interested in anything close to a romantic comedy. It’s a portrait of marriage that does much to discredit the institution, although it’s so clear that its protagonists are so ill-suited to each other than they’d be better off with mutual vows of celibacy. I watched The Bet out of a sense of worn-out resignation — it was such a regular fixture for months on Canada’s Super Channel that I ended up giving in to its constant scheduling, reasoning that it probably played for a good reason. Alas, this reason was nothing more than CanCon requirements — and there are far better Canadian picks than this one. The Bet is sad, depressing, irritating and unlikable by design, and while my puzzlement can’t do much to change the film, at least I can vow never to watch it again.

  • Getting to Know You (2020)

    Getting to Know You (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There is filmmaking life in Ontario outside Toronto, and after seeing Sudbury become a minor film shooting metropolis in the field of Canadian Science Fiction, here we have Sault Ste. Marie acting as backdrop to intimate romantic comedy Getting to Know You. It starts in a quasi-theatrical fashion, as two travellers meet in an almost-empty hotel. He’s a prodigal son coming back to town for a high-school reunion, hoping to declare his long-lasting love for his hometown sweetheart; she’s a London-based photographer coming back to clean up her estranged dead brother’s house. After a first act almost entirely set in a hotel, the film opens up, and so do the characters: his plans to romance his sweetheart hilariously derail, she’s asked to play his wife and complications simply pile up the longer the two protagonists stay in a small town where everybody knows each other. It’s not headed toward an easy ending: Getting to Know You plays things on a low, almost melancholic key. There are quite a few moments of genuine comedy along the way, but the end of the film is more contemplative than triumphant, which is disappointing but not inappropriate. Natasha Little and Rupert Penry-Jones headline the film, which means that they are on-screen for nearly all of it. Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin doesn’t too badly—although the impression left by the first act of the film is a bit misleading and disjoints the film’s spatial unity (at least the story ends when they leave town). Still, it’s an amiable-enough film, significantly more interesting than the Hallmark romantic movies often shot elsewhere in non-Toronto Ontario.