Kiawentiio

(On Cable TV, March 2022) I definitely had an interesting time watching Beans. As someone with fairly vivid memories of 1990’s Oka Crisis (which took place not even 200 kilometres away) and a typically French-Canadian upbringing at the time, my sympathies were not with the First Nation protesters at the time. But here is a film deliberately designed to present a highly subjective take on that story. It picks its battles carefully: the emphasis here is on a teenager coming on her own, flanked by a younger sister and a determined mother. The protesters themselves are merely supporting characters, far less present than the French Canadians that act as a chorus of oppression throughout the entire film. (It’s hard to avoid noticing that, until the film’s last minutes, nearly every single French-Canadian line of dialogue in the film is an insult or a dismissal aimed at First Nation characters.)  It’s obviously meant as a very loose adaptation of real events, without any real attempts at factual accuracy despite copious use of contemporary footage—but it’s quite effective as a way to look at those events critically, with today’s more even-sided perspective. I don’t think it’s completely successful either at that or as a coming-of-age story set against those events: there are missed opportunities, underwhelming subplots that distract from strong material, and a structure that could have been more effective. But it has its high points and a pair of very compelling performances from Kiawentiio and Rainbow Dickerson. It’s interesting to note that, for all of the harsh criticism of French Canadians in the film, the large majority of Beans’s Montréal-based crew sports French-Canadian names. As the Canadian national conversation talks a lot about Reconciliation, there’s probably a lesson to be gathered from that.