“Do you ever feel your life just veered off somewhere?” – Helena Grayson, Into Invisible Light
In her first film, Passionflower, Winnipeg-based filmmaker Shelagh Carter delved into her own past. Seen through the watchful eyes of young Sarah (Kassidy Love Brown), Passionflower depicts a childhood shadowed by an advertising-agent father (Darcy Fehr) and a mother (Kristen Harris), who is rapidly deteriorating with an undiagnosed and unnamed mental illness. Sarah absorbs it all: her parents’ marital strife, the mercurial pendulum-swing of her mother’s behavior, the isolation of growing up in a house with a mad mother. The film takes place in the Mad Men era of ad-men and cocktail parties, tail-finned cars and frustrated women, and Carter’s film shows the maelstrom of confusing influences bombarding the child’s psyche. It was an impressive debut. (I interviewed Carter about Passionflower, and I also interviewed lead actress Kristen Harris.) Carter’s second feature was the award-winning and emotionally harrowing Before Anything You Say, starring, again, Darcy Fehr and Kristen Harris as a married couple locked in mortal combat. Although other characters appear, this is a two-person show, with the back-and-forth of buried resentments coming to the surface, old hurts, fears of abandonment, secrets and lies. (I interviewed Carter about Before Anything You Say, for which she won Best Director at the International Filmmaker Festival of World Cinema, Berlin, as well at the International Filmmaker Festival of World Cinema, Milan.)
Carter’s third feature, the melancholic Into Invisible Light, has a large cast (larger than her other two films), and is a puzzle-piece film about the dreams and desires, hopes and disappointments of a group of characters with intersecting relationships and fraught past involvements. The central character is Helena Grayson, played by the superb Jennifer Dale (who also co-wrote the script with Carter). Helena is a recent widow, now in charge of the artistic endowment established by her late husband. She feels unqualified to walk in her husband’s footsteps. Her enforced engagement with art, sculpture, dance, writing, picking and choosing the candidates for consideration, brings up old ambitions, and memories of her own writing, done long ago before marriage and its complications seemingly obliterated all that. She had thought she “put away childish things”. Michael (Peter Keleghan) teaches literature at a local university, and is married to a woman who protects her independence ferociously, going off on hiking trips for weeks on end, leaving him to single-parent their teenage daughter Monica (Jaydee-Lynn McDougall), a dance student hopeful for a scholarship handed out by the aforementioned artistic endowment. Years ago, lifetimes ago, Michael and Helena had a romance, young people bound together by their love of words and writing, and support of one anothers’ young dreams.
These four characters are at the center of the intricate and thoughtful script.
Accompanied by Shawn Pierce’s beautiful original score, a haunting piano which infuses the film with an elegiac yearning, Carter explores the past and present of these intense characters, using a variety of arresting stylistic choices.
Cinematographer Ousama Rawi (who also shot Before Anything You Say) has an intuitive sense of space and light, showing Helena strolling through ornate offices and gigantic museums, the surrounding space and high ceilings making this prickly powerhouse look lost and defenseless, in stark contrast to her competent and verbally intimidating persona.
One of the components of Into Invisible Light is its melding of past and present, Helena flowing backwards into the past (shot in dreamy black-and-white, black-and-white with a dark greenish-blue tint), where white curtains billow, where her mother lies dying, where her family stands around a grave, where her hand hovers over a pen on her desk. These are poetic thematic choices, highlighting the Chekhovian elements of the script. Chekhov, in plays like The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, wrote about people caught in the past, bubbles of life trapped in amber, with no way out except through their long-held dreams. Helena and Michael re-enter their old relationship, awkward and fumbling, and yet passionate, the feelings still intense, as though no time has passed at all. Meanwhile the teenage Monica is shown again and again in a rehearsal studio, launching her body in dramatic slo-mo across the space, arms flung out, head thrown back … visual sequences of depth and power. And yet Monica is vulnerable too. She has been abandoned by the adults meant to protect her. (There are a couple of extremely frightening scenes showing the consequences of this abandonment.)
The intense – even fraught – flashbacks emanate from Helena’s unconscious, from her memory, interrupting her present, filling her mind’s eye and heart (similar to the way flashbacks are used in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.) Things Helena had assumed were dead in her, things she had buried long ago, arise. Some of the things are terrible, and some tremble with beauty and fragile hope. Dale navigates this with assurance, Helena’s glamorous competent exterior, but also what the exterior is designed to cover up. There’s a wonderful scene where she joins Michael at a quiet club, with wood-paneled walls and leather armchairs, and over the course of their conversation she has too much to drink. Her mask falls away. She wants him. She wants him now, she is lonely, but she also wants him because he reminds her of who she was back then, with him. This scene is beautifully played by Dale. Drawn to Michael again, drawn to literature again through him, she starts to feel the ground beneath her feet once more, all while her past still rises, the constant presence of long white curtains billowing around her as she moves back into memory.
The best way I can put it is that Into Invisible Light is a movie for grownups. It’s not about the first flush of hope. It’s a movie about flawed human people with some miles on them, miles where things have been dropped along the way, things they all thought were lost forever. The dialogue is spiky sometimes, and also really fun to listen to. It’s a relief to sink into a script confident in its different voices, feeling no obligations towards kitchen-sink realism. These are articulate people, devoted to language. They use language to deflect, to camouflage. There’s a real script here, and each scene creates its own intense little microcosm. There’s momentum in the plot, to be sure, but the plot is not really “the thing.” What is “the thing” here is a mood, a vibe, an overall style meant to call up emotions and thoughts and memories. This is difficult to pull off, without seeming precious or like the film is tiptoeing around committing, to nailing things down. Carter collaborates well with Rawi (and they are aided in their work by talented editor Chad Tremblay, who won Best Editing at the Madrid International Film Festival for Before Anything You Say). The music ties the whole thing together, grounding it and yet also setting it free.
When Monika launches herself across the dance floor, lost in her creativity, in her expression, watched by Helena, the childless Helena, there’s an emotional impact flowing from all that came before, flowing without pushing, pieces of the puzzle put together gently, and yet still … still … imperfectly. Because life is like that sometimes. Because things aren’t perfect, things don’t work out perfectly. There are no “happy endings.” But there can be peace, there can be joy, even if momentary, and dreams aren’t lost forever if you drop them on the road of life. You can go back and find your way into them, find your way back into the light.
“Into Invisible Light” opens in Canada on January 9th. Keep your eyes peeled for streaming release dates.
