Drive Back Home's questions drive the Rendezvous with Madness festival

17 oct 2024 -

Rendezvous with Madness is an arts, mainly film, festival whose mandate is to use 'art as the entry point to illuminate and investigate the realities and mythologies surrounding mental illness and addiction.' As  Workman Arts Executive Artistic Director Amadeo Ventura explains, "Art provides a means of shining light onto challenging situations in our lives, especially for anyone living with mental health and/or addictions. This year’s festival theme, 'Shine; Together' brings stories into the light as a clarion call to build a more equitable society where compassion and empathy can shine through the darkness." This is certainly true of the one film, Drive Back Home, I was able to screen in advance. One character questions, "If you did something so bad that it caused your family to turn their back on you, what does that say about you?" They are promptly told, ""You're asking that question the wrong way around." And that is the lesson at the heart of Drive Back Home. And Rendezvous with Madness.

The plot synopsis—"In the winter of 1970, a cantankerous, small town plumber from rural New Brunswick, must drive his beat-up work truck 1000 miles to Toronto to get his estranged, gay brother out of jail after being arrested for having sex in a public park"—tells only the bare bones of the story. Drive Back Home is not only a character study, as all great road movies are, of the two brothers, it is also an evocative dissection of the morals and repression of family life. Charlie Creed-Miles as the brother Weldon, the one with the truck, has an astonishing character arc handled with subtlety and power. Forced by his mother, the great Clare Coulter, to go and fetch his miscreant brother, Alan Cumming as Perley—who modulates the flamboyance and eccentricity into heartbreaking empathy—there are years of unspoken secrets and questions to be unraveled. It is implied that Weldon has, besides a hearing impairment, a learning disability of some sort, and Perley is host to numerous addictions (including a queasily presented sexual one) and a far too cute taste for taxidermy. Both suffer from repressed trauma.

Writer/director Michael Clowater and cinematographer Stuart Campbell seamlessly weave a recreation of the 1970's, the proliferation of stubbies is instantly evocative, with archival road footage to create a heightened reality for the characters to inhabit. The image quality feels like Canadian films of the period with just enough grain and lots of chill to add grit. Drive Back Home is based on a true story and it both reads as genuine while gently carrying the timeless heft of a folk tale. It opens with footage of  media coverage of the gay community from the time, but instead of the nostalgia or anger that is usually aroused by such usage, it presents a melancholy, a sadness over where we were. That is the lesson that Weldon is to learn though, to the film's credit, Perley is far from a gay paragon of virtue come to show him the way. While we understand Perley's drives and reactions, we are also shown the questionable nature of some of his choices. There is much resignation and recrimination (and repression) but threaded through with a gentle humour that leads to a climactic scene, following a few horrific ones, that is uplifting and incredibly satisfying. The question is finally asked the right way around.

Rendezvous with Madness is also presenting a screening of My Dad's Tapes an audience favourite from the Hot Docs Festival, WaaPaKe (Tomorrow) that asks "What are we without our pain?" in context of the residential school system,  A Man Imagined "an intimate and hallucinatory portrait of a man living with schizophrenia," and Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin a documentary on one of the shooting stars who lived where rock 'n' roll and addiction collide. Nicole Decsey Dance Projects present a live performance of We Lost You A Long Time Ago, and there is a live performance showcase entitled Public Speaking Through Comedy with multiple performers. There are many short films in showcases or before the features, with the Workman Arts artist members contributing their newest short films in a presentation entitled I don’t need to ask you to love me because I love myself. A lot to love and questions asked and answered.