Victoria Day is a tiny perfect gem about the no-man's-land of adolescence.
Don't worry -- this isn't your usual dishonest snore fest about disaffected youth and teen angst. This film maintains an emotional honesty that makes some scenes uncomfortable to watch. That's a good thing.
Prompted by real events big and small, Victoria Day is set in Toronto in 1988 and centres on the experiences of a fairly serious kid named Ben (Mark Rendall). Ben is the son of Russian immigrants, and his parents have set high standards for him.
Over the May long weekend, Ben has several things to think about -- a Bob Dylan concert at Ontario Place, the upcoming Stanley Cup finals, a girl at school named Cayla (Holly Deveaux).
Ben and his friends are currently obsessing about everything from the 1960s.
Ben's interest in Cayla is a bit tricky, because she's the younger sister of Jordan, a guy on Ben's hockey team. Jordan's a bit of a jerk. He and Ben don't get along.
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At the Dylan concert, Jordan nags Ben into lending him some money to buy drugs.
The next day at school, Ben is hanging out with his friends when Cayla comes by to ask if anyone saw her brother at the Dylan concert -- because he didn't go home afterward. It's not the first time Jordan has gone AWOL after a concert, but Ben feels uncomfortable about the whole thing.
Where's Jordan?
Meanwhile, life unfolds as usual. Ben plays hockey, goofs off with his friends (John Mavro and Scott Beaudin), buys some firecrackers and goes on a date with a girl named Melanie.
It's all teen life as usual, except that Jordan's disappearance has cast a pall over everything.
Grown-up life has arrived long before anyone expected it to.
Victoria Day is an intelligent, understated film about the process of moving from childhood to adulthood.
As he slowly undertakes that transition, Ben makes all the usual unsettling discoveries about responsibility and disappointment, those staples of adult life.
Because Victoria Day lacks anything in the way of unlikely event or stereotype, the film plays just like real life and all the characters are heart-breakingly three dimensional.
The writer/director, David Bezmozgis, has said that his ambition was to recreate what it feels like to be a teenager, and while that's not an experience most people would willingly revisit, he has indeed captured the wobbly essence of that vulnerable time of life. (To his credit, Bezmozgis' film does not overlook the giddy fun or delicious anticipation that sometimes lighten the adolescent load.)
Victoria Day is not only set in Toronto and named for a colonial holiday, it even uses the chaos at Boston Garden during the 1988 Stanley Cup playoffs -- fog on the ice, flickering lights and a power outage -- as a sort of metaphor for the awakened consciousness. That's so Canadian.
And that too is a good thing.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001U0HBPG/almosthuman
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