*½/****
starring Miranda Richardson, Callum Keith Rennie, Katharine Isabelle, Kristin Adams
screenplay by Esta Spalding, based on the novel by Barbara Gowdy
directed by Scott Smith
by Bill Chambers Falling Angels has accumulated a lot of buzz over the past couple of days at the TIFF, but I don't mind telling you to ignore it. Basically a Sunday-funnies version of The Virgin Suicides, the film stars an already-typecast Katharine Isabelle as the most embittered of three daughters who live under the gun of a live-wire buffoon (Callum Keith Rennie) while tending to their catatonic mother (Miranda Richardson, doing a mean Joan Allen impersonation). It's set in the early Sixties, an excuse to splash the same old anti-suburbia tropes with a fresh coat of Day-Glo; the gap between the Canadian filmmaker and his/her audience doesn't get any smaller as a newfound satiric bent revitalizes the national cinema's incuriosity. Rennie and Richardson hardly suggest husband and wife (nephew and aunt, maybe), but more problematic is the latter's role, which requires of a terrific actress to sit silent on a couch for the film's duration, a slab of Canadian misery like one of the corpses Molly Parker bangs herself with in Kissed (also, like Falling Angels, based on a Barbara Gowdy novel). Falling Angels is, ironically, more realistic (ergo, likeable) in a series of flashbacks to the girls' temporary stay in a bomb shelter that exudes the colours and compositions of old "Davy & Goliath" cartoons. Programme: Perspective Canada
