The New View

From film star to filmmaker: Sarah Polley makes her directorial debut with Away from Her, based on a story by Alice Munro. (Steve Carty/CBC)

This story originally ran during the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival.

Perhaps it’s because as a former child actor, she grew up in an adult world, or perhaps she is just a young fogey, but the directorial debut of Sarah Polley, 28, has the assuredness of a film made by someone twice her age. Eschewing the hipster-soundtracked coming-of-age story that often marks the first outing of a young director — no Garden State gauze here — Polley has made Away From Her, a hushed, handsome adaptation of an Alice Munro story about a long-married couple in the throes of Alzheimer’s.

“I think Canadians feel proprietary about Munro,” says Polley in a downtown Toronto restaurant, a few metres away from one of the city’s most popular movie theatres. “She is sort of the one nobody wants to touch because she’s so good, and I didn’t either, even though when I read [the short story], it was immediately a film in my mind. I kept casting it and working it over in my brain and finally, I just gave in to it.”

Polley first read the source story, The Bear Came Over the Mountain, on an airplane ride from Iceland, where she had been shooting a film with Hal Hartley. Hartley is just one of the many independent directors Polley can name as boss on her acting CV, which reads like a film geek's wish list: Wim Wenders, Atom Egoyan, Isabelle Coixet. And yet, in this country, Polley is probably best known from TV’s Road to Avonlea. After escaping child stardom to face the humiliations of the Vanity Fair Hollywood issue cover and hot-young-thing status, Polley chose to study at the Canadian Film Centre in her hometown of Toronto. Although she previously had short films at the Toronto and Sundance film festivals, the premiere of Away From Her at TIFF was her feature-length debut. Still, the product was not entirely untested, as the neophyte director was buoyed by a veteran cast.

“I wanted Julie Christie from the beginning,” says Polley. “She is so ethereal and so stunningly beautiful and yet not someone whose face is under a mask of plastic surgery. We have this shared history with Julie Christie, because we knew her when she was young.”

Drifting apart: Grant (Gordon Pinsent, left) comes to terms with Fiona's (Julie Christie) illness in the film Away from Her. (Capri)

Christie fearlessly looks 65 (though she’s a pretty fine 65), and the film is filled with faces in extreme close-up, confronting the aging process head-on. Fiona is as regal and gorgeous as Christie, but her mind, as the character says, is “not all gone – going.” Fiona’s husband, Grant, played by Gordon Pinsent, agrees to place her in a nursing home, where she forms an intense bond with another patient, a mute man in a wheelchair whose presence throws a wrench into the myth of the perfect marriage.

“The idea that you can be a sexual being past the age of 45 is something we don’t deal with in cinema,” says Polley. “And we don’t do devotion, either — what it looks like in a real way, as opposed to a Hollywood version. Munro’s version of marriage was so nuanced and honest.”

The euphemistically titled “retirement home” setting reminded Polley of tours she took through old-age facilities when her own grandmother was admitted to one near the end of her life. In Away From Her, the sometimes funny, wistful tone that keeps the film afloat is established in the corridors of one such place. A camera follows Grant, childlike in giant boots and a winter coat, through hallway after hallway while he watches the infantilizing of the patients, and the relentlessly upbeat nature of a sincere staff, all the while facing the realization that this place of both cheer and abandonment is where the woman he has been married to for more than 40 years will live out her days.

“Anyone who has ever put someone in a retirement home feels conflicted about it,” says Polley. “On one hand, the frequency of people going into those places has everything to do with women not wanting to be domestic slaves. With women working, there’s no longer the infrastructure in the family home to keep people at home like we used to, and yet of course there’s something so difficult about putting someone you love into a place like that. Very often, people don’t want to go. We all struggle with it in North American culture.”

The state of North American culture isn’t a small thing to Polley; she has been a vocal anti-globalization activist, famously losing some back teeth to police at a rally against the Ontario government as a teenager. “Earnest young woman” is an image she finds at once tiresome and somewhat accurate.

“I’ve always been political and I always will be, so that’s not something that's manufactured at all. But in terms of the earnestness that people perceive in me, that’s completely my own doing. In the struggle to not create an image for myself and just be myself, I somehow actually created a totally false image of who I am,” she says. “I’ve become this humourless nightmare in the press, and I am slightly bugged by that because I find it really irritating in other people.”

Polley smiles her familiar crooked-toothed smile and looks less like an angry teenager than ever before, and more like an artist to be reckoned with.

Away From Her opens in Toronto and Vancouver on May 4 and in other Canadian cities on May 11.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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