Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself - By Design

V.I.A. is co-sponsoring the amazing Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself film series that's screening at the Waldorf Hotel! It's the first comprehensive showing of some of the earliest, most ambitious and strangest films shot in Vancouver and it happens every Monday at 7 PM for the next few weeks. The series is presented by local arts researcher Elvy Del Bianco, who has spent the last year and a half identifying and acquiring Vancouver-set films, and will feature notable guest speakers. Michael Turner’s On Location 1 (Elvy Del Bianco’s Annotated Film Collection) will screen weekly before each film, and we're priming it here on the blog by offering Elvy's thoughts on that week's title.

This week's film is By Design, and here's a clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzXVmW_6rVY

And here's the synopsis and some thoughts from Elvy:

Helen (Patty Duke) and Angie (Sara Botsford), live together on a Granville Island houseboat, run a fashion design business together, and are so intent on making each other happy that they tackle head-on the social and institutional challenges of a lesbian couple seeking parenthood. In their quest, Vancouver c. 1981 is revealed in all of its scenic glory and banalities: sunny beaches, bars, clinics, and –of course- construction sites.

Director Claude Jutra was Canada’s wunderkind, largely responsible for demonstrating the aesthetic capacity of a national film industry through his debut, A Tout Prendre, and especially his subsequent feature, the critically acclaimed Mon Oncle Antoine. (As Poevere and Dymond note in Mondo Canuck: “Everything you’ve heard or read about it is true.”) But following several critical failures, the ire of his fellow Quebecers for his insufficiently political stance/overly critical eye, and the introduction of tax-shelter funding that encouraged films for the foreign (read American) market, Jutra went into Canadian exile, making films as he moved west.

Jutra’s strengths are all on display in By Design, from his matter-of-fact approach to a subject that would not be tackled again for decades, to his sensitive and honest handling of character. (Duke and Botsford, as well as Saul Rubinek and Clare Coulter, all received Genie nominations for their performances.) As Pauline Kael reviewed in The New Yorker, “Jutra has a light understated approach to farce. His sensibility suggests a mingling of Tati and Truffaut. The scenes are quick and they're dippy, but with a pensive, melancholy underlay."

In By Design Jutra left us a gift of the rarest of the rare -not only with respect to the other films in the Vancouver Sometimes Plays Itself series, but of all films set in Vancouver: a happy ending.

Unavailable on DVD.