Mothers have mostly broken free from 1950s-era stereotypes. We’re no longer expected to stay barefoot and pregnant ad infininitum, or aim for unattainable June Cleaver levels of domesticity. These days, motherhood is framed as a choice, the first of many related to childrearing: breastfeed or not; co-sleep or not; daycare or not.
But motherhood can be ugly – rife with self-doubt, isolation, boredom, and sometimes even the nagging feeling that you might have made the wrong choice in the first place. Such ugliness is rarely depicted on television or in films – and when it is, like in Bad Moms or Sex and the City, it’s a comedic device, something to laugh at and veer past as quickly as possible.
But Menorca goes there. Menorca – a surreal and surprising dramatic feature from Canadian filmmaker John Barnard that has its Vancouver premiere on April 15 – leans into the ugliness of motherhood, to satisfying and weirdly empowering effect.
Menorca stars Vancouver actress Tammy Gillis as Claire, a mother to a precocious young boy (portrayed by Logan Creran). Claire can front like a soccer mom, but she’s also hedonistic and self-destructive. One day, like she’s done countless times before, Claire runs away for some selfish, reckless fun – but this time, her son tells her by phone not to bother coming home. Thus begins a journey of self-discovery that takes Claire to a strange strip club on the edge of Manitoba, and then to Spain (Menorca, specifically), and ultimately to somewhere Claire can truly call home.
Menorca also stars Sheila E. Campbell, Talia Pura, Dorothy Carroll, Aaron Merke, Jason Wishnowski, and Krystle Snow. The film premiered at the 2016 Whistler Film Festival and won Gillis the award for Best Actress at the 2017 Noida International Film Festival.
Gillis – who, previous to Menorca, had collaborated with Barnard on a couple of short films – was drawn to the script because of the content of Claire’s character. “I thought it was so amazing that [Barnard] was writing a woman for how women are,” says Gillis, in a recent interview. “What was really exciting for me was that there was so much about the part that scared me. I dance in it. I’m naked a lot. Claire goes to really dark places. All of that scared me, and I love acting roles that scare me and challenge me.”
But Gillis also knew that what she liked most about Claire could potentially make the character unlikeable to a film audience. “When I would tell people about the movie, some were immediately negative about this mother, like, ‘How could a mother leave her child?’ I realized I had to really show the audience how depressed she was, and how flawed she was, and how unhappy she was,” says Gillis, whose lengthy filmography includes Once Upon a Time, Supernatural, Motive, and a fan-favourite two-part episode of Hallmark’s Signed, Sealed, Delivered, in which she portrayed an army medic who gets captured in Afghanistan. (“I fell out of a helicopter, and I fell down a cliff,” Gillis says of the Hallmark gig. “It was the action hero that I’ve always wanted to play.”)
Gillis notes plenty of overlap between her own life and Claire’s. Gillis grew up in Manitoba and “was, at one time, on a totally different path: not involved in acting and with a guy that I thought I was going to marry,” she says. “That literally could have been my life, and I probably would have been miserable.”
Menorca has its Vancouver premiere as part of VIFF Vancity Theatre and Reel Canada’s National Canadian Film Week (April 14-21). Menorca is one of six Canadian-made features screening, including Nick de Pencier’s Black Code, which explores how the internet is being controlled by governments in order to monitor their citizens; Sensitive Parts, Brendan Prost’s Vancouver-shot deep-dive into relationships; David Ray’s Grand Unified Theory, a dramedy in which the family of a brilliant North Vancouver astrophysicist implodes during a watershed moment in his career; the Canadian premiere of Jason Bourque’s Drone, an intense, topical thriller that stars Sean Bean as a US military drone operator; and Hugh Gibson’s The Stairs, an affecting documentary examining the lives of habitual drug users in Toronto’s Regent Park.
The week is anchored by National Canadian Film Day – a cross-country initiative which, at Vancity Theatre, means a full day of free programming showcasing iconic director Atom Egoyan. The schedule includes screenings of Egoyan masterworks The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica, as well as the famed director’s favourite Canadian film (1977’s Skip Tracer, Zale Dalen’s Vancouver-shot feature about a disaffected debt collector), and a creator talk featuring Egoyan and his frequent collaborator, actor Bruce Greenwood.
Details at VIFF.org.
