North of Normal brings Cea Sunrise Person's memoir of free-range childhood to big screen
Film release has author reflecting on the bad and good that came with the ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture movement that brought her to the BC wilderness
Sarah Gadon (with River Price-Maenpaa as a young Cea Sunrise Person) in North of Normal.
North of Normal opens at VIFF Centre July 28
IF YOU’VE SPENT time on the West Coast, then you’ve inevitably met people who were raised inside the alternative communities of the Kootenays, in towns like Ymir and New Denver, where draft dodgers and back-to-the-landers converged in the late ’60s and early ’70s to model new ways of living, away from the hard-edged noise and thrum of western modernity.
Opening today (July 28), and based on the bestselling 2014 memoir, North of Normal makes spirited entertainment from the childhood experiences of Cea Sunrise Person, whose free-range childhood in the deep wilderness of BC, Alberta, and the Yukon left the author with a full compliment of conflict and trauma, but also wisdom and courage rare to an adolescent.
Starring Amanda Fix as the teenage Cea and Sarah Gadon as Michelle, Cea’s equally free-range mom, Carly Stone’s film distills the book (and its 2017 follow-up Nearly Normal) into the years just prior to Person’s departure, at 15 no less, for a successful modelling career in Europe. Has anyone ever flown further from their origins?
“It’s funny because when I wrote my story I was in my 30s,” she tells Stir, “and I was, like ‘Oh my God, why am I even doing this? No one is going to relate to this story of a girl raised off-the-grid with a crazy family where mental illness is rampant. Like, no.’ And sure enough, as soon as it was published, the emails starting pouring in. ‘Oh my God, this could have been my life!’”
The common urge, Person discovered, was a desire to hit the ‘burbs and “just fit in”, an aching but unfocused (sometimes unhinged) yearning projected with casual brilliance by actor Fix in essentially her first starring role, winning the big-time approval of the real Person.
“That girl’s headed for big stardom. She’s got everything. Tons of admiration,” she says, while extending uniform praise to the entire cast assembled by filmmaker Stone, whose talent with actors blazed from the screen in her 2018 feature debut The New Romantic. Gadon naturally turns in a typically magnetic performance as a woman, barely in her 30s, still grappling with her own wayward inclinations, not to mention a crippling pot habit.
Cea Sunrise Person
“I was a little worried when I first heard she was cast,” Person admits, “only because she’s so beautiful, her face is so angelic, and my mom, she was a lot more gritty looking, a lot more earthy. I wondered how someone so beautiful was going to play my mom convincingly. But oh my God, it goes to show just what an incredibly talented actress she is. She did such a great job.”
As family patriarch Papa Dick, meanwhile, Robert Carlyle is a long, long way from the vicious psychopath Begbie in 1996’s Trainspotting. “I was so thrilled. He’s so charismatic, and my grandfather was so charismatic. He has the right look, he does a perfect accent—he’s amazing. And he’s also such a great guy to work with. So kind. A lovely, lovely man.”
Now in her 50s and getting nearer than ever to normal with a family and more than one successful post-wilderness career on her resume, how does Person view, these days, the efforts of the ’60s/’70s counterculture? Did it have any kind of positive affect on the wider culture? Did it push the needle in the right direction? Was it a failure?
“I do think there was a lot that was really good about it,” she answers, with a chuckle. “That was quite a long time ago, half a lifetime ago for some people, and I feel like we need another one, you know? My family did a lot things wrong and they were very selfish in a lot of their actions, but they had the right idea in terms of getting back to nature and putting love first, practising tolerance, letting people be who they want to be—all that sort of stuff.”
Appended to that, presumably, is the irresistible tug felt by many people, as mid-life speeds towards the sunset years, to forgive our own past. Person confesses to her own evolving sentiments about the extraordinary if challenging youth she was given.
“Definitely,” she says. “Very strongly. And it’s like a weird mixed bag, right? Cause I still have a lot of resentment about the way my family raised me. Even though they’re all dead, I don’t totally forgive them every minute of the day, but I do also have a lot of nostalgia for the lifestyle we had because there was a lot of beauty to it. Just living off the land and not being in a polluted concrete environment. How many people get to experience that? Very few. And also I think I just have a longing for the freedom we used to have. I wish my kids could experience it all, somehow, in a much more healthy way.”
The irony isn’t lost on either of us that Person has been speaking to Stir from inside her car during a traffic jam in Vancouver.
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