At Whistler Film Festival, Bruce Sweeney's new She Talks to Strangers is a morally muddy gift to Gabrielle Rose and Camille Sullivan
Vancouver director’s longtime collaborators make the most of their mother-and-daughter roles—amid kidnapped dogs, sex as currency, and a Kitsilano real-estate caper
Gabrielle Rose in She Talks to Strangers.
She Talks to Strangers screens at the Whistler Film Festival on December 1, 2, and 3
WITH VANCOUVER AS a regular bit-player, Bruce Sweeney has been producing witty character studies about neurotic urbanites for close to 30 years.
In his newest feature, She Talks to Strangers, premiering at the Whistler Film Festival on December 1, we’re asked to find sympathy for people engaged in some very, very bad behaviour. The film’s low-key humour springs from the casual psychopathy it observes—you might call it an amorality play—but it all started as a heartfelt gift to two of Sweeney’s greatest collaborators.
“I wanted to write a project for Gabe [Gabrielle Rose] and Camille [Sullivan],” Sweeney tells Stir, “something they could hit out of the park. A mother-daughter project. And I guess the way I work is sort of backwards: I get a theme and then the story fits the theme, and the theme of this is the nature and fragility of the parent-child bond. I thought it would give them a lot to sink their teeth into, give them a lot to do. And everyone can jump in on this topic. Everyone has a family.”
This is true, although very few of us will experience the stresses forced with evil glee by Sweeney onto this particular duo. In turn, both Sullivan and Rose make a meal of their roles as Leslie and Staci, who find themselves embroiled in a plot by deadbeat ex-husband Keith (played with equivalent comic energy by Jeff Gladstone) to rob Leslie of her home.
No one is innocent in Sweeney’s snappy formulation, which gradually involves kidnapped dogs, sex as currency, midnight corpse-disposal, and a notable amount of exposed male genitalia. Among the understated amusements of this “morally muddy universe” is that the entire story turns on a piece of property in Kitsilano. In conventional noir cinema, plots are hatched and crimes committed either for money or for passion. In the Vancouver of 2023, it’s for the real estate value, a wry punchline that happens to recall Sweeney’s 2012 film, The Crimes of Mike Recket.
“I think you go hard at it on an intuitive level and you hope it has some strength at its core, you hope that it resonates with something that reflects our current society or some societal norm that you kinda tap into,” says the filmmaker, although he understandably demurs from overanalyzing his own work. One gets the sense that for Sweeney, who describes himself as a “notorious loner”, the process of making the film is what really counts.
Gabrielle Rose and Camille Sullivan in She Talks to Strangers.
“You end up being part of this little machine that chugs along and that is something that really suits me,” he says. “I’m definitely a team player and I definitely like to work with people, ’cause it’s not lonely. It helps bring me out. And even with my first film [1995’s TIFF award-winner Live Bait], which is more autobiographical, I think: why would you bring this up in film? It’s deeply personal. But you do that because you’re trying to, in a way, get over yourself. And if your worst fear is to disclose your personal fears and intimacies, to get them out with film can be of a cathartic nature.”
Perhaps most pleasing about She Talks to Strangers, and indeed Sweeney’s entire filmography, is that it belongs to a kind of individual-regional cinema that’s increasingly hard to find, and which reliably projects a strong authorial voice. Notwithstanding that he can count on an outstanding repertory team, Sweeney demands adherence to the script.
“The way I write is that I put the beats right on the page and I get quite hardcore about that,” he says. “If everyone is chiming in to make the movie, I can guarantee that movie will be garbage.”
Meanwhile he comes off like a character in one of his own screenplays. Asked if he’s a paranoid person, since She Talks to Strangers revolves so much around deceit and betrayal, Sweeney answers, “I would say yeah. I have anxiety issues that I have to deal with a little bit and I dunno, a lot of times I feel like life isn’t that easy for me, actually. Like I get wracked with anxiety over little things that aren’t big things, like you go to lunch with a friend and then they say something and then you stew about it for two days. Other people would just confront it, like, ‘Well, why would you say that to me?’ But I don’t, I just withdraw and get upset by all myself. And that is not very good. Right?”
No, but blurting it onto the screen seems to have its value.
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