Body & Bones: Smitten Young Woman Making Bad Man Choices Remains Ripe Dramatic Terrain

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The story of the naïve young miss who risks emotional and social ruin by falling for the wrong man may be a Victorian novel cliché, but the raw pain of betrayal is also a subject for modern films.

Those old-fashioned pangs of remorse echo through such autobiographical films as Lone Scherfig’s An Education (based on the memoir by Lynn Barber) and one of last year’s best films, director Johanna Hogg’s autobiographical, The Souvenir.

That’s also the basic plot of Body & Bones, a first feature from actress/writer Melanie Oates, who has also described the story as based on personal experience. The setting is small-town Newfoundland, where 18-year-old Tess (a good Victorian novel name), is a listless high-school senior.

She’s played by Kelly Van der Burg, who may be a decade older than the character though, with her tousled cascade of hair and open features, she manages to suggest the mixture of vulnerability and brashness of new adulthood.

Her growing-up has happened abruptly with the death of her mother, leaving her with a house and no one else at home. Her nominal guardian is her mother’s former boyfriend Gerry (Lawrence Barry). Gerry has another girlfriend now and he invites Tess to live with them.

Tess spends a lot of time skipping school, listening to music on her headphones or engaging in clumsy sexual engagements with a local boy. One morning, Tess finds a surprise visitor in the kitchen. His name is Danny Sharpe (Joel Thomas Hynes, an actor, Governor-General Award-winning novelist, and musician).
Danny is a small-town music legend who left town 20 years before and hasn’t done all that well, though he maintains his confident satyr’s smirk and stylized rock ‘n’ roll bedhead, even though he’s come down a peg in life, running a bar in St. John’s.

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Tess, starved for affection or maybe just change, is infatuated. Danny’s is gruffly flirtatious and, initially at least, careful not to exploit the two-decade age difference between them. But Danny has a deserved bad reputation and when Gerry angrily chases him back to St. John’s, Tess decides to follow. Danny, though startled to see her show up at his door, provides with her a mattress to sleep on. Predictably, one bad choice leads to another.

Body & Bones feels most alive when Tess begins to discover what Danny’s life is like. He lives in a dump, drinks a lot, and works at the bar when he mocks a mild-natured college alcoholic, Nick (Evan Mercer). Danny also has a habit of disappearing without telling her and after one episode, he returns with a woman friend, a hairdresser and singer named Jo (musician Janet Cull, really good) who is warm and a little trashy. In what feels like an entirely credible response, Tess zones in on Jo, eager to interrogate her rival while acting like a new friend.

Body & Bones suffers from some repetitiousness, particularly in a series of dreamlike montage sequences involving water and a lot of swirling and fluttering which, like the film’s title, come across as pretentious. When it isn’t trying too hard, Body & Bones memorably succeeds in capturing the double whammy of a first heartbreak, when the shame of naivete feels almost as bad as the hurt of betrayal.

Body & Bones. Written and directed by Melanie Oates. Starring Kelly Van der Burg, Joel Thomas Hynes, Lawrence Barry, Stephen Payette and Jo Burg. Available on video and on demand on October 16.