Drifting Snow: Well named strangers-on-a-road-trip drama explores relationships and life in wintry Prince Edward County
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-plus
“A Canadian island where hip meets historic,” is the way The New York Times described Prince Edward County, the community on the northeast shore of Lake Ontario that has become a popular summer retreat for monied city dwellers, and is not to be confused with P.E.I.
They enjoy its Loyalist history, artisanal culture, cuisine, regional wines and dune-covered beaches. And it’s where producer-editor Ryan Noth’s debut feature film, Drifting Snow, is set in the off-season.
Sonja Smits and Jonas Bonnetta are strangers on the road, with backstories, in Drifting Snow.
The chilly title (this is no Wet Hot American Summer), targets a discerning art-house audience, perhaps those hip and historical people who go to farmers’ markets, buy pottery and shawls, support Canadian books and go to small film festivals.
The central event is a night-time fender-bender between widowed island resident, Joanne (Sonja Smits) and a young cinematographer, Chris (Jonas Bonnetta), who’s in town to oversee the sale of his late mother’s house. Chris’s car is too damaged to drive the next morning, so he and Joanne take a road trip together in hers.
As they drive, they get to know each other and drift into their own memories. Chris, who is suffering from a progressive eye condition that is beginning to threaten his career, mulls over the recent death of his mother, his arguments with his long-distance girlfriend (Jess Salgueiro) and sister (Rachel Bonetta), as they cope with their loss.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Joanne recalls the last nights with her late husband, John (Colin Mochrie), her spouse from her middle-aged second marriage. With its use of a traffic accident, and time-shifting structure, it evokes Atom Egoyan’s 1997 film, The Sweet Hereafter (which Noth cites as an inspiration)
In its brief 74-minute running-time, the free-wheeling Drifting Snow captures the tempo of country life, neighbourly decency, the double life of a community of year-rounders and summer visitors (including tone-deaf entrepreneurs and real estate invaders).
In the CanCon tradition, it reminds us of the cold facts of life in most of this country: Whether by black ice, freezing blizzards, power outages, or loneliness, the weather pushes us inward, in homes and soul-baring conversations on long stretches of highway in heated cars.
The performances are naturalistic and understated: In her first movie role in a decade and a half, Smits (who, in real life, runs a winery on Prince Edward County) has a long career that runs from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome to TV series such as Street Legal and Traders.
Beautiful but unbeautified, she holds the film’s emotional center as a pragmatic woman, a potter by trade, who is watching her life grow suddenly narrower with her husband’s death.
In drawing a line between Joanne and Chris’s shared sense of precarity, the script somewhat over-reaches in giving Chris a potential career-ending eye problem, though having the character employed as a cinematographer is inspired.
If Drifting Snow is spare as a drama, visually it’s luscious. Shot by Noth’s regular filmmaking partner, Tess Girard, the film assembles zone shots, snow-covered dunes, winter fields and fire-flickering interiors, all bolstered by Bonetta’s meditative score.
The film’s focus on the texture of time, on artisanship and uplifting rural beauty, make this a graceful tribute to the place where it was made.
Drifting Snow. Written and directed by Ryan North. With Sonja Smits, Jonas Bonetta, Rachel Bonetta, Colin Mochrie, Jess Salgueiro. Drifting Snow is available on iTunes Canada, Apple TV and Vimeo video on demand from May 11.