Original-Cin interview: Director Nicole Dorsey on Two Intense Character Studies Within One Film
By Liam Lacey
The title of the film Black Conflux doesn’t quite trip off the tongue. As the film’s director Nicole Dorsey observes, “People say, ‘Do you mean complex?’”
She doesn’t. While the film is certainly complex, the word “conflux” — the merging of two rivers seen in a recurrent aerial shot — is the guiding metaphor in the film.
One current in the story belongs to a 15-year-old girl named Jackie (Ella Ballentine) living in suburbs of St. John’s in 1987. Though Jackie’s a good student who sings in the school choir, she could fit the textbook definition of “at risk.” Her mother is in prison and her guardian is her alcoholic aunt. Jackie’s beginning to fall in with a party crowd and experiencing the mixed emotions that come with intense male attention.
Read our review of Black Conflux
The other current of the story belongs to a local misfit, Dennis (Ryan McDonald), who works in a brewery and has dark, angry fantasies about women, who he hates because he doesn’t believe he’s good enough for them.
Dorsey’s film debuted at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, where I interviewed her in the hubbub of a hotel café amid phone interruptions, clanging dishes, and yelling publicists. But Dorsey, now in her early thirties and with more than a decade’s experience in the film and television industries, was the kind of interview subject who’s comfortable diving deep quickly.
It probably helped that TIFF 2019 was a good festival for her, with Black Conflux receiving mostly strong reviews, including an important one from The Hollywood Reporter. The film was subsequently selected by TIFF programmers as one of Canada’s Top 10 films of the year. Now, after being delayed by theatre closings because of the pandemic, it is seeing its long-anticipated release. (As a matter of disclosure, Dorsey is the niece, by marriage, of Original-Cin.ca founder and editor Jim Slotek).
She grew up in Burlington, Ontario and attended film school at Ryerson University. Since then, she has done almost everything imaginable related to film, from props, acting, assistant casting and camera, script supervisor, assistant directing, and creating commercials for such brands as Nike, Red Bull and Mattel.
“I always wanted to direct since I was very young,” she says. “So, I’d take a job, make contacts, save some money, make a short, go broke, and then take another job, make another short. It was a very repetitive cycle. Then I landed in commercials, where I realized, ‘Hey, you can actually get paid to do this.’
As well as hands-on knowledge, Dorsey knows her film history, and Black Conflux represents the confluence of two film genres: Dennis’ story can be seen as part of cinema’s long-standing fascination with violent delusional men in such films as Psycho, Peeping Tom, The Collector and Taxi Driver.
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The other stream here is the girl’s coming-of-age film, a genre invigorated in the #MeToo era, typified by such films as Firecrackers, Book Smart, and Never Sometimes Maybe Always. Dorsey mentions someone suggested the film resembles a cross between Taxi Driver and Smooth Talk, a much lesser known 1985 drama about sexual violence (released by Criterion just this past February) with a young Laura Dern and Treat Williams, based on a Joyce Carole Oates story. The connection of the fear of violence and sexual coming of age is certainly in Oates’ camp.
One of Dorsey’s short films, entitled Dennis (2015) was a sort of prequel to Black Conflux, a portrait of a mentally disturbed Newfoundland loner. The film was the fruition of a 2010 exploratory trip she had taken to Newfoundland, where she has family roots on her mother’s side.
Her original idea was to learn more about a true crime story of a teenaged hitchhiker who was murdered in Newfoundland in the early eighties. With the nerve of the young, she chose to hitchhike around the island herself while thinking about the story.
Filmmaker Nicole Dorsey.
“I was fascinated by the land itself, the rain, the mis-en-scene that’s built into the place. I hitchhiked around a lot and got my face eaten by bugs. I was thinking about this peaceful community and this violent crime. I had this obsession about two people from different worlds who meet each other. Is it fate? Coincidence?
“But that grew and became something else about nature and nurture, what shapes people and what leads to violent acts? I did a big pile of research about these kinds of men, including reading Elliott Leyton’s book [about serial killers] Hunting Humans.”
The result was a character portrait that’s balanced between compassionate and clear-eyed.
“I don’t see Dennis as just a victim of his delusions,” she says. “He’s an active participant. This is a world he created for his own comfort. He’s part of a culture, a society that objectifies women. Every feminine image — wife, mother, girlfriend or femme fatale — is part of a specific culture that also defines what masculinity is, what it means to be a man. And if you can’t meet those standards, what worth or value do you have?
“He’s struggling to be part of a society where he doesn’t fit in, and he’s infuriated. But it’s kind of bullshit to say that because he’s suffered X, Y, and Z in his life, he’s not responsible for his actions.”
She notes that, somewhat unnervingly, after festival screenings, audience members like to tell her they know someone just like Dennis. As for the character of Jackie, Dorsey knew her better because she had more or less lived the part.
“In a way, Dennis was easier to write, my observation of someone other than myself. Jackie was harder. Her internal experiences were very much my own. When you start looking at it, it’s a super-complex thing. I hit puberty really early. I looked like a woman at an early age but mentally, I was naïve.
“I remember I bought these little board shorts which I thought were so cool. I was like Ginger Spice — I was going to conquer the world — and the first time I wore them on the street, this guy in an 18-wheeler slowed down and said something incredibly crude and I was so absolutely mortified I never wore those shorts again. I discovered that male gaze that was out there in the world was a powerful one. I felt shame and guilt and like a complete idiot.
“Jackie’s story is a reflection of my own journey. I had this sense, at that age, that I had to figure out my identity, who I was going to be for the rest of my life, which obviously isn’t how things work. Jackie has the body of a woman and this kind of physical power, her sexuality, which you can use to control or do whatever with. But at that age, you don’t fully understand the vulnerability that comes with it.
“As she goes along her journey, she settles into the realization that the world is not concrete, that you’re always going to be changing. It’s not the experience you’re going through but your reaction that really matters.”
That idea is embedded in the surprising, and surprisingly right, conclusion to Black Conflux, a resolution that may squelch the expectations of genre fans, but for others, feels inspired. That ending wasn’t obvious even to Dorsey, until the film was almost finished.
She says that McDonald, the actor who plays Dennis, “was really taken aback when he saw it. The actors didn’t know what ending I would choose. But the moment I went into the edit suite I knew that this was the best one.”
Black Conflux. Written and directed by Nicole Dorsey. Starring Ella Ballentine, Ryan McDonald, Luke Bilyk, Olivia Scriven, and Sofia Banzhaf. Available nationwide through the Digital TIFF Bell Lightbox July 2.