This Place: A Space for Love, Between Hybrid Identities
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B
Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, with half its population born outside of Canada, and half belonging to visible minorities.
That makes for a potentially rich source of intercultural narratives. And it’s where This Place — the debut feature from V.T. Nayani — steps up, aiming to hold a mirror to the city in the story of two women students from very different but connected backgrounds who meet and fall in love.
A multicultural collaborative project, it’s co-written by Nayani, the child of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, Iranian Canadian writer Golshan Abdmoulaie, and Mohawk actor-writer Devery Jacobs (Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Reservation Dogs) who also co-stars.
The film begins with a teaser flashback in the late 1980s on a plane about to land in Montreal. After disposing of his passport in the airplane washroom, a Sri Lankan father deplanes and surrenders himself to customs.
Two Iranian men behind him in line use the distraction of his surrender to sneak past security. Subsequently, we learn that the Sri Lankan, and one of the Iranians, are the fathers of two young women, who meet in Toronto a couple of decades later. While highly coincidental, the connection is an illustration of the therapeutic truism that the way forward is through reconciling with the past.
Shot with softly glowing interiors and accompanied by an emotional score, This Place (the title rhymes with “displace”) is a love story. It focuses on Malai (Priya Guns), a Tamil Canadian math undergrad, who finds a notebook of poems in a laundromat.
She returns it to its owner, a poet named Kawenniióhstha (Jacobs), who has recently arrived in Toronto from the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk reserve near Montreal, to study creative writing.
Kawenniióhstha’s ulterior motive is to seek out her the father, an Iranian man who split from her half-Mohawk mother (Brittany LeBorgne) before Kawenniióhstha was born.
After the two women meet for coffee, they flirt, and share histories. As Kawenniióhstha wryly notes, both she, as an Indigenous woman, and Malai, a Sri Lankan, “have been mistaken for Indians.”
The two women do not, immediately, share their preoccupations with their paternity. After joining a poetry-writing circle at a gay bookstore, and starting her new romance, Kawenniióhstha finds time to travel to the suburbs to meet her Iranian father, Behrooz (Ali Momen), who now has a new family, but proves a lovely man who also likes poetry.
Meanwhile, Malai’s estranged alcoholic father (Muraly Srinarayanathas), who is dying, wants to reconnect with his Malai and her older brother Ahrun (Alex Joseph), who wants nothing to do with his father.
Complicating matters, Malai’s professor is urging her to attend graduate school and she’s guilt-ridden about depending on her brother for support. These problems, too, prove easy to resolve. Soon, the Mohawk-Iranian poet and her Sri Lankan mathematician lover can move forward with their lives.
“This shit only happens here,” says Ahrun, in a gruff acknowledgement of his hybrid country’s improbable possibilities.
This Place would have improved by taking a step back with some self-aware humour. Though the filmmakers’ thoughtful, therapeutic approach thankfully avoids rom-com and melodramatic clichés, too often This Place plays like a thesis in search of a dramatic form.
The schematic structure and mundane dialogue never allow it to blossom into three-dimensional fictional reality, making this play like the demo version of a richer film that really should be made.
This Place. Directed by V.T. Nayani. Written by V.T. Nayani, Devery Jacobs, and Golshan Abdmoulaie. Starring Devery Jacobs and Priya Guns. Now available on VOD, including on Apple TV.