Darkest Miriam: Still Waters Run Deep in this Tale of a Toronto Librarian
By Liz Braun
Rating: A
A young woman entombed by books is at the heart of Darkest Miriam, a delicate character study about love and grief. The film stars Britt Lower (Severance) as Miriam Gordon, a quiet, buttoned-up librarian at a fictional branch of the Toronto Public Library in Allan Gardens.
Director Naomi Jaye has made the city of Toronto a character in Darkest Miriam. Allan Gardens is a large, beautiful green space located in a down-at-its-heels neighbourhood. The park includes a stately botanical conservatory but it has also been a magnet for homeless encampments. Many in the area struggle with mental health and addiction issues.
Miriam (Britt Lower) and Janko (Tom Mercier) take their relationship to the next level slowly.
All of this makes Miriam’s branch of the library — like every urban library — a haven for people from every walk of life. Some want books to borrow, some seek shelter or human company.
(Other nods to Toronto? Miriam gets knocked over by someone riding a bike on the sidewalk, and gets bumped into a big hole in the ground at a construction site. That’s all on-brand for the city.)
Our first glimpse of Miriam is, literally, through a glass darkly, an image that slowly leads into her working day — riding her bike to the library, shelving books, devising games for kids in the children’s area.
And she acts as therapist, problem solver, referee and cleaner for the disenfranchised and disoriented who frequent the library. It falls to Miriam to remove an abandoned set of false teeth, make sure Fainting Man is okay, and answer the same questions asked repeatedly by a patron with dementia.
The film is based on The Incident Report, a 2009 novel by Martha Baillie that is a series of daily library reports written up by Miriam. In the film, the reports are a source of humour, poetry and remembrance — a wonderful device.
In the background to all the activity in Miriam’s working day is an on-going mystery about anonymous, possibly threatening notes left at the library for her. The notes reference Verdi’s Rigoletto. By coincidence, Rigoletto is the first opera to which Miriam’s father ever took her, and she knows the story of how tragedy results when the hunchback Rigoletto tries to protect his daughter.
Meanwhile, Miriam eats her lunch every work day in Allan Gardens. One day she exchanges glances with a young man she notices on the park bench opposite. In time, they meet and become lovers. He is Janko (Tom Mercier), a Slovenian artist who drives a cab.
Slowly, slowly, they begin a relationship, and he draws memories out of Miriam about her past, her childhood and her father, a man isolated by his growing book collection and undone by depression. As Miriam’s heart is unlocked, her grief subsides long enough for her stories to come to light.
Darkest Miriam is magical, mysterious and ultimately heartbreaking, although it ends on a hopeful note. It is quiet, slow-moving and remarkably beautiful to look at. And as Miriam falls in love with Janko,it becomes more beautiful still, as the world reflects her state of mind.
Kudos to cinematographer Michael LeBlanc and director Naomi Jaye for this painterly creation, brought to life by an understated, brilliant performance from Britt Lower.
Darkest Miriam. Directed by Naomi Jaye, screenplay by Naomi Jaye from the novel by Martha Baillie. Stars Britt Lower, Tom Mercier, Sook-Yin Lee, Jean Yoon. In theatres in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal March 28.