Not Your Average Teen Movie: Director David Bezmozgis Aspires For Greater Things With Victoria Day
Posted June 23, 2009 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
There’s an underlying sense of dread running through Victoria Day, the feature film debut from writer-director David Bezmozgis.
Set in 1988, the plot centres on 16-year-old Ben Spektor (Mark Rendall) as he comes to grips with a number of life-altering events leading up to the May long weekend. The decision to spot the school bully five bucks for drugs at a Bob Dylan concert winds up having bigger consequences than Ben ever could’ve foreseen, and the resulting guilt weighs heavily on him.
Bezmozgis, also an acclaimed novelist ( Natasha And Other Stories), drew from his own experience as the son of Russian immigrants growing up in Canada to create a realistic film about teenagers coming of age.
“I wanted to tell the story of what it feels like to be a teenager,” Bezmozgis told CityNews.ca in a recent interview in Toronto, where he’s based. “I like those movies when I see them, when they’re done well. I think often they’re very stereotypical and kind of inane. They don’t need to be. There’s a place for those sorts of movies, but that can’t be everything we see about teenagers.”
But there’s a reason so many films about teenagers seem painfully familiar. As Bezmozgis observes, it’s easier to fall back on what’s been done before.
“Even for me the first instinct is to try to do something that feels kind of cliché and you look at it and think that’s not really what it’s like,” he notes. “You try to subvert your worst impulses. The thrill is to see something that all of a sudden comes to life, when somebody behaves in a way that is unpredictable and yet totally believable.”
The story behind Victoria Day came to Bezmozgis when he was in California. He attended film school there after earning a degree in English literature from Montreal’s McGill University. The Sundance Institute invited him to work on the script as part of its screenwriting lab back in 2006, and three years later, in 2009, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
Bezmozgis nods when asked if Ang Lee’s darkly atmospheric The Ice Storm was a source of inspiration.
“Yeah. I thought about that movie a lot when I wrote this,” he muses. ” The Ice Storm, The Squid and the Whale, Dazed and Confused. There’s another movie that’s now more than 20 years old, Racing With The Moon. A young Nicolas Cage, a young Sean Penn, set in the 1940s, just before they go off to war in a small California town. Just so smart, by the writer who now has done all these Harry Potter movies, Steve Kloves, but he also did Wonder Boys. That was his first produced script. Great movie.”
The most affecting films, the director notes, have the power to keep the audience guessing, and keep them thinking, long after the credits roll.
“I think that if you walk out of a film and it lingers, and stays with you, in a good sense, that’s the best,” he nods.
Victoria Day is now playing in Toronto and Vancouver.
Image: Actor Mark Rendall in a scene from Victoria Day, courtesy E1 Films
