Dances With Torontonians
Tkaronto puts a fresh spin on the theme of aboriginals out to connect with their heritage
Published January 29, 2009 by Paul Matwychuk in Screen Review

TKARONTO
Directed by Shane Belcourt. Starring Duane Murray, Melanie McLaren, Lorne Cardinal. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Jan 30-Feb 2.
***1/2

“Will someone please tell me how to say ‘tree’ in Ojibway?” asks Anishnabe painter Jolene Peltier, beckoning to the skies. She’s expressing herself with mock frustration, but that mock frustration disguises a genuine frustration with her inability to connect with her own cultural heritage. She asked her grandmother to teach her the language, but the lessons weren’t very productive and to this day she knows about as much Ojibway as I do. She’s earned acclaim for her paintings of aboriginal leaders, but when her latest subject, a elder and community organizer played by Lorne Cardinal, presents her with an eagle feather, she’s devastated to realize, after driving out to a field and lighting some sweetgrass, that she has no idea what the “correct” way to pray with it might be.

Jolene, played winningly by Melanie McLaren, is one of the two main characters in Shane Belcourt’s lovely, no-budget indie Tkaronto (named after the discarded Mohawk word for Toronto). The other is Ray Morin (Duane Murray), a Métis graphic novelist who’s come to The Big Smoke to pitch a series to some TV executives — but also to get a little distance from his pregnant wife and sort out his thoughts about becoming a father. Jolene’s life is a little more together than Ray’s is, but they feel the same awkwardness and self-doubt when it comes to owning their aboriginal identity. They are also both married to white partners, and so they have a lot of pent-up thoughts about being aboriginal that spill out of them their first night together in a long Before Sunrise marathon conversation. An affair is out of the question, but it’s clear they’re drawn to each other.

The themes of Tkaronto may sound familiar, even rote, but there’s something very fresh in the way Belcourt filters them through his young, self-deprecating characters. Sure, there’s not a lot of subtext in Tkaronto — it’s a movie about two people struggling to find their cultural identity who spend every scene talking about their struggle to find their cultural identity — but you completely believe that these two people would express themselves in exactly this way, that there are thousands of Canadians out there who are wrestling with precisely the same issues, and their struggle to attach themselves to something bigger than themselves, and just to get their lives on track, is genuinely involving.

I could have done without Ray’s Ally McBeal fantasy sequences, and Jordan O’Connor’s overbearing score. And the scenes where Ray takes his script meetings (which strongly reminded me of the audition scenes in Robert Townsend’s Hollywood Shuffle) feel too broad — maybe I’m betraying my naïveté here, but surely even the most clueless TV exec wouldn’t be as brazenly insulting as the idiots Ray encounters here. That said, there’s a very funny, pointed moment early on where one of Ray’s producing partners tries to calculate whether Ray’s Métis status is enough to qualify their show’s creative team as “30 per cent Canadian aboriginal.”

I imagine Belcourt has tried to get a lot of projects off the ground and has endured a lot of meetings even more frustrating and unproductive than Ray has. Hopefully Tkaronto makes it easier for him to get some cash in the future; like everybody involved in this little gem, he’s obviously a talent to watch.