PAST PERFECT
Written and directed by Daniel MacIvor
Starring Daniel MacIvor, Rebecca Jenkins
Edmonton International Film Festival
Sat, Mar 14, 4:15 p.m.
Princess Theatre

Fate plays an integral role in Past Perfect, the feature directorial debut by Canadian actor and playwright Daniel MacIvor. The story is predicated on the chance meeting of two strangers who fall in love on an overnight flight from Halifax to Vancouver. But the writer-director says the success of the film lies in part in his crew’s openness to the vagaries of circumstance.

"One of the things I said really early on is I’m not going to call it a film by Daniel MacIvor – which I’m kind of against anyway – I’m going to call this a film by God, and whatever the universe gives us we’re going to take it as a gift," MacIvor says from his home in Halifax. "And we did and I think it made for a better movie than the one we had on the page."

From the beginning, the process that brought Past Perfect to the screen was shaped by prevailing conditions. MacIvor, a respected figure in Canadian theatre but probably best known as Nathan, the anal-retentive foil to Don McKellar’s slacker shut-in Curtis on the CBC series Twitch City, had planned to use a script based on his own play, Marion Bridge, to break into feature directing. But the play seemed too large in scope for a first-timer, so he passed it on to director Wiebke von Carolsfeld, a friend and colleague who was also looking for a feature project.

MacIvor turned his attention to an idea he’d been working on, a stripped-down examination of a relationship in decline. He got a call from producer Camelia Frieberg, a longtime collaborator with Atom Egoyan and Jeremy Podeswa, who had an unusual proposition.

JOINING THE JET SET

"A company in Halifax called IMX Productions, they bought a plane set and they had a bunch of money and they wanted to make a movie," MacIvor says. "Then they thought, well, why don’t we make five small movies, and we’ll give them the constraint of this plane set. On one level it was a good business decision for them, so it made these small movies far more affordable because they owned this major set. They also thought it might be interesting to offer filmmakers the challenge of a limitation like that."

Initially, MacIvor balked at working up a story that was partially set on a plane, but he realized this constraint coalesced with the script he’d already been working on and furnished a fresh jolt of inspiration. MacIvor called Frieberg back and accepted IMX’s terms.

"[Thriving on constraints] comes from my years in the theatre when you really don’t have a lot of money. It’s like you want to have running water on stage, well you can’t, you can’t afford it, and so you come up with an idea that’s usually better than the first idea. I like the idea of a limitation as a way to goose creation, a way to work the creative muscles."

MacIvor stars in Past Perfect as Cecil, an uptight linguistics prof on his way to a job interview in Vancouver. He vociferously expresses his desire to be left alone by crew and passengers alike on his overnight flight. Next to him sits Charlotte (Rebecca Jenkins), a sales rep from Vancouver who is going home after her Internet romance fizzled in just four days. Over the course of the flight, they warm to each other; by the time the plane touches down, a new relationship has blossomed.

PROPPED UP BY FATE

The in-flight romance is intercut with scenes from a single day two years later when Cecil and Charlotte, who now live together, are watching their love slip through their fingers in the aftermath of personal tragedy. The non-linear structure allows for repetitions and resonances between these two turning points in the characters’ lives, forcing the audience to continually revise what they think they know.

"It’s funny because in the theatre you can do that stuff easier," MacIvor says of the film’s structure. "[The audience is] already there, they’ve already got their parking, it’s more of a night out when people go to the theatre, so they’re going to give you an extra 20 minutes of suspended disbelief or trust or something. But in movies, it’s such a disposable medium, I think people are like, ‘I’m not getting it, I gotta go.’ But I think it’s satisfying in the end when you realize you didn’t have all the information, then you get it, then it alters your judgment."

The small cast and limited sets make Past Perfect sound like a play, but in some ways it parallels a short story in its concentrated system of symbols that gradually accrue meaning as the film progresses. Mundane objects like a bookshelf and a paint chip acquire emotional significance for the characters and audience alike. MacIvor admits that some of these elements were introduced into the story during shooting, when circumstances had to be accommodated into the script, as when they arrived to shoot at the airport, only to find their set adorned with Christmas decorations, or when the original location for Charlotte and Cecil’s house fell through days before filming.

STRANGE DIVISIONS

"I went away and I would do rewrites. To me, that’s the magic, it’s like the magic that happens in the editing room where you juxtapose two images differently and all of a sudden it means something else and feels like, ‘How could it have been conceived any other way?’ It’s like you’ve been struggling and struggling until you have this happy accident where everything suddenly makes sense."

MacIvor brought this openness with him to the set, where he extended his trust to his small but experienced crew and allowed them to be collaborators on the final product.

"[S]omething I’ve tried to do in the theatre is to break down these artificial hierarchies and these strange divisions – the world of the director and the world of the writer and the world of the actor and the world of the producer – and make one world out of it. On a film, it’s a crew and it’s a family, we’re working together and we should all be on the same page. Certainly because we had a smaller crew and it was a smaller movie, it was a really good way to give everybody a bit more responsibility, and as a result they felt more engaged and more a part of it."

The question now is whether Past Perfect will prove equally inviting to audiences. MacIvor is undaunted by the reaction of movie industry types, who find the film’s innovative structure too complicated for mainstream filmgoers.

"These are people who are trying to sell movies to people they don’t respect, so if there’s anything at all challenging, they’re going to be gone. But the thing about it is that it’s really not all that challenging in the end, you just have to trust it. If you trust it, it makes itself indelibly clear as to what’s going on... It makes you question your judgments, and anything we can do, whether in theatre or film, to get people to question their judgments, that’s a very valuable thing to do."