Love in a Placeless City

Ariella Garmaise reviews Kazik Radwanski’s new film “Matt and Mara.”

By Ariella GarmaiseNovember 18, 2024

• Film

I RECENTLY GRABBED a drink with a friend in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where both of us are staying for a couple of weeks. Both of us are Canadian, and both of us, like most Toronto artists, aspire to move south, but have thus far been unable to secure American citizenship. So, we have settled for extended stints in the Land of Hope and Dreams. We were discussing the films of Kazik Radwanski, whose portrayals of Toronto my friend finds lacking.

“People always make Toronto seem like it’s full of promise,” he said. “But it’s all disappointment.”

It’s a running joke that for most Canadian artists, and professionals more broadly, there exists a strong temptation to flee to the States. “You don’t want every book to have the texture of New York,” writer Sheila Heti said at a Harvard event, and as an acclaimed artist who has chosen to stay in her homeland, Heti is an outlier. “You want books to come from different places, and different places have different values,” she continued. “What are the values of Toronto? What are the colors of Toronto?”

It’s a question with which she grapples throughout her work. “All of Toronto feels banal,” she writes in Alphabetical Diaries (2024). “You can’t grow if you are in a pot of concrete, and that’s what Toronto is—a pot of concrete,” she writes later in the book. “It just seems like I can’t stay in Toronto forever or I would always be a child.” But it’s also a city replete with “simple happiness and pleasure.” “Toronto felt to me yesterday like putting on soft pajamas,” Heti concedes. “Toronto may well be a coastal city one day. Toronto means nothing to me anymore. Toronto, Toronto, Toronto, fine.”

New York City and Los Angeles are already beloved cities in the cultural imagination, not least of all because of the many love stories Hollywood has staged in both places. In Garry Marshall’s Los Angeles, romance is all grand gestures—a shopping spree in Pretty Woman (1990), a domino effect of celebrity cameos in Valentine’s Day (2010); Nora Ephron writes of heartburn and neuroses against the Manhattan skyline. L.A. is beautiful, New York is cerebral, or so the cliché goes. “I don’t want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light,” Alvy Singer says to his friend Rob in Annie Hall (1977), regarding why he’ll never live in Los Angeles. “You’re like New York City,” Annie tells him. “You’re like this island unto yourself.”

Take This Waltz (2011), What If? (2013), and perhaps Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) are the closest Toronto has come to competing with its peers for the girl. And with comparatively little cinematic representation, the question remains: Is Toronto for lovers? What are its values, then?

Professionalism, lingering parochialism, ambition with something of an inferiority complex, but free—at least for now—healthcare, alongside skyrocketing rents. Its colors are predominantly the gray of anonymous skyscrapers, the flash of blue on a deceptively sunny winter day. Kazik Radwanski has his own hypothesis in his fourth feature film, Matt and Mara (2024), a rare piece of cinema where Toronto does not double for some cosmopolis elsewhere. Toronto feels like “a placeless city,” he said in a recent interview with In Review Online. “How do you make a film about a placeless city?” And how do you fall in love with a city like that?

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Matt and Mara is, loosely speaking, a romantic comedy, in which Matt (Matt Johnson), a successful author who fled to New York, returns to Toronto to visit his college flame Mara (Deragh Campbell), who is now a creative writing professor with a husband and small child. Mara is stifled by domesticity, and Matt aches for the “simple happiness and pleasure” that his early love promised. He also needs to finish a draft of his next novel. New York, the film seems to say, is where you go to succeed, Toronto to settle, with a family or for less flashy accomplishments.

It’s not the first time Radwanski, Campbell, and Johnson have worked together. In Anne at 13,000 ft (2019), Johnson plays a fleeting love interest of Anne’s (Campbell), again named Matt, and their chemistry crackled so much that Radwanski found it deserving of its own 80-minute interrogation. That film, which won the Toronto Film Critics Association’s Rogers Best Canadian Film Award, further cemented Radwanski’s status as part of the New Wave of Canadian filmmakers, and Campbell as a preeminent indie actor (who frequently co-directs with filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz). Johnson, for his part, is the director of BlackBerry (2023) and creator of the cult classic Canadian series Nirvanna the Band the Show (2017–18), about a musical duo’s desperate quest to play Toronto’s Rivoli concert venue. He was also named a part of “Canadian cinema’s New Hope” alongside Radwanski.

The cast of Matt and Mara is rounded out by a cross section of Toronto’s intelligentsia: the writer Emma Healey, novelist Marlowe Granados, Jane Inc synth-pop musician Carlyn Bezic. Even Mara’s infant is played by Avery Nayman, the daughter of film critic Adam Nayman. (The credits are a veritable advertisement for Canada’s creative class.)

Matt and Mara’s reunion ignites what one might call an “emotional affair.” Campbell and Johnson are an easy pairing, making for a natural opposites-attract love story. Matt is large and imposing, brash and bumbling, almost oppressively charming; Mara is sly and slight, far more controlled, always giving the sense there’s something she isn’t saying—she borders on oppressively dour. She makes him thoughtful, he makes her playful; he gets to be outrageous and she gets to play at being outraged. Why their relationship didn’t survive their college years we’re not quite sure. Was it the pull of postgrad desires, or did this dynamic inevitably grow tiresome?

When Radwanski shoots Matt and Mara in extreme close-ups, Campbell’s anemic pallor absorbs the light of whatever surrounds her: the warmth of a butter-yellow turtleneck, the overcast skies above Niagara Falls. It’s as though Mara is a chameleon, slipping into whatever skin is demanded of her. The real drama is told in these close-ups of Mara’s face, as Matt’s boyish charm lends her cheeks a long-overdue flush. They pretend with their passport photographer that they’ve been married for six years. “Your relationship seems young,” he tells them, and it’s as if Matt and Mara are back in college. (It’s Mara’s second time back to get her photo taken, proof of identification an existential question for a woman lacking identity.)

Their relationship embodies the pitfalls and promises of Toronto: the comfort of familiarity, pitted against the pull of what exists beyond one’s hometown. The mostly handheld camerawork lends a certain vérité quality, attesting to the unsteady newness of their rediscovered relationship. But there’s also the more cinematic rom-com moments, as they frolic through the public fountains of Yonge-Dundas Square (Toronto’s Times Square, a descriptor I am reluctant to type out), or share a passionate kiss on Niagara Falls’ Maid of the Mist. Toronto Metropolitan University, where Matt watches Mara lecture, is perhaps to them what the University of Chicago was to Harry and Sally. And yet, the two can never find stable ground—Toronto is a place they can slip back into together, like time travelers, but the clock always runs out.

The script was an 80-beat outline, Radwanski told Filmmaker Magazine, with scene descriptions like “Niagara Falls” or “Road trip,” to scaffold the drama. Campbell and Johnson are talented improvisers, but scenes feel lopsided, like that meme of the horse whose head is photorealistic but whose hind legs taper off into a hasty sketch. Their energy seems constrained by the need to hit certain beats.

The romantic leads’ motivations are sometimes so forceful, so on the nose, that it feels like they’re reciting from a treatment. “The thing that I’m really interested in is, like, a person who truly believes that they know nothing about themselves, and that all of their desires are complete secrets from them, and that these desires could be revealed at any moment and ruin her life,” Mara says to Matt on the writing she’s working on. In this moment, one can almost feel Radwanski speaking to the camera himself. To her husband Samir (Mounir Al Shami), Mara says: “You ever, like, know two people that were such good friends that they’re known for being friends?” she asks. “Then one day, they’re just not friends anymore. Don’t you feel like, then, it’s kind of like each of those people is sort of a fraud?”

Mara and Samir’s relationship is as thin as the silver band that Mara wears on her left hand. He’s a musician, while she doesn’t feel an “intellectual response to music,” as she declares in a tense dinner party scene. There are barely any moments of just the two of them, but when there are, they are vacant, as if the couple is meeting for the first, and likely last, time. While cooking, stumbling around each other like a first date, Samir nervously recites a Paul Mooney joke: “He said that white people would rather kill each other than break up with their partners.” Mara laughs too hard—should she wink at the camera too? This love triangle lacks the structure of a third side. We know why she wants to leave but not why she would consider staying. It’s certainly not because of their daughter, whose childcare is rendered so ambiguous that it borders on the comical.

Mara tells Samir when Matt’s father dies: “Have I mentioned my friend Matt to you before?” she asks, but he, of course, says no. It’s difficult to imagine these two sharing a home, let alone a life. They go for a run together, and she asks him to keep pace with her, but Samir injures his leg, and Mara quite literally leaves him in the dust of the Don Valley. One gets the sense that she could keep running all the way to Matt’s Manhattan.

Still, the film offers poignant meditations on a type of love that exists just beyond our grasp. Take the advice Mara gives her writing students, all of which she might apply to her own relationship with Matt: “Try some different styles of line break with the poem that you have and maybe see how that makes you rediscover it.” Or, as she advises a student who visits her office hours, the artist need not “say everything […] and allow […] there to be gaps in time.” Radwanski is more interested in the push and pull of a relationship with breaks and gaps than in a happily ever after.

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At the beginning of Minnie and Moskowitz, John Cassavetes’s 1971 film that partially inspired Radwanski’s monogram, Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) is in an ill-fated relationship with a married man. “I think that movies are a conspiracy,” she cries to a friend. “They set you up to believe in ideals and strength and good guys and romance and, of course, love.” Shortly thereafter, Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel), an aimless parking attendant, makes a sudden move from New York to Los Angeles. Perhaps the grit of New York is the source of his ailments, and some sunshine will set him on the right trajectory.

Moskowitz soon meets Minnie, a glamorous museum curator too aware of her fading beauty. Aside from matching golden manes, the two make an odd pair. Cassevetes’s question is somewhat meta: how do you tell a love story set in Hollywood without making it a Hollywood love story, the kind Minnie has come to revile? “It’s just not there, don’t you understand?” Minnie sobs to Moskowitz during one of their frequent spats. “It’s a pretend place that people get to and […] they just never say it but it doesn’t exist.” Whether she’s talking about love, Los Angeles, or some heady combination of the two, we’re not quite sure.

Minnie and Moskowitz fall in love in Los Angeles, in spite of Los Angeles, with its oppressive glitz and inveigling promises to make dreams come true. Or rather, they fall in love with a different part of L.A., against a landscape of roadside diners and seedy dance clubs, where everything goes off script and even the pastor who eventually marries them can’t remember Minnie’s name.

Matt and Mara teeters in turn between promise and disappointment, and perhaps that makes it a quintessentially Toronto film. Are these the very “values of Toronto” that Heti was searching for? “I find [Toronto’s] pace of growth and sense of possibility exhilarating,” the journalist Tyler Brûlé wrote in Monocle, “but then I also feel that it’s stuck—literally. The traffic doesn’t move, the subway system feels as though it’s about to buckle.” Toronto, like Matt and Mara’s relationship, is full of potential but is also where that potential might die, the purgatory between what might be and what could have been. It’s a place where anything can happen but feels as though nothing really does.

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Featured image courtesy of the Cinema Guild.