Valley Boys

Stuck between a rock and a wet place: From left, Caleb (Kris Lemche) with Matt (Matt Craven) in Aubrey Nealon's A Simple Curve. Courtesy Domino Film.

Set in the thrilling, blue-green Slocan Valley of the Kootenays, British Columbia director Aubrey Nealon’s debut feature, A Simple Curve, is a father-son coming-of-age story with a difference. It’s very much a race to see whether Jim, the film’s sourly rebellious hippie-dad, reaches maturity before Caleb, his sensible, starved-for-experience boy.

The filmmaker, a graduate of the Vancouver Film School and Toronto-based Canadian Film Centre, is full of surprises and has a real gift for sneaking up on an audience. Take an early scene, where Caleb (Kris Lemche) ventures out on a first date with Lee (Pascale Hutton), a single mom. The couple shyly knock heads at a small-town diner — just the two of them, a diffident waitress and a pair of young women poking at the blue-plate special a couple of tables away. Lee seems relaxed, but Caleb is squirming like he’s in a dentist chair.

“You all right?” Lee whispers, growing concerned.

Finally, it all comes out: Caleb is 27 years old and sexually inexperienced. There have only been three women in his life. The first, he wincingly confesses, is the waitress now serving them. The blonde at the table near the window? Well, that’s his old girlfriend. She is sitting with her sister; Caleb had a fling with her, too.

A funny moment, yes, but even as it plays out, we realize that writer-director Nealon is providing us with more than a “meet cute” romantic comedy scene. The sequence illustrates the ever-shrinking parameters of small-town life.

Caleb lives in a mountain paradise, with emerald lakes and acres of plush forest. Nevertheless, he is a small-town kid who is running out of room, people and time. His mother recently died, and the father-son woodworking business is failing because his master-carpenter father, “Hash Oil” Jim, is far better working with wood than people.

A Simple Curve — a reference to the lines of a chair Jim is perfecting — has the intimate, high lonesome feel of a confessional first novel. Indeed, when Nealon promoted his feature at festivals across Canada, he admitted to reporters that the movie, shot in his hometown of New Denver (population 609), was autobiographical. Like Jim in the movie, Nealon’s own father was a conscientious objector who fled America during the Vietnam War, finding in the Slocan Valley a sacred, unspoiled Eden.

All that's missing is the incense: Caleb with new-generation hippies Erika (Sarah Lind) and Buck (Kett Turton). Courtesy Domino Film.

The Nealons lived as hippies, without phones, electricity or running water. Not surprisingly, some of the funniest moments in A Simple Curve come when Nealon’s screen alter ego disrupts a family argument with a searing memory. Like the time Caleb stops his rambling father short with the exasperated non sequitur, “You ate my placenta!”

That A Simple Curve is bright with comic ambushes and well-placed zingers does not mean it’s a woolly burlesque. The decade spent kicking around Canadian film schools has clearly taught the 35-year-old filmmaker the rigours of narrative construction. A Simple Curve is as meticulously crafted as the chairs Jim labours over in the family workshop.

Nealon’s film comes to life when an old friend of Jim’s returns to the Slocan Valley. Matthew (Matt Craven) is a tough, worldly pilot-entrepreneur. Caleb is intrigued by Matthew for the same reason Jim now hates him: the businessman has abandoned Eden to mock the hippie dream of freedom by spending money on a private plane.

Nealon’s evident ambition and passion for material so close to home has clearly inspired his cast. Michael Hogan (Nights Below Station Street) is very good at underplaying Jim, a middle-aged hippie who has settled into a weary belligerence. The circumstances require Caleb to fill household silences with antic complaints and comic observations; Kris Lemche (“The Cute Boy/God” in Joan of Arcadia) plays the part with considerable brio and charm.

Still, this is Nealon’s movie. A Simple Curve is a smart-funny, deeply felt, intricately balanced debut. If anything, the film may be too rigid in conception, as the final sequences occasionally betray the strain of film-school trickery. (A simultaneously backwards- and forwards-moving screenplay!)

A Simple Curve was recently selected one of the top 10 Canadian films produced in 2005 by the Toronto International Film Festival Group. That would seem an overly modest distinction. There aren’t half that many films on screens right now — Canadian or otherwise — that have the heart and mind of A Simple Curve.

A Simple Curve opens Feb. 3 in Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver and Nelson, B.C. and nationwide Feb. 10.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.