It seems strange to be writing a review for a film that is over 20 years old, about another film that few have seen.
Given its rogue construction, and unorthodox structure and style, Claire’s Hat has been screened publicly fewer than five times in the 24 years since its completion. The agreement with Hungarian-Canadian mega-producer of the film, and Toronto big-wig, Robert Lantos (ExistenZ, Being Julia, Johnny Mnemonic, The Sweet Hereafter, and of course, Picture Claire) is that director Bruce McDonald has to not only ask permission every time to show it, but also be present in the room during any screening.
I remember being at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of McDonald’s Canadian caper film, Picture Claire, back in the day at the Elgin Theatre. It was a very particular day, the last day of a certain kind of innocence: September 10, 2001. The world changed a dozen or so hours after the screening. The American Hollywood machine clamoured to get out of Canada in all the aviation uncertainty. Screenings and business, and certainly buying and publicizing movies at the festival, came to a full stop.
Picture Claire was a reasonably high-budget feature film for a Canadian film at the time, mixing actors from the English Canadian film scene, including Callum-Keith Rennie and Tracey Wright, with mid-tier Hollywood stars, including Mickey Rourke, Juliette Lewis, and Gina Gershon.
The slickly produced film was to be Toronto’s coming out party on screen as it did the unthinkable at the time: It let Toronto play itself. Kensington Market, The Annex, Union Station, Yonge Street, and other neighbourhoods were showcased in a Toronto film when the typical production was about providing tax breaks, and Toronto typically masquerading as Chicago or New York City. It was nspired by the style and visual flair of The Thomas Crown Affair, with the resourceful stranger-in-a-strange-land fantasy of The Wizard of Oz, as seen through the language barrier of a French Canadian heroine adrift in the seedier parts of the Big Smoke.
The film was poorly received, and instantly forgotten in spite of the money invested. It was eventually dumped directly to video some time after. It probably made the rounds on First Choice / Super Channel, Canada’s low rent HBO at the time. But its commercial fate was not the real tragedy here.
The film was poorly received, and instantly forgotten in spite of the money invested. It was eventually dumped directly to video some time after. It probably made the rounds on First Choice / Super Channel, Canada’s low rent HBO at the time. But its commercial fate was not the real tragedy here.
As McDonald essays in Claire’s Hat, the film was a testament to his own failure of artistic judgement, and commitment to his principles and instincts, in the foolhardy pursuit of Hollywood hubris. The passive-conflict with Robert Lantos, who was asking for a different picture than was originally conceived, was the crux of the matter. The producer and money man did not get the personal, romantic, character-driven piece that the director was aiming for. This disconnect unravelled the film, like a loose string pulling a sweater undone, slowly, inevitably altering the final form.
In a punk rock act in keeping with the director of Road Kill, Hardcore Logo, and Highway 61, McDonald stole all of the footage, in a modern day cinema-heist, and retreated with some friends and his editor to a cottage in Bark Lake, Ontario. With the help of a teepee and a generator, he recut the film as a kind of self-flagellating, free-styling essay. The result is a feature that is equal parts poetic and pragmatic criticism, that exists somewhere on the spectrum between F for Fake and Irma Vep, but registering in its own kind of Canadian humility and pragmatism.
It also restores the original title, Claire’s Hat, to this confessional funhouse mirror of the original, while offering a post-mortem on youth and ambition and selling out. McDonald has a lot of fun with irony, flights of fancy, and watching the original spirit of the film — a wispy romantic vision of a French-Canadian dream girl dancing on the moon — slip from his fingers.
There is an extended tap dance of clap boards, a bit of art-house suffering through, a long single take of Juliette Lewis eating her lunch in a bathroom, and technical ruminations about how to do a good insert of a McGuffin vs capturing the magic on an actors face. (There is also explaining comically, why the title had to be changed in the first place.) This is playful experimentation and having self-deprecating fun with the creative process versus the ruthless efficiency of the big budget commercial endeavour.
But the topper is escalating the passive-aggressive on-set drama, comedy, and ridiculousness that can often barnacle onto any Hollywood machine. An ongoing thread binding the film together is the (possibly apocryphal) back and forth between actor Callum-Keith Rennie and Robert Lantos.
Rennie may have had an affair with significant other shortly before shooing began. Lantos made it a point to way underpay him on a picture with a sizeable budget. Rennie would silently mouth his lines as protest, so he would get extra pay for the ADR recording. Lantos paid him this fee in “Loonies” ($1 Canadian coins). Rennie would then use the Loonies to hire panhandlers to howl outside Lantos’ house to harass him at wee hours in the morning.
McDonald has a field day of grafting his own inner conflict and feelings onto the actual plot of film, which he feels the plot was the enemy of feeling. He reframes scenes as warnings, or reminders, of mistakes made. He spins an elaborate metaphor which equates Juliette Lewis’ title character, who doesn’t speak the local language, to himself, the lost director trying to make both art and a calling card, while Gina Gershon’s femme-fatale character is the absentee, cynical producer, and Callum-Keith Rennie is either the eventual big money distributor to be, or well, simply Satan.
Even though Picture Claire was edited only a short time after the film’s original festival debut, it has a certain ‘wisdom-of-distance’ that is a gift to filmmakers or aspiring ones, or any collaborative artist who has felt a project go off the rails. Bruce cannot put it more bluntly, “I fucked up my own movie!”
And he is here to dish, mythologize, reflect, and self-flagellate. For himself, for us, for posterity. Claire’s Hat is a gift. It is rebel-remix-reflexive filmmaking as an act of psychic self-repair, while also masquerading as an act of petty revenge via unbridled creativity. It is a picture certainly worth a thousand words.
And he is here to dish, mythologize, reflect, and self-flagellate. For himself, for us, for posterity. Claire’s Hat is a gift. It is rebel-remix-reflexive filmmaking as an act of psychic self-repair, while also masquerading as an act of petty revenge via unbridled creativity. It is a picture certainly worth a thousand words.