(Canada, 92 min.)
Written and directed by Ana Valine
Starring: Suzanne Clément, Paloma Kwiatkowski and Callum
Keith Rennie
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| Suzanne Clément is Marlene Bell in Sitting on the Edge of Marlene, an Entertainment One release. |
Suzanne Clément does a whole lot of acting in Sitting on the Edge of Marlene and it’s
pretty darn spectacular. The Mommy star finds a
ferocious vehicle for her dramatic chops in this promising feature debut by
writer/director Ana Valine. Performances as big, dynamic, and full of life as
Clément’s Marlene are often of the love-it-or-leave-it variety, but Clément’s
bold and gutsy turn as the phony baloney mama is a fascinating performance.
It’s one of the best performances yet from an actress who continually
surprises.
Clément stars as Marlene, the out-of-control alcoholic who lives day-by-day in a downward spiral. The eye of Marlene’s turbulent hurricane is her daughter Sammie (Paloma Kwiatkowski), a sixteen-year-old who dreams of death, escape, and something that resembles a normal life. Marlene’s a hustler who long perfected the art of the quick con, but she never planned the long one. Marlene isn’t the best parent that Sammie could ask for—she’s a terrible mother, even by the most generous and forgiving of standards—but her life is such a tragic and self-destructive wreck that it’s hard not to sympathize with Marlene just as much as one feels for Sammie.
Marlene and Sammie scrape by as a mother-daughter team of
grifters working in cahoots with Freddy (a cool Callum Keith Rennie), a friend
of ambiguous relations to Marlene and her husband, Sam, who’s currently in the
slammer. Marlene’s game only works when she’s fully loaded or high on pills
and, thanks primarily to Clément’s seductive calculations, she’s a convincing charlatan—a
fun flirt who verges so far on the edge of being a floozy that all the men in
the game disarm themselves to her trappings and let the con work its charm.
Well, the suckers fall for her, anyways.
Seen through the eyes of Sammie, however, the only person
Marlene seems capable of fooling is herself. Sammie grows restless worrying
about Marlene (she never calls her mom, unless she’s angry) and her destructive
behaviour. Marlene flushes herself with bottles of wine and “happy pills,”
usually mixing them together (sometimes with Mr. Clean and Windex), and she cavorts
with questionable men in between bouts of shoplifting for outlet haute couture
and shoes that don’t fit. Sammie knows that their time together is running out,
so she starts trying to work the cons while also working her way out by finding
new allies in the Jesus Camp/roller disco down the street. Sitting on the Edge of Marlene is one of those films that the
viewer instantly knows is not going to end well.
Valine adapts the novella The Trouble with Marlene by Billie Livingston in this challenging and
dynamic character study. Valine, who developed this project after scooping the
Director’s Chair Feature Film Award at the Women in Film Festival in Vancouver with
a hand from “director mentor” Denys Arcand, shows ample promise at daring the
audience to look at unlikable characters with compassion. Sitting on the Edge of Marlene challenges audiences to find the
humanity in lowlifes and their dreams of better days of which they both feel
cheated. Marlene knows no act other than the seductress and the role lets Clément
show off her chops with as much gusto as she’s relished in the films of Xavier
Dolan. Marlene seems more out of control when sober, but she’s truly volcanic
when drunk, and Clément brews a tempestuous performance that lets Marlene hide
her fear and vulnerability behind a stormy haze of excess. This smartly layered
performance leaves the character open to viewer: is Marlene as phoney on the
inside as she is on the outside, a purebred hustler, dangerously mentally ill,
or some combination of all three?
Valine keeps the characters compelling even when Marlene veers into messy twists, but
with a character as akin to a train wreck as Marlene, some disarray is fitting
and necessary. The role calls to mind iconic parts like Gena Rowlands in Gloria or Tilda Swinton’s foul-mouth tramp
Julia, and Valine shows a budding auteur’s hand at creating a compelling film around
conflicting characters. Where Clément is fierce, Kwiatkowski is quietly captivating.
Sammie barely resembles her own character when the film begins, and it makes
sense that she wouldn’t, since Marlene sees her only as an accessory to the
latest grift at hand. As Marlene flies further out of control, and Clément
becomes increasingly unpredictable, Sammie grows with the power of a true
heroine and Kwiatkowski grounds the film with her unwavering composure. Sitting on the Edge of Marlene shrewdly
puts the mother-daughter con artists on a rickety seesaw that sees power and
control bounce up and down from one con to the other, but the real target in
the end becomes the mother with the young protégé sharply gaining the balance. Sitting on the Edge of Marlene is a taut
balancing act, especially because Clément keeps us so unpredictably on edge.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Sitting on the Edge of Marlene is now available on iTunes from eOne
Films.
