Strangers in Good Company
1991, PG, 100 min. Directed by Cynthia Scott. Starring Alice Diablo, Constance Garneau, Winifred Holden, Cissy Meddings, Mary Meigs, Catherine Roche, Michelle Sweeney, Beth Webber.
REVIEWED By Kathleen Maher, Fri., Oct. 11, 1991
They are eight women in a school bus, seven of them elderly and one with a badly sprained ankle, stranded in the Canadian woods. Scott uses documentary-style camera work and the acting is improvisational. Scott found her cast in nursing homes and senior citizen clubs. The camera impassively watches as these women set about the task of surviving and it allows each woman to tell her story. As the camera focuses on the faces of these unlikely movie stars we have time to first note the effects of time, the wrinkles, the faded eyes, the thinning hair, and then see the women inside, as they were, and how they got here. To illustrate the interior lives of these women, Scott intercuts pictures of the women as children, as young mothers, as career women and as grandmothers. There is a broad representation of women including a nun, a black woman, a lesbian, a Mohawk, an English woman slightly addled from the effects of a stroke, and two genteel women who react to their circumstances in very different ways. Scott plays upon the reality that we don't often see faces like these in movies, nor do we hear stories like these. Yet, as one character says, “I think every life is interesting.” These women have stories to tell by virtue of their experience, their wit and their wisdom. Made with the support of the Canadian Film Board, it is an example of independent filmmaking at its best.
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July 10, 1992
Strangers in Good Company, Cynthia Scott, Alice Diablo, Constance Garneau, Winifred Holden, Cissy Meddings, Mary Meigs, Catherine Roche, Michelle Sweeney, Beth Webber