Anne at 13,000 Feet – first look review | Little White Lies

Festivals

Anne at 13,000 Feet – first look review

23 Feb 2020

Words by Sophie Monks Kaufman

Blond woman with windswept hair in a blue and yellow top, against a grassy field background.
Blond woman with windswept hair in a blue and yellow top, against a grassy field background.
There’s shades of John Cas­savetes in Cana­di­an writer/​director Kazik Radwanski’s ele­vat­ed char­ac­ter study.

There is volatile ener­gy cours­ing through Kazik Radwanski’s lat­est fea­ture, earn­ing him apt com­par­isons to John Cas­savetes. The Cana­di­an director’s lead­ing lady – his Gena Row­lands – is Der­agh Camp­bell, play­ing a free­wheel­ing young day­care work­er named Anne. Her unbri­dled pas­sion makes day-to-day life high-stakes and unstable.

One moment, she’s in heav­en, 13,000 feet in the air while sky-div­ing; the next, she’s in hell, under­mined by a con­ser­v­a­tive co-work­er who ques­tions her pro­fes­sion­al con­duct. Rad­wan­s­ki cap­tures a life­force that will not be con­tained by con­ven­tion­al rules. His major suc­cess is to draw the audi­ence into the micro dra­mas that make up Anne’s life. We ascend with her and we crash with her. We expe­ri­ence a grow­ing con­cern over whether she will ever find a safe place to land, as the peo­ple around her strug­gle to cope with her often awk­ward behaviour.

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Camp­bell embod­ies Anne with such nat­u­ral­ism that her per­for­mance scans more like the gen­er­ous dona­tion of her being than it does act­ing. Rad­wanksi films in long-takes, often employ­ing hand­held close-ups on her face; you can count her freck­les and see indi­vid­ual strands of hair whip­ping in the wind. The direc­tor gives us a front row seat on her expres­sions as she process­es her chang­ing environments.

She is hang­dog after the father of a young boy she is mind­ing rep­ri­mands her for swim­ming in clothes; she is glee­ful while pulling a prank on her new boyfriend Matt; she is choked on love in the mid­dle of a speech at her friend Sarah’s wed­ding. Her emo­tions nev­er stand still – they are quick­sil­ver, and it is nev­er made explic­it whether she is react­ing pure­ly to exter­nal stim­uli, or whether there is more going on inside than we ever find out.

Every­day loca­tions make up this micro-bud­get gem: Anne’s apart­ment; the day­care cen­tre; a bar where she goes on a Tin­der date. Every­thing we are shown belongs to her world. We are strapped into it as tight­ly as she is to her para­chute. While the per­son­al episodes that shape this snap­shot of her life are per­fect­ly ordi­nary – Will she keep her job? Will her new romance last? – the stakes are made extra­or­di­nary as her men­tal health hangs in the balance.

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