Matt and Mara – first-look review

The tit­u­lar cou­ple of Kazik Radwanski’s lat­est real­ist dram­e­dy aren’t actu­al­ly a cou­ple – but when they get mis­tak­en for one by a pho­tog­ra­ph­er tak­ing their pass­port pho­tos, Mara (Der­agh Camp­bell) plays along. She’s actu­al­ly mar­ried with a young daugh­ter, while her friend Matt (Matt John­son) is a cad­dish sin­gle­ton with his eye seem­ing­ly on every bright young thing in the Greater Toron­to area. The two went to col­lege togeth­er, both with aspi­ra­tions of being writ­ers, but that was years ago and their paths have diverged somewhat.

While Matt has pub­lished a suc­cess­ful short sto­ry col­lec­tion and spent time liv­ing in New York, Mara set­tled down with exper­i­men­tal musi­cian Samir (Mounir Al Sha­mi) and start­ed teach­ing prose and poet­ry at a local col­lege. Return­ing to Toron­to, Matt bar­rels into Mara’s life again, turn­ing up at one of her classes.

Despite the dis­rup­tion, the pair fall back into an easy friend­ship, bick­er­ing like no time has passed at all. Radwanski’s charm­ing, well-observed dia­logue reflects the expe­ri­ence of plen­ty of elder mil­len­ni­als, caught between the unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions of age­ing par­ents and the real­i­sa­tion that cre­ative pos­si­bil­i­ty under the con­straints of cap­i­tal­ism is hard­er and hard­er to achieve. Matt briefly rep­re­sents the pos­si­bil­i­ty of anoth­er life to Mara – one where she feels more cre­ative­ly com­pat­i­ble with her part­ner. But while Matt is charis­mat­ic, he’s also self­ish and patro­n­is­ing, stuck in a state of arrest­ed devel­op­ment. Per­haps it isn’t so much Matt, but what he rep­re­sents, that Mara finds enticing.

Radwanski’s fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tors Camp­bell and John­son (who both appeared in his pre­vi­ous work, includ­ing How Heavy This Ham­mer and Anne at 13,000 Feet) have an easy chem­istry togeth­er, and their predica­ment is like­ly to strike a chord with any­one who’s ever con­tem­plat­ed the sev­en-year itch. It also might seem sim­i­lar to Celine Song’s fab­u­lous­ly suc­cess­ful 2023 dra­ma Past Lives, sim­i­lar­ly about a female writer ques­tion­ing her rela­tion­ship once a fig­ure from her past reap­pears, but Matt and Mara is more obser­va­tion­al and lo-fi in method­ol­o­gy. The nat­u­ral­is­tic cam­er­a­work and per­for­mances ground the film in real­ism, cre­at­ing a wry dram­e­dy that refus­es to pla­cate us with easy answers or condescension.