Swimming in The Bay of Love and Sorrows
By Karen Hill
David Adams Richards and Tim Southam are nursing colas and waxing poetic about their adaptation of The Bay of Love and Sorrows–Richards' heartrending 1998 novel, set in rural New Brunswick. They make an interesting pair: Southam is the analytical one–all button-down shirt and neat jeans–next to a windswept, slightly rumpled Richards. The duo wrote the screenplay together, and Southam directed.
Barely seated for a minute, Southam quickly dispenses with the social niceties and launches into nearly two hours of intense, impassioned discussion of The Bay of Love and Sorrows. He's all over the questions while Richards seems to hang back a bit, only getting revved up when the issue of character and motivation surface. Though they may be Canadian film's odd couple, they hit it off so well during their first outing that they're now thinking about their next–as yet undecided–collaboration.
Love and Sorrows premiered to rave reviews in Halifax, at the Atlantic Film Festival last fall. The film was launched there theatrically in November, with the rest of the country to follow in early 2003.
Though it's set in the late summer of 1973, only the presence of stubby beer bottles and a preponderance of old gas-guzzlers really tip the hat to the time period. Southam wanted to give the film an American neo-realist early'70s look–reminiscent of films like Badlands and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, or the work of Terrence Malick–with a certain loose, unmannered feel.
A writer and director, Southam's credits include The Tale of Teeka, Island of the Dead, and the doc Drowning in Dreams, while his TV credits include Blue Murder, Traders and North of 60. Richards is a screenwriter and the Governor General's Award winning author of three non-fiction books and 10 novels, including Mercy Among the Children, Nights Below Station Street and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down.
The characters dictate everything
Southam says both the film and book versions of The Bay of Love and Sorrows defy narrative logic in order to tell the story. "It's a very narrative film, but at the same time it's very audacious on some level."
For Southam the storyteller, this movie is a big step because it sees him using characters who are "real people in every possible way" rather than emblematic in nature. And in this film, the story is subordinate to the characters, rather than the other way around.
"The Bay of Love and Sorrows is a gentle rebuke to those who think a story has to have an ironclad logic," says Southam. "The story comes from what the characters see, think and feel at any given moment in the film. It's true of the book and true of the film."
In writing the story, Southam and Richards refused to work the plot to conform to the standard three-act structure with a satisfying narrative. Rather, characters are confronted with information they're then forced to sort out. "The plot is only the psychology of the characters. It's not a chain of events. It's a very good risk, it's a beautiful risk in film terms," Southam says.
"I think it's harder to pull off in a film than in a novel because you have less room to do it, so you're sticking events together sometimes arbitrarily but there's nothing arbitrary about it in psychological terms. It all flows from the psychology of the characters. As a storyteller, it was very important for me to go to a place where the reality and the truth of the characters dictated everything, and you were never forcing them to do things that weren't part of who they were."
The writers agree the only time the film makes an effort to go somewhere deliberately is when it follows the trajectory of the consequences of one small decision by a character that leads to tragedy. While Southam says it's the one time the author is present in the work, Richards says it's organic. "I think that it is directly character-based and I don't think it's prodding by the author that makes it happen. I think it's character itself. It acts like internal combustion."
As they were developing the screenplay, Southam simply referred back to the novel to push through. If he thought an action he was writing fit with what a character in the book would do, then "that was good enough reason for it to occur in the story. I had to absolutely use David's world, there was no thinking up new characters. You had to use the characters from the book."
Point of view was also a major challenge, Southam says. "In The Bay of Love and Sorrows, we're in everybody's point of view all the time. One of the brilliant things about The Bay of Love and Sorrows, the novel, is that the narrator slips in and out of everyone's private space whenever he wants to." The film works in a similar fashion. The story is told in such a way as to allow the point of view of the six major characters, though one of them–Madonna Brassaurd–is the moral centre of the movie. Her character ends up peeling back the story to reveal the final truth of the film.
The complete article can be found in the Winter 2003 issue of Canadian Screenwriter.
