LAST NIGHT
Canada/France. 1998. Director/Screenplay - Don McKellar, Producers - Niv Fichman & Daniel Iron, Photography - Douglas Koch, Music - Alexina Louie & Alex Pauk, Digital Visual Effects - Buzz Image Group (Supervisor - Stephane Landry), Special Effects Supervisor - John LaForet, Production Design - John Dondertman. Production Company - Red Violin Productions/Rhombus Media/Odeon Films Inc/Le Sept Arte/Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Haut et Corte/Canada Television and Cable Production Fund/Telefilm Canada/Equity Investment Program/The Canadian Film or Video Tax Credit. Don McKellar (Patrick Wheeler), Sandra Oh (Sandra), Calvin Keith Rennie (Craig Zwiller), David Cronenberg (Duncan), Tracey Wright (Donna), Genevieve Bujold (Mrs Carlton), Robin Gammell (Mr Wheeler), Roberta Maxwell (Mrs Wheeler), Sarah Polley (Jennifer Wheeler), Karen Glave (Lily), Trent McCullen (Alex)
Plot: The world is due to end at midnight - there are six hours left. Architect Patrick Wheeler tries to escape his family's attempts to celebrate a Christmas dinner, desiring to spend it alone and refusing to treat the day as any different and engage in meaningless gestures. But he is instead drawn in to helping a woman, Sandra, make her way home across a city that is collapsing into anarchy so that she can commit suicide with her husband. Meanwhile Patrick's best friend Craig determines to spend his remaining hours fulfilling all of his sexual fantasies, while a gas company executive sets out to ring every client and assure them the gas will be kept on until the very end.
This was one of six international films commissioned in 1998 to commemorate the turn of the millennium. Others in the series included the Taiwanese 'The Hole' and Hal Hartley's 'Book of Life'. 'Last Night' is the Canadian representative and marks the directorial debut of actor/screenwriter Don McKellar.
McKellar's film is never specifically mentioned as taking place around the millenial turning point. Rather McKellar's spin is to use the connection as the springboard for an intriguingly thoughtful What If ? drama, to ask how various people would meet the end if everybody had only six hours left to live. McKellar has stated that he didn't want to make a 'Deep Impact' or an 'Armageddon'. And the difference between these and what McKellar is attempting to achieve is immediately apparent - where 'Deep Impact' and 'Armageddon' are driven by state of the art special effects and feature only cliche-ridden human dramas, 'Last Night' is low-key and driven by characterization. (McKellar has said his model for his film was 'The Day the Earth Caught Fire' (1961), although the film he actually comes closest to is the little seen 1990 drama 'Miracle Mile' and to some extent the 'The Last Night of the World' segment of 'The Illustrated Man' (1968)). McKellar is wholly unconcerned with the show-stopping spectacle of disaster movies - to such extent that the type of disaster that is about to occur is never specified apart from a vague reference near the end about how there is no night anymore which suggests something to do with the sun. The only special effects McKellar offers is the most simple effect of having the screen white out when the disaster comes.
But where McKellar eschews special effects he achieves considerable dramatic effect with small nevertheless potent background details - the radio station on the soundtrack that spends the hours counting down the Top 500 songs of All Time; the casual suggestion that McKellar makes to Oh that she just steal a car to drive home and her sudden realization that civilized nicety doesn't matter anymore (the subsequent break-in scene amusingly sends up every action movie cliche of trying to jump start a car); the hooker who says that she wants to experience an orgasm; the people who just sit on a tram car waiting even when they know no driver is coming. McKellar's does have a certain awkwardness in handling some of the actors in the early scenes but the film quickly absorbs and builds a strong climax. Unlike 'Deep Impact' et al none of the characters are cliches, each are written with depth and complexity. Perhaps the nearest that McKellar comes to cliche is reserving the humour for the most obvious target - Rennie as the friend who is determined to fulfil all his sexual fantasies - but even that produces an extremely funny scene where Rennie awkwardly propositions McKellar about trying gay sex. Maybe also one would have liked to have seen a little more given over to David Cronenberg's executive character who remains a relative enigma. But these are minor faults in an otherwise original and undeniably intelligent End of the World drama.
Viewed at the 1998 Vancouver International Film Festival Copyright Richard Scheib 1998
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