Ste. Anne (Rhayne Vermette, 2021) (Patreon)

It is a very delicate thing indeed to forge a hybrid between narrative and experimental cinema. Too often the balance tips too far to one side or the other. This can result in avant-garde techniques being used as a kind of funky window dressing for conventional storytelling. Or conversely, one kind end up making an essentially non-narrative film that attempts to shoehorn performances and para-literary themes, in the hope of greater accessibility. There have been some truly successful integrations of these two very different modes. Jennifer Todd Reeves's The Time We Killed and Ben Rivers's Two Years at Sea are fine examples. 

And those those, we can add Canadian Métis filmmaker Rhayne Vermette's debut feature, Ste. Anne. And part of why Vermette's experimental approach works so well is that she is grappling with ideas and identities that ask for an unconventional treatment, to a large degree. This is a film about cultural dislocation as an everyday process. Centered on a family of Indigenous Francophones in rural Manitoba, Ste. Anne shows us a community rarely seen onscreen, even considering the somewhat expanded representations and production outlets available to Canada's Indigenous peoples.* 

Vermette's formal strategies make this paucity of representation into something palpable. It's not just that much of Ste. Anne is filmed with minimal available light, resulting in rich, murky images to which the eyes must physically adjust. Vermette also foregrounds the materiality of celluloid in ways that turn the human drama before us into unstable, often explosive light events. Narratively, Ste. Anne clearly draws inspiration from Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas, in its close attention to a personal dynamics disrupted by the return of a long-absent family member. But the clearest visual antecedent for this film is the work of Stan Brakhage.

Much as we see in Brakhage's films, Ste. Anne employs handheld camera, flash-frames, end flares, scratches on the film surface, and other artifacts of the filmmaking process. We are constantly reminded that we are watching a community coming into visibility, as the grain of  Vermette's images swirls and pops. But more precisely, Ste. Anne is a film about space and spacelessness, presence and absence. Renée (Rhéanne Vermette) has been gone for four years and suddenly wanders back to her hometown, and although nothing concrete is ever revealed, we understand that she was driven away by some shattering trauma.

The heart of Ste. Anne's story has to do with Renée's relationship with her young daughter Athene (Isabelle d'Eschambault). In her mother's absence, Athene has been raised by Renée's brother Modeste (Jack Theis) and his wife Elenore (Valerie Marion). Although the couple is willing to allow Renée back into Athene's life, they are worried that she will vanish again, either with or without her daughter. As Renée reestablishes her relationship with Athene, she shows her daughter a photograph of an empty plot of land, a place she hopes to build a home.

It is clear that this photo is a talisman for Renée, something that has kept her partially anchored, even as it depicts the lack of a structure. She has staked her identity on absence, and appears ready to pass this perpetual uncertainty onto Athene. In its articulation of gender, trauma, and spiritual homelessness, Ste. Anne bears comparison not only to Paris, Texas but Marilynne Robinson's modern classic Housekeeping. But Vermette is primarily a visual thinker, and the connections she draws between Métis Nation and the material film images are a thing of tremulous beauty. 

Ultimately, Ste. Anne is a quiet film about an agonizing struggle. Although the family that Rénee's family left behind has lived on the margins of Canada's dominant white culture, we see their rich multi-generational community, their interwoven existence, their difficulties as well as their joys. But there is something within Renée that cannot allow her to find her place in the world. Vermette suggests that alterity can yield a deeper connection to one's place in the land, or it can produce a sense of perpetual drift. Neither response to the traumas of history is more or less correct. But in the middle of this crisis is Athene, and by extension, the future.

*Note: by no means do I want to suggest that Canada's institutional liberalism has produced uniformly adequate outcomes for Indigenous media-makers. But the situation has improved in recent decades, and far outpaces such efforts in the United States, where Native invisibility has generally been federal policy.