With all due respect to Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders (1953) and Perils of the Royal Mounted (1942), the great RCMP feature has yet to be made. But Simon Ennis’ short The Canadian Shield, which follows its triumphant TIFF premiere with a screening at the Worldwide Short Film Festival, will do in a pinch. Actually, Perils of the Royal Mounted would be an appropriate alternate title for Ennis’ film: in lieu of a polite Paul Gross type, we get a bedraggled Dudley Do-Wrong (Josh Peace) staving off loneliness, dementia and a murderous, bilingual trapper (inevitably played by Julian Richings) “somewhere in the hinterlands.”
That said hinterlands (actually Kinmount, Ontario and the Scarborough bluffs) look so exquisite is the film’s secret weapon: its relentless bad-taste gags come framed within beautiful 2:35:1 widescreen compositions. “If the look wasn’t so precise, the exaggeration wouldn’t work,” notes Ennis, whose previous short, The Waldo Cumberbund Story (2005) had similarly meticulous visuals — and also starred Peace as a borderline lunatic.
The pair’s friendship dates back to a mutual stint working at Revue Video on The Danforth. When they met, Peace was a few years out of George Brown’s acting program and Ennis was in the process of dropping out of Ryerson — a decision that Peace jokingly takes credit for. “I kept telling Simon, ‘fuck it, drop out.’ I had been reading a lot of David Mamet, who said that secondary education was bullshit, et cetera.” Ennis ended up getting course credit for a film he produced on his own time (and dime) called The Business of Suicide, but dropped out again before his last year to do Waldo with his school chums Jonas Bell-Pasht (producer), Jonathan Bensimon (cinematographer) and Matt Lyon (editor) — all of whom would later work on The Canadian Shield.
“Matt Lyon had made a couple of Super-8 silent Westerns shot in Toronto,” recalls Ennis when asked about the roots of the project. “I said I’d love to make some music for his next one. When we were cutting Waldo, I was biking home and I started singing this Western theme to myself. But [Matt] never ended up making the movie. So I decided to make it myself. I like the idea of making your backyard into a legend, like Guy Maddin does with Winnipeg or John Waters does with Baltimore. So I wanted to do something really Canadian.”
“We thought maybe we could get some money from the arts council,” adds Peace, but with its abundant profanity and slapstick violence, The Canadian Shield isn’t exactly the stuff of Heritage Minutes. (This did not dissuade Bravo!FACT from assisting the production).
“I approached my character from the standpoint that he had just lost it,” explains Peace. “He’s out there alone, stinking to high heaven, without his horse, shitting in the woods all winter. Even the loon calls are driving him crazy.” His only relief comes in the comely form of Genvíeve (Liane Balaban), a distressed French belle — she first appears tied to some railroad tracks — who speaks to her new beau of amour and epiphanies beneath the stars. But sadly, the Mountie is unilingual and doesn’t understand a single sweet word.
“Simon said that he’d always seen me in this part,” says Balaban by telephone from Montreal; she’s also known Ennis since they were teenagers, first collaborating with him on a short film that she describes as “something about Satan. I don’t remember what it was called but I do remember being in a basement in a schoolgirl outfit and cutting my wrists.”
Suffice it to say that her Canadian Shield role is slightly more flattering: Balaban brings real sweetness to a stock part and her elegantly deadpan French line readings bounce serenely off of Peace’s barely controlled hysteria.
“I had a whole backstory prepared for Genvíeve,” she says. “I saw her as being a French New Wave heroine.” The actress also proudly takes credit for the film’s funniest visual joke: “I thought that after sex [Genvíeve] would smoke a pipe.”
Balaban will appear next in Ennis’ first feature, You Might as Well Live, which was co-written by Peace and features the actor once again — in the lead role as a social misfit.
“It’s another outrageous dark comedy,” says the director, who is in the throes of post-production. But there’s a continuity here that runs deeper than genre — all of Ennis’ long-time collaborators are on board.
“When I’m working with Jonas, Jon, Matt and Josh, there’s a kind of shorthand,” he says. “We’ve laid so much groundwork that we can finish each other’s sentences at this point. We’re taking a big step, and it’s wonderful that we get to do it together.”