As a sensitively rendered study of teenage wildlife, Victoria Day is not exactly novel. Nor could it be, considering the amount of time and money that filmmakers spend exploring the tumultuous lives of adolescents, especially the ones who hook up with vampires.
Even Victoria Day’s maker admits that viewers have been here before. “I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel with this film,” says David Bezmozgis, the Toronto writer and director who first gained wide renown as the author of the 2004 collection Natasha and Other Stories.
What distinguishes it instead has more to do with context — this city’s context in particular. Aspiring to achieve the same complexity, specificity and accessibility as such personal faves as The Ice Storm and Racing with the Moon, Bezmozgis’ hope was to show “that this is how we live our lives here.” As he notes, “It’s not so peculiar or exotic that you won’t see these things anywhere else, but I wanted to make a realistic film about ourselves that’s entertaining and intelligent. That’s basically it.”
And that’s basically what Bezmozgis accomplishes with his modest but astute debut feature. Set in North York around the time of the titular holiday in 1988 — a milieu the director knows well from his own youth — Victoria Day is the story of Ben (Mark Rendall), the pensive offspring of Russian immigrants who’s forced to cope with events even more momentous than that Spring’s playoff run by Gretzky and the Oilers. Outside a Bob Dylan show at the CNE, Ben reluctantly loans a hockey teammate money for drugs. When the other teen goes missing, Ben’s pangs of guilt collide with stirrings of desire for the boy’s sister, Cayla (Holly Deveaux).
Conveyed with the same degree of nuance that won Bezmozgis’ short fiction so many plaudits, Victoria Day is a coming-of-age story about a youngster’s first attempts to grapple with love and death. Its sheer North York–ness will give the film extra resonance for local viewers, many of whom may recognize their younger selves in scenes depicting bush parties, fireworks battles, earnest conversations about classic rock and other, often GTA-specific teen rituals. (The multilingual carping in Ben’s home will also be familiar to anyone who grew up in an immigrant family.)
What’s more, the story of the missing teen bears an unmistakable resemblance to the real-life case of Benji Hayward, the 14-year-old who died in a drug-related incident after a Pink Floyd show the same year that Victoria Day is set. The subject of huge media attention at the time, Hayward’s death served as a cautionary tale for a generation of Torontonians. Bezmozgis says that when he began writing the script eight years ago, “I tried to think back to what was going on when I was a teenager and ask what I could construct a story around. And I remembered this incident because it touched me as well.”
The filmmaker has repeatedly stressed that this is a fictional story. Nevertheless, he was relieved to learn that Victoria Day was appreciated by Hayward’s parents, who attended a screening at the Toronto Jewish Film Festival.
“I had no idea they were going to be there,” he says. “They came up to me afterward and talked about how they were moved by it and how basically they approved of the film. I was very conscious in writing to try not to get too close to it. That was, first of all, for the family’s sake. But that was also because I didn’t want to overwhelm what the film was trying to do otherwise, which is to show how people react in the wake of this sort of thing. It’s more about this one particular guy and the choices he has to make because of other choices he’s made.”
Yet Victoria Day accomplishes the tricky task of depicting Ben’s moral struggles with all due gravity without becoming deadeningly earnest. For that reason, it may be a rare kind of indie teen film: one that connects with actual teenagers as well as it does with nostalgic geezers. Working hard to compensate for the usual miniscule marketing budget for a Canadian movie, Bezmozgis has delivered Victoria Day straight to the kidz by presenting it at local schools over recent weeks.
“It’s work,” he says, “but it’s absolutely necessary. If you want to get teenagers to come out and you don’t have a lot of money, you have to go to them. And I’ve loved doing it.”
In his experience, the typical reaction has had two stages. “You bring this film in with the approval of their teachers and you put it up and the first thing they see is guys playing hackysack and talking about tit-fucking,” says Bezmozgis. “They can’t believe this comes with the full sanction of their school!
“Then they watch it and there’s all this recognition that manifests as laughter,” he adds. “They see themselves and their parents — it’s almost like they can’t believe you can make a movie like this because you never see movies like this. Instead, you see stereotypes, where you know from the very beginning which role everyone is going to play. I think that this is refreshing for them. It’s also important for them to know that the lives that they experience can be the material for art. You can actually look at the things you find exciting in your daily life — that can be a movie.”