Falls Around Her stars longtime Canadian supporting actress Tantoo Cardinal in a rare leading role as Mary Birchbark, a world-famous singing sensation who decides to abandon her tour one night in mid-performance and return to her home on the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek reservation. Despite the presence of family members, long-disconnected friends, and old flames all looking to pull her back into community life so long as she's here, Mary wishes to spend most of her time alone out in the bush, enjoying the privacy of her cabin and wandering the woods as she pleases. She cannot, however, shake the notion of someone stalking her whenever she leaves the house, and lines of dialogue when in contact with other characters indicates she has perhaps pulled a stunt like this before when she fell off the wagon for an unspoken reason. In the watching, there's not much in the way of forward momentum through these two components of narrative, which I chalk up to the segments with Mary alone not rising to the standards of the material around them. Whether it's the highly compelling vibrancy of the way Cardinal interacts with her fellow castmates or the visuals in these isolated segments looking fine but not quiet polished to the degree I'd like for what they're showing, the central motif the film returns to time and again doesn't draw me too much, and so results in the communal scenes feeling disconnected from one another.
And that's fine in its own way. Cardinal embodies a lovely impression of a woman with darkness in her past who genuinely wants to make a try for a new life without any harsh feelings towards those she tries and fails to distance in her scenes with Tina Keeper and Johnny Issaluk. She grants Mary a mild air of mystery that strings the viewer along with just enough information to keep us enticed without making her cold or distant, and the positive energy she exudes when she allows herself to get caught in the moment got me perking up after any scenes I found flagging. The community's small but has this good sense of togetherness going on, and while I find the brief subplot of their struggle against a local mine polluting their water supply disappointing for the way it only amounts to a red herring, it's nice to have that around as a small element of local activism, as well as the way her cousin is allowed a brief conversation about wanting to marry a woman she's in love with free from any attempt to make it a big thing. I like being here, I'm on the movie's side, and I want to see where it's going with these hints about Mary's past coming back to haunt her.
Then it DOES come round in the third act, and it is so, so disappointing. The scenes of Mary growing paranoid over someone watching from the woods already failed to grab me, so the sudden overload of scenes to this effect at the expense of pretty much all other side characters and subplots was a major letdown. There's a whole new character introduced to and ushered out of the film inside five minutes, an old lover from Mary's band, who seems to only stop by so she can let her guard down and freak out even more in the aftermath. We are treated to, I wish I were joking, a scene of Mary arming herself and preparing homemade traps around her cabin set to a hard-shredding electric guitar score, like we've transitioned into some survivalist adventure drama. And the whole climax... I won't go and outright spoil it, but it involves the simplest answer to what Mary was running away from showing up on her doorstep, and playing out like a breakneck compressed rape-revenge arc, which is both immensely uncomfortable to watch, and hardly fitting for the tone as constructed. A brief coda acting like this has resolved all of Mary's outstanding issues and rejuvenated her soul does little to help the feeling of getting lashed in the face by a hard swerve to wards left field.
I understand the issues we're working here, I understand the little ways Falls Around Her teases where it's really going, I understand I latched onto something different than what Darlene Naponse likely intended. None of this changes the fact that I was drawn in by a positive-energy character study of an older native woman returning to her home reservation and resisting both the draws to go back to her life of fame and reconnect with loved ones, and had to go along with the film abandoning the things I believe it presents in a far more appealing, engaging manner in order to deliver on violent catharsis via a fairly lazy round of answers. The script's goals let down the greatest strengths of Cardinal's performance, and what I assume are attempts at commentary on the music industry and the way it exploits minority performers is out of place and too close to material from an old exploitation film to jibe properly. Our endgoal here is not supported by the framework as built, and I wish a quieter conclusion more driven by characters we'd already seen, with a less bombastic reason for Mary's choices took the place of what we get.
2.5/5
Alas and alack, but my time at the 2019 Loft Film Festival is officially done! Tune in tomorrow for a wrap-up post, wherein I'll provide some parting thoughts on these eight films in competition, discuss my feelings on the judge's pick for the CICAE award, and name my own pick for the honor, for whatever that's worth!
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