"It’s just this dance. It’s not forever. It’s going to change": A conversation with Sarah Polley

Named after Leonard Cohen’s exquisite homage to the poet Federico García Lorca, Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, the acclaimed actress’ second feature as writer/director, is in many regards the inverse of Away From Her, her debut, trading wintry places and care facilities for sweltering summer heat and urban cafés, somber earth tones for shimmering drunken fruit punch hues, a couple in their 60s and married for decades for one in their 20s and only just slipping into those first years of familiarity (and, perhaps, stagnation). Both films are equally distinguished by Polley’s preternatural insight into the nature of trust, lust, dependency, secrets, and the thorny complications of long-term love. It’s been noted that the events chronicled in Take This Waltz, which is basically a love triangle, mirror events in Polley’s own life. This may be the case, yet the result is hardly a mushy confession; lived experience only texturizes and at times actually lightens (unbearably) the film’s unnerving truthiness. For all the right reasons it is probably not a good date movie.

Which isn’t to say that Take This Waltz isn’t problematic in its execution. Michelle Williams’ Margot, a married copywriter drawn to another man, is captivating, a sponge. Her every hesitation brims with wildly varied urges; we never lose track of where she is emotionally. Yet her scenes with Luke Kirby, the artist and rickshaw driver she falls for, lack chemistry, their first exchanges feel especially forced, while those with Seth Rogen, so endearing and sympathetic as her husband, an author of cookbooks containing recipes for nothing but chicken (read: comfort food embodied!), are intermittently undone by Polley’s determination to impose a sense of well-developed intimacy. (Though there is something rather ingenious about the couple’s ritual of whispering sweet nothings to each other that sassily describe torture and murder.)  

Still, I can’t emphasize this enough: no matter how many reservations or accusations of bum notes one can lob at Take This Waltz it is nonetheless decidedly adult, wordlessly articulate, sexy, sweet, brutal and very much alive—an extraordinary film about the vagaries of desire, which is to say, something extremely rare. The last act in particular, which is both the fulfillment of a promise and the exhaustion of a longing, is haunting and brilliant in its conclusions. (Or lack there of.) I admire this film far more than I do many others that have far fewer flaws. Also: it is a heartfelt, if geographically confused, love letter to Toronto.

I was late for my interview with Polley at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. My flight was delayed and my taxi stuck in late afternoon traffic, but Polley waited for me. I was flustered; she was gracious, relaxed and responsive: an ideal interviewee. We spoke only a short while yet I think we managed to cover a great deal.

JB: Did you have a lot of ideas after Away From Her? Was it difficult to decide which idea to run with?

Sarah Polley: There were several things I’d started. This was the one I was enjoying the most. It felt like the one I could learn most from as a filmmaker. It would allow me more freedom to explore with the camera and the actors than I’d had on Away From Her. A second film feels like an opportunity to do what you really want to do, as opposed to what you think you should do.

JB: Films about romance often focus on how the lovers are meant to be together. So they’re to some degree about destiny. But Take This Waltz is very much about desire. Desire is a central character, a foil, something greater than the individuals.

SP: I wanted to explore the theme of life having a gap in it. Of emptiness. Of the way we use desire to fill that gap. I wanted to envelop the audience in that feeling of the beginning of desire, when the world’s popping in Technicolor and everything seems new and brimming with possibility—the possibility of reinventing yourself. From there we can follow desire through its natural life cycle and see what happens.

JB: I found your exploration of those feelings very resonant, very real, but I also sensed a very deliberate use of artifice, the punched up colours, or the idea that the object of one’s desire, though found in another city, might live right across the street.

SP: I definitely wanted the world to feel believable but then at moments have this fairy tale quality. This extends to the depiction of Toronto. That’s Toronto in the movie, but it’s also a somewhat idealized Toronto. I romanticize the city. It doesn’t actually look the way I see it. I wanted it to be a little too vibrant, a little too colourful. I didn’t want to be shy about injecting moments with coincidence or magic, of having a dance happen in the middle of a very messy human story.

JB: At what point did the Leonard Cohen song come to you?

SP: Right at the beginning. I was listening to it so often. There’s something about its circular nature. I found it so beautiful and romantic and sad. I wanted the film to capture that same tone.

JB: It’s a song I adore. I almost find it hard to listen to. One of the things I love about it is that it feels particularly unresolved, partly because of the waltz time, partly because the lyrics whisk us through these baroque scenarios yet never seem to land anywhere.

SP: Exactly. It almost feels like it could go forever. The song kind of tangles itself up in the same way that I like to imagine the characters do with each other.

JB: I think of how both the song and the film end, with this idea that the waltz is “all that there is.” Being in motion, being between things. We leave Margot feeling like she’s still between things.

SP: Absolutely. Perhaps she’s a little more at ease with being between things, but that feeling of emptiness has followed her. And there’s something about the title: ‘Take This Waltz.’ It’s just this dance. It’s not forever. It’s going to change, to mutate. But you go with it anyway because those are some of the greatest moments in life, when you just go with somebody, surrender.

JB: I was also fascinated by your repeated use of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star.’ Is it me, or does this very different song not allude to the film’s most devastating piece of subtext?

SP: Absolutely. To me that song addresses what the film is about completely. One thing replaces another, but it’s not necessarily better, and it too will be temporary.

JB: This sense of being caught between things works its way into several aspects of the film. Being a recovering alcoholic, like Sarah Silverman’s character, means that you’re sort of always between drinks. Margot and Lou’s home seems perpetually between renovations.

SP: Matthew Davies, the production designer, was responsible for a lot of that. He really made that house feel like something in progress. You could see the layers of different families who’d lived there. He also brought a lot of the heat to the film. He made those rooms feel sweaty. There’s always a sheen in the paint or a shiny wallpaper. Every material he put in that house exudes heat. But yes, our discomfort with feeling between things was something I wanted to film to embody. Everybody was playing with that, including Lea Carlson, our wardrobe designer. She would sometimes dress Margot like an adolescent, as though she’s still going through this in-between phase.

JB: One thing about being an artist that some people find hard to fathom is the fact that your whole career keeps you between things. Most of your time is spent between one project and the next. Is that something that gives you anxiety?

SP: Professionally, I love being between things. I don’t love it in the rest of my life. Being between things professionally means you’re always trying to make things happen, but during those gaps you don’t always have to be doing it, which is also great. I love making films, but I also love just thinking about making films. And I love sleeping through the night, which you’re generally not able to do when you’re making a film.

JB: Are you at all interested in directing yourself as an actor?

SP: I don’t think so. Not unless I get way better as a director and way better as an actor. I’m so amazed that anyone can do both things simultaneously. Maybe one day I’ll try it, though I worry it could be miserable. I enjoy directing and acting so much, but I feel like doing them at the same time would compromise both experiences.

JB: I ask because I’m every now and then struck by how certain actors wind up doing their best work when directing themselves. Off the top of my head, I think of, let’s say, Clint Eastwood or John Cassavetes as actors who might be best when directing themselves.

SP: Now that’s actually inspiring. I never considered that. As you said that I suddenly had this flash of what it might be like to do exactly what you want to do and not have to worry about someone else’s opinion. That could actually be really fun.

JB: Perhaps if it was a very low-stakes project with a small crew, something you could take a lot of time with.

SP: Ooh. I love that idea. It’s weird. That’s the first time that’s ever sounded attractive to me. The idea of feeling less inhibited, not trying to please anybody. 

JB: Alright, then. Now I want to see Sarah Polley direct Sarah Polley.

SP: [Laughs] I’ll have to think about it. 

Every grain of salt

A skinny young man with a little kid’s haircut, his face bearing a hard-to-read expression, something between nonplussed and suspicious, stands in a back alley that could be tucked inside a war zone. Allen Ginsberg, bearded and bespectacled, lingers in the background, perhaps offering a blessing. The young man displays a series of cue cards featuring some lyrics to a song he wrote. We hear his recording of the song, but he’s not singing along. Maybe the cards are for us, but if so we’re going to have a hard time joining in because the lyrics are only fragments. Sometimes the wrong fragments. The young man is, of course, Bob Dylan. He’s in the first scene—which may also be the world’s first music video—of a movie about Bob Dylan. And his performance, or anti-performance, in this alley is reminding us to take everything that follows with a grain of salt. Or, as his later work would have it, of sand.

In my memory I often lump D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967) in with Don Owen’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen (1965). Both documentaries capture the artist as a young man, half-consciously honing his image, half-letting it find its own way, on the road, hanging out backstage, in the midst of what would prove to be a career-changing and ultimately culture-changing transition: Dylan playing what would be his final shows as a solo acoustic act, with Bringing it All Back Home in the can and the new, increasingly surrealistic and increasingly personal, genre-fusing, electrified bandleader about to forever eclipse the more overtly politicized Village folk troubadour; Cohen stealing the spotlight while touring with other Canadian poets, all more established than he, giving readings that at times feel more like stand-up while wearing a leather jacket, on the cusp of leaving behind a literary career to take up music and become one of the most covered and influential songwriters in history—second perhaps only to Dylan.

Where these two films differ greatly is in their scope and stakes. Cohen was, as a popular star, still all coiled potential, and Ladies and Gentlemen, running 44 minutes, feels by comparison somewhat more utilitarian, where Dylan was exploding, an already wildly prolific supernova of song, and Don’t Look Back finds him running from rabid fans, holding hotel rooms crammed with friends and hanger-ons—Marianne Faithful, Donovan and Alan Price among them—spellbound as he casually plays a tune, and antagonizing journalists, many of them condescending and under-prepared. And one of the reasons that Don’t Look Back remains historically important is that the filmmaking mirrors the transitional nature of its subject. Popular music was undergoing a sea change, with Dylan riding the crest, while the movies were being swept up in the revolutionary tactics of the French New Wave and cinéma vérité (or, if you prefer, direct cinema), with the on-the-fly, half-observational/half-artificial, formally playful and structurally happenstance Don’t Look Back absorbing lessons from both movements. So there’s a magical alignment of two distinct forms meeting to create something that must have felt startlingly new. Don’t Look Back is the inaugural screening in Metro Cinema’s series of music documentaries, and it makes sense that it is indeed first. After Don’t Look Back, the way we made movies about music would never be the same.

A singer must cry: Bird on a Wire on DVD

Leonard Cohen’s recent return to the world’s stages after a decade and a half of relative reclusion has, among other things, served to remind us just how magnetic a presence the soon-to-be 76 year old troubadour can be. Few performers combine Cohen’s particular blend of humility and authority, gravity and humour—he’s a consummate showman who seems metabolically incapable of taking his audience’s adoration for granted. Yet Cohen, who only began his career as a recording artist in his mid-30s, who insisted on singing his own material despite the limitations of his voice, whose musical styles have only intermittently dovetailed in any way with the transitory fashions of that have marked his 40+ years in music, has also at times revealed a deep personal ambivalence to touring—which might help explain the hiatus. The tension between Cohen the showman and Cohen the tender, at times mercurial poet obsessed with communion and not “cheating” his audience, his band, or himself with anything less than emotional honesty is very much a part of what makes his concerts as riveting and even transcendental. This tension is eloquently captured in Tony Palmer’s documentary Bird on a Wire.

The 1972 European tour, which ended in Israel and was plagued by technical problems, which featured Cohen’s famed producer Bob Johnston on organ and the angelic Jennifer Warnes sharing back-up vocals with Donna Washburn, possesses a certain mythical status in Cohen’s biography. I’d read many years ago about the final concert in Jerusalem where Cohen dropped acid and wept on stage during a performance of ‘So Long, Marianne.’ The story always had this apocryphal tinge to it. I never believed I’d actually see the event on film, but here it is. It almost wasn’t. After getting a limited release in a reportedly messily assembled version unauthorized by Palmer in 1974, Bird on a Wire vanished. It was only in 2009 that 294 rolls of original film were discovered, re-assembled and restored by Palmer for its new, first-ever DVD release from Conveyer.

Cohen was 37 then, at one of many career peaks, and clearly magnetic on a number of levels—we actually see him decline invitations from not one but two different Euro-babes who approach him after a performance. He initially seems rather serious but soon enough regains his trademark deadpan humour and sense of mischief and camaraderie. He improvises an ode to a speaker that refuses to stop emitting some galactic-sounding feedback. He invites audience members to come up on stage to hear the music better when the PA shuts down completely. He improvises a self-satirizing introduction for himself: “Leonard Cohen is going to sing songs of anguish and despair… The skulls appear… They’re lowered by wires by a man above the stage…”

Once the songs are properly begun they’re all of them magic. A rendition of ‘Suzanne’ with spectral organ and bubbling bass is especially buoyant. He and the band imbue ‘Story of Isaac’ with an extra layer of portent. ‘Please Don’t Pass Me By’ is used as a sort of call to arms. And of course there’s ‘Marianne.’ Cohen had already left the stage once that night, apologizing profusely but insisting that things just weren’t working. Yet the audience, many of them teenagers, won’t have it. At one point they offer to sing to him if he’d just come back out. There’s a hilarious bit where, while backstage and still uncertain he can continue, Cohen convinces himself that what he really needs is to shave, and shave he does—if he can only stop laughing. Most impressively, he doesn't cut himself. It’s unclear whether or not he ever actually confessed to the audience that he was already deep in the throes of his LSD trip.

Palmer’s career as a filmmaker—he’s also worked in theatre and opera and as a critic—has been grounded in an interest not only in music but also portraiture. His eclectic range of subjects have included Cream, Maria Callas, the Beatles, Ginger Baker, and Benjamin Britten. His most famous film is probably the 1971 batty satirical rock flick 200 Motels, co-written and co-directed by its featured performer, Frank Zappa. Bird on a Wire benefits as much from Palmer’s obvious facility with gaining superb coverage of musical performances with apparently skeletal resources as it does from its wide-ranging access to off-stage business and Cohen’s personal transparency. All of the original coverage, photographed by Les Young, looks terrific, particularly for its distinctive framing of strikingly lit faces during the performances. All of what appears to be new post-production work however—the titles, the cutaways to home movies, the recycling of scenes from Don Owen’s 1965 film Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, or most especially the images of violence in Vietnam—look comparatively hokey, at times in poor taste, and, above all, unnecessary. The image and sound captured during the actual tour easily stand on their own without this additional contextualizing. Thankfully, the original material is about 95% of what we get here, which makes Bird on a Wire essential viewing for fans of Cohen and of tour documentaries in general.

Driving that souped-up Buick to the end of love can tear a poor singer in two: revisiting Leonard Cohen's Death of a Lady's Man 30 years on

I’ve long dreamed of writing an essay that would focus solely on a subject of some personal obsession: the great divorce albums made in the broadly defined rock idiom. The list would be necessarily short, as my criteria are severe. Obviously, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks sets the mould. Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call makes every cut, as does Lee Hazelwood’s Requiem for an Almost Lady and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear. But whenever I get to thinking about Leonard Cohen, the question isn’t whether he’s got a record that qualifies but which one to choose. Romantic relationships have about as much chance of surviving a Cohen record as a hot turkey sandwich at a teamster’s meeting. Further reflection illuminated the dilemma: Cohen’s one great work of relentless lament for broken love isn’t a record at all, but a book.

Not to be confused with his much maligned but actually quite inventive, weirdly moving and brazenly snappy Death of a Ladies’ Man, the 1977 record produced by Phil Spector, who, more or less insane, apparently homicidal, usually drunk and frequently wielding various weaponry, almost resulted in Cohen’s actual death, Death of a Lady’s Man—a very similar title with a very different meaning—is the volume of poetry Cohen released the following year—yet another entry into this summer’s ongoing theme of under-loved books by famous writers from 1978.

Like all Cohen’s work, it dares to go “to the end of love” and crawl toward some modest redemption. It’s full of humour and eloquence, raw sex and verbal play. Like some of Cohen’s work, it arrives at these elements through endearing feats of irony, bouts of deadpan hysteria and an ongoing sliding between grandiose pomposity and self-flagellation. I would argue it’s some kind of masterpiece, inspired, audacious and gutting, a meta-volume of multiple reflections and sly digressions that arrive at truth through covert means, like bank robbers tunneling in from the basement of the lingerie store down the block.

‘I Knelt Beside a Stream’ opens the collection with mock-heroic language and disquieting allusions to the author’s passive participation in his doomed plunge into love—which, with Cohen, always spells a deadly threat to meditation, mental health and artistic creation. The speaker kneels beside a stream manifesting on a wooden floor in Upper Manhattan, where a feathered shield is placed on his arm, a feathered helmet on his head. “This made me feel so good,” he explains, “I climbed up on Alexandra’s double bed and wept in a general way for the fate of men.” Somewhere in here he finds himself submitting to Alexandra’s suggestion to worship her, which he does for ten years. “Thus began the obscene silence of my career as a lady’s man.”

What immediately follows this poem is of equal importance as the poem itself. Shit, maybe more. Like the vast majority of poems here, ‘Stream’ is supplemented with a commentary written so that it seems the author’s either a separate person from the poet, at least as separate as the incompatible selves at work in Cohen’s double life as artist/ascetic and lady’s man. These commentaries function as a notebook archeology, exposing excerpts from other unpublished writings—especially something called Final Revision of My Life in Art—that deepen or at least perversely twist our reading. Just as often they decry what’s false, preposterous or embarrassing about the poems.

The commentary for ‘The Café,’ where the poet’s taken “a drug that makes me want to talk,” expands on the six-lines of verse with an explanation as to what happened to the titular locale: “Upon inquiry, I discovered that it had been demolished and the marble tabletops thrown into the harbour.” The evidence of Cohen’s actions cagily described in the poem has been lost to time. Implied is some willful amnesia, a way of escaping feelings too complicated to sort out in the reasonable, detached approach of the commentator, the poet’s adversary, the aggressive apologist for this book which had already been sent to Cohen’s publisher and pulled from publication several times before.

With its vague resemblance to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the doubling structure offers resolution found only through cold self-analysis and a balm for the reader upset by the author’s surges of violent resentment and reeling marital anxiety, ie: “You fucking whore, I thought you were really interested in music.” Gradually, however, we realize the commentator is as susceptible to emotional torrents as the poet. He too becomes illucid, digressive, overwhelmed by his project. The disparate personae of these two Cohens slowly collapses, the commentator finally tossing out fragmentary statements as enigmatic as the book’s briefest poems: “They should cast your cunt in chrome for the radiator cap of a Buick.” (Why a Buick? I’ve always wondered this. Perhaps you’d have to be a motorist in 1978 to get that.)

There is a narrative poem about carrying luggage and waiting for a boat with one’s wife that never fails to sweep me up. There’s a poem where the flow of Montreal traffic is narrated as an unsuccessful attempt at forgetting a woman. There’s one that gives the finest advice on performing poetry since Hamlet, and one ostensibly authored by Cohen’s spiritual mentor that is the best piece of verse ever written about a cricket’s girlfriend. And there is a lovely pair of poems quite near the end that steps back from emotional clamour to take note of a nine-year-old girl’s face that appears in the window and stares. Though typically spare, the shape of Death of a Lady’s Man is unruly, suitably so, fraught with alienating effects, yet few chronicles of disastrous love pierce the heart so brutishly. Cohen’s time as a lady’s man didn’t actually kill him, or his art. But something always dies in such melees, just as something of the other always burrows within us afterwards. I’m grateful that he took this fatalist metaphor to such sumptuous extremes. He really took off the kid gloves with this one.