Mouthpiece

This screening took place on Wednesday, February 6, 2019 at 8:30 pmYukon Arts Centre

Following her mother's sudden death, an aspiring writer grapples with reconciling her feminism with her conformist choices in this funny and modern drama. Based on the award-winning play which was performed in Whitehorse in 2016. Selected for Canada’s Top Ten films of 2018. Patricia Rozema (I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing; Into the Forest) brings her great character-driven sensibility to this tale of Cassandra, a troubled Toronto writer divided against herself and, thus, played simultaneously by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava (who also wrote the script with Rozema, adapted from their award-winning two-woman stage play). The interplay between the physically mismatched, misanthropically aligned leads is a sardonic wonder to behold as Rozema and her collaborators set Cassandra on a spiraling seriocomic odyssey that takes her back home to deliver the eulogy at her mom’s funeral and seek redemption for past implosions. En route, she revisits the life of compromises her mother (Maev Beaty, wonderful) accepted in order to raise two children on her own and evaluates what, if anything, has changed for women in the ensuing years. - VIFF "Elevator pitch: Rozema suggested ’Lena Dunham’s Girls meets Charlie Kaufman [Being John Malkovich],’ and we can’t do better than that… In revealing Cassandra’s interior life, Rozema lays bare the modern female condition in an epic battle that is by turns lacerating, soothing and heartbreaking."—Simon Houpt, Globe & Mail