Rarely has an artist expressed as much self-criticism as Woody Allen, now 87 years old. For the premiere of his film Coup de Chance at the Venice Film Festival he looked back critically at his oeuvre.
“I had all the advantages. I made money, I had complete artistic freedom, I could make exactly the films I wanted, one after the other. I’ve made some good ones, but no masterpieces. And because I haven’t created a masterpiece, I feel like I’ve let myself down. Someone who had my chances should have made two or three masterpieces.”
That’s what the director says, among others Annie Hall, Interiors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Another Woman and Manhattan, all masterpieces in my opinion, but who am I? No Woody Allen.
What’s a masterpiece anyway? Who decides that? Festival juries, film criticism, the box office, the artist himself? Or should every moviegoer decide that for themselves? In the latter case, I would like to point out a feature film that was not considered good enough for Dutch cinemas last year: The Maiden, the debut of Canadian director Graham Foy. Wrongly, thought Eye Film Museum, which is showing it with some other films under the motto ‘Previously Unreleased‘; these films are now also circulating in other theaters.
The film critics responded positively The Maiden – thanks to them I went to see it myself – but their parts did not stand out very much in the publicity for other films. I didn’t read an interview with Foy anywhere. Too bad, because I thought it was a beautiful film – Woody Allen should not have been ashamed of it.
The Maiden is in a penetrating way about grief, as it can be experienced by young people. The film is set in Calgary, one of Canada’s largest cities. Foy grew up there and was an avid skateboarder. This also applies to two of its main characters, the adolescents Kyle and Colton, who explore the city and its surroundings on their skateboard. Kyle is the outgoing daredevil, Colton the humble friend. In his overconfidence, Kyle is run over by a train, Colton barely finds anything of him, apart from one sneaker, and is in danger of being destroyed by the grief.
Their friendship is beautifully visualized in all kinds of action scenes: the best one is the one in which the boys tie the body of a dead black cat to a raft and let it float down the river. But Foy also knows what tranquility is when he lets Colton wander desperately through the landscape.
Then the previously very realistic film takes a turn when Colton finds the diary of a classmate, Whitney. Whitney was abandoned by a school friend and then disappeared forever. Foy brings these two storylines together and even shows that the two disappeared young people, Kyle and Whitney, meet in a different reality. Which reality? Perhaps the afterlife, the film critic suggested Fidelity. I stick to the fantasy of the lonely Colton. He’s doing ‘wishful dreaming’, I suspect. That’s why the black cat jumps into his arms, alive and well, in the final scene; the most moving cat scene I ever saw.
Sorry, I had to spoil a lot above, but trust me: that film can handle it well.
A version of this article also appeared in the September 13, 2023 newspaper.