Movie Review

Seville Pictures, directed by Terence Odette, starring: Genevieve Buechner (Monica), Brigitte Baka (Icelia), Maurizzio Terrazano (Albert) and Clare Coulter (Mary), 82 minutes, 2002.

Like her namesake, Monica is a very persistent and determined person. Augustine's mother, you'll remember, prayed and schemed thirty years for her son's conversion. Monica needs to be persistent. Her parents have split up and she lives with her Mom and her uncle in a basement suite. They have moved to a new neighbourhood in Toronto where Monica has no friends and doesn't want to make any. Her mother is busy and angry. Her uncle thinks she's a nuisance. Her father is acting like a manipulative idiot and her grandparents are very angry at her mother. She has a lot to cope with.

Monica's big desire in life is to be an angel in The Assumption Day Procession that her old parish puts on every August. It is a long way to the old neighbourhood and her uncle reluctantly drives her to the parade meeting but can't be bothered to pick her up so gives her money for the streetcar. Alas, she is late and the parts have been assigned and she can't be in the parade anyway because she doesn't live in the parish. Life is harsh when you're 10. She steals the wings and takes them home with her on the Queen St. car. Ever since the bulk of the population of the Queen Street Mental Health Centre was drugged up and turfed out on to the street a ride on the streetcar has been a brief tour of Bedlam. As Monica attempts to get off the streetcar her wings get caught inside and the car takes off. Boy, is she stuck!

She sees the wings one day on the back of a street person, Crazy Mary who occasionally frequents the Drop in Centre at a church on Sherbourne St., (likely St. Peter's Anglican). She asks for the wings back but Mary refuses. She has adopted a routine where she dons the wings and walks out in traffic on various bridges in the city. Monica tracks her down to her hovel in the woods of the Rosedale Ravine. It is a strange irony that Canada's highest rent district, Rosedale, has demented homeless people living in its bounds. Mary's dementia takes the form of her repeating the Rosary and the Hail Mary as a kind of mantra as she walks in traffic. It turns out that her son committed suicide twelve years before by jumping off the Bloor Viaduct and her crossing the bridges is a form of tempting fate, trusting herself to God's care as a kind of test. Mary wants to go to heaven!

Monica eventually gets the wings back and is granted the role of archangel in the procession. Mary, however has been taken to the psych ward of a local hospital and her hovel with all its statues and religious objects has been taken down, including the statues and pictures that Monica had brought her from her own collection. This is a weird kid with a rich religious life at age 10.

At the moment she is about to realize the dream that she has relentlessly, if deviously pursued, she bolts the procession, runs to the hospital, gets Mary out and into a wheelchair and processes to the Bloor Viaduct, wings in hand, where they proceed to stop traffic. Mary had always said that she "had one last bridge to cross".

This is a delightful Ironic/ Comic tale with no obvious teaching moral. When Jesus says "Suffer the little children…" we often romanticize their innocence. Monica is a determined and wily child coping with adult restrictions and character faults. They let her down. In the midst of circumstances that have messed up her life she seems obsessed and fixated on religious articles and symbols. She encounters numerous street people who are "harassed and harried like sheep without a shepherd". Still, with all the trappings of a religious life that may seem an empty form she acts in a manner that is truly religious; self emptying love for another that reveals what is always there, God's care. Inadvertently she becomes the angel she hadn't bargained for.

This movie was the official selection at three Canadian film festivals in 2002, Toronto, Vancouver and Atlantic as well as Berlin/ Kinderfest in 2003.