Our wonderful new writer Paul Gratton never stops! He’s at it again with a look at the Can-Con feature Steal Away, which premiered at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival.
About: Director Clement Virgo returns with a bold, mesmerizing, and erotically charged thriller, that tells the story of a pair of young women the film’s subtitle calls “two princesses.” The first is Fanny (Angourie Rice), a sheltered teenager whose knowledge of the world barely extends beyond the stately manor house belonging to her glamorous and magnanimous mother Florence (Lauren Lee Smith), which is located in a mysterious country that variously evokes occupied Europe, Algiers, and the Antebellum South.
Into her life comes Cécile (Mallori Johnson), a charismatic visitor who’s one of countless people seeking asylum from the conflicts that consume this alternate and highly stylized reality. The two women’s mutual curiosity sparks a bond that may prove vital to their ability to survive the maelstrom of desires and dangers that surround them — though they are so immersed in sensory pleasures that they struggle to comprehend the truth about their situation. Similarly, the film’s fevered flow of sounds and images may render viewers slow to register its weight as an uncommonly potent allegory about real-life horrors.
Reaction: A rich upper-class family offers a home to a refugee from the Congo. Their young daughter becomes enchanted with the exotic allure of the African woman. After the more testosterone-inspired tale of Brother (2022), it is gratifying to see Virgo showing such sensitivity to a female POV. Much of this probably can be attributed to the fact the script was co-written by his partner Tamara Berger. Steal Away is sumptuous to look at, and features some scenes of genuine female eroticism, much of it just verbal expressions of young women’s early sexual experiences. The problem is that the backdrop is a totalitarian political system hellbent on expunging foreigners, especially blacks, from society. The film loses power by setting the film in nowhere specific: the cars seem vintage, the uniforms vaguely fascistic, with public signage about aliens that seem kind of ICE-like, but in some Eastern European-looking language. The point of course is that racism is omni-present in all societies and targeting blacks in particular is nothing new. But, there is nuance that gets lost in the film’s lack of specificity, as it is obvious that the racism in, say, apartheid South Africa, is not the same as the racism encountered in the Jim Crow South. And of course, nazism sought racial purity by mostly focusing on Jews. So the film seems a bit adrift as the Congolese woman, now pregnant, seeks escape to the “North” by boat. Still, this film has many worthwhile moments with strong female performances. It is a reflection of the difficulty Canadian films have finding theatrical audiences, that Stay Away is scheduled to bypass theatres in the US completely and go straight to streaming via Peacock. In Canada, the film has opened against The Odyssey. Clement Virgo is the most prominent director of colour in Canada, and his films deserve a better fate.
Rating: 6 out of 10
STEAL AWAY is now playing in limited release in Canada.