A Fresh Start. (Short Takes).

2001 15m prod Festian Lente Productions, Black Sheep Films, p Caitlyn Colquhoun, Lisa Mader, discled Jason Buxton, ph Albert Hennen, mus Peter Johnston; with Kiersten Tough.

Tolstoy once famously observed at the beginning of Anna Karenina that "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way." Although Tolstoy never saw a Canadian film, the Canadian cinema has yielded plenty of corroborative evidence for his dictum: Claude Jutra's Mon oncle Antoine, Richard Condie's The Big Suit, Alan King's A Married Couple, Atom Egoyan's Next of Kin (and everything after), to name but a few. Add to this already powerful and withering set of family albums A Fresh Start by Nova Scotia director Jason Buxton. The film is a quiet, deceptively simple drama of a family preparing to move from somewhere to somewhere else. While the mutually irritated mother and father squabble over the television remote control and other trivialities, their two young sons listen upstairs and wonder about what lies ahead. While not exactly told from the children's perspective, the film constructs an almost tangible sense of the vagueness, even opacity of how their lives change just because mom and dad say it will. Caught in a skein of unresolved tensions, unspoken fear, and undefined destinations, the children adjust in their silent, obscure manner. There are no scenes made in Buxton's fictional family, but there's lots going on. Indeed, its understated juxtaposition of the mundane and the profound, particularly in the final sequence when the family car passes a road accident, is intensely powerful. Sensitive, sad, superbly controlled, stylistically authoritative, A Fresh Start announces the arrival of a talented filmmaker and contributes considerably to this country's anguished stockpile of family viewing.