In Memoriam: 2001 18m, 16mm, prod Canadian Film Centre, d Aubrey Nealon. (Short Takes).

What's going on up on the farm? Is the Canadian Film Centre a hotbed of radical politics? In that unlikely urban bucolic setting, the notion seems preposterous. Nevertheless, over the last few years several short films from the Centre (see last year's Ernest, for example) have delivered some of the most incisive attacks on neo-conservative ideology and spirit deadening consumer capitalism to be found anywhere in Canadian cinema. Aubrey Nealon's In Memoriam is another example; a droll drama revolving around a junior financial adviser who finally gets his big break, Tom is assigned to the prestigious, if slightly perverse portfolio of a very wealthy client; trouble is, the client is dead. Informed matter-of-factly by his predecessor that "the dead have more money than the living," Tom's task is to manage the lucrative accounts of the deceased magnate and, as explicitly ordered in his will, to spend all accumulated interest on the upkeep of the gravesite. In an uninteresting and predictable subplot, he is also p ursued by the late client's daughter, who begs him to ignore the will. Where others in the firm have failed, Tom resolves to succeed for the "loved one" who has, even after death, money to burn. Don't be fooled by its conventional short dramatic structure: smartly designed and executed, In Memoriam is an absurdist, subversive take on North American materialism.

Tom McSorley is the head of the Canadian Film Institute and a contributing editor to Take One.