When Old Love Is Just Slip, Sliding Away

A young directors bold debut tackles dementia, writes Stephanie Bunbury.

HERES the lounge. A blank-eyed elderly woman sits where she has sat all day, hanging her head.

The one coming along the corridor looks sprightlier, despite the walking frame. And shes certainly chirpy: introduced to a male visitor, she immediately propositions him. Anyone who has visited a care home for old people will recognise the characters in Sarah Polleys directorial debut, Away from Her.

This woman, glazed into her own world, might once have been your mother. Where on earth is she now?

Canadian actor Sarah Polley is only 28 but nothing about her, apart from her pale, girlish face, seems especially young. It never occurred to her, she says — at least until after the film was made — that dementia was a strange choice of subject for a young, first-time director. Now she can see that. "And I suppose that would be my question too.

"But I suppose I feel like we keep exploring the most boring part of life in films. Of course it is fantastic and really exciting to be young and having very chemical relationships and crashing into each other, but I dont know that is the most interesting thing to watch. And as someone looking forward in my life, I dont know that I am really learning a lot from those stories. So I guess it was about trying to have an insight into something a little more layered."

Away from Her is based on a story by Alice Munro, another Canadian and unquestionably the greatest living writer of short stories. Polley read it on a plane when she was on her way home from Iceland, where she had been filming Hal Hartleys No Such Thing alongside Julie Christie. She read it, in fact, about 10 times, while imagining Christie as the storys central character, Fiona. Fiona is only in her 60s but all her reading tells her that she is sliding into early dementia.

Fiona insists, against her husband Grants agonised protests, on checking herself into a plush care facility; she has decided, while she still can, that he should not have to manage her final deterioration. Within a month, she has forgotten who he is. He must watch, on his daily visits, as his wife of 44 years cuddles up to another man: a weeping wreck in a wheelchair who depends on her confused presence every second of the day. He is her "dear heart" now.

Polley was intrigued, she says, by what could happen inside a relationship over four decades. She married David Wharnsby — a film editor who worked on her first short film a few years ago and also edited Away from Her — when she was 24. Without a doubt, she agrees, the story asked questions that resonated with her. "That idea of looking forward, of thinking what happens when life has its way with you, that you will let each other down, you will disappoint each other, so what then? If it still goes on after that, what will it look like?"

Working together on the film was, she laughs, "like some sort of insane crash marital therapy. You are locked in a dark room with your husband for three months and, in that time, you have to work out these other peoples fictional marriage and you have to solve their problems. It was interesting for us, because when you are editing a film, you really do have to resolve things. It has to get done. So you have to talk through things; we couldnt walk away from any problem." Yes, she agrees, it could be dangerous. "But if you actually get through it, its a really interesting process."

Fiona and Grant first appear as a devoted couple, but the marriage has not always been rosy: Grant, a former academic, had dalliances with his students. That is now long in the past, but as Fionas memory dips and soars she is thrown up against that pain once again. "When we talk about memory loss, we talk about the things people forget and how tragic that is," says Polley. "But I think one of the most horrifying things about the disease is that it can trigger memory, so that you can end up living very viscerally at a time of your life that is long forgotten. And these wounds that have been healed for years can come unscabbed."

Polley has plenty of memories she doesnt want to come knocking. She has been working in films since she was five years old — "that was on something called The Magic of Christmas," she says sardonically — and says the life of a child actor is not something she would wish on anyone. Her worst experience came when she was only eight, working on Terry Gilliams The Adventures of Baron Von Munchausen. "A lot of traumatic things happened to me during the shoot: explosions went off round me and he had me in freezing cold water for long periods of time. It was an extremely difficult experience for an eight-year-old. I felt incredibly unsafe. I think I was, actually, in quite a lot of danger a lot of the time."

Didnt that put her off acting again? Probably, she muses. "But by then the train had kind of left the station." The year after Munchausen she had her own series, The Road to Avonlea. It was a syrupy spin-off from Anne of Green Gables that ran for years. She came to hate it. "Its an interesting thing when you grow up receiving a lot of affirmation for pretending to be someone else," she told another interviewer recently. "I think we all struggle with questions (of identity) but its slightly exaggerated when your identity has mostly been formed by older men giving you congratulations for becoming who theyve decided theyd like you to be. Its difficult to untangle that." No wonder, she agrees, she is afraid to return to a time before that work began.

Polley has now confronted Gilliam with her memories. While he was making Tideland, another film centred on a small girl, she sent him an email. "I said, I dont know why I go round the world talking to everybody except you about why this was such a traumatic experience. And I outlined for him everything I remembered." He sent a wonderful reply — "so humane and so gracious and so empathetic" — it immediately increased her faith in human nature. "Because it was like you can do something that is completely irresponsible, but then take responsibility for it and come out with a lot of dignity and grace."

She thought about Gilliam often, she says with a rueful laugh, while she was making Away from Her. So this is what it was like — at least, this is what it was like on a small scale, given that her film was essentially a three-hander set in snowy northern Ontario and Baron von Munchausen was a runaway monster. Now she understood. "I saw how, when you are making your own film, you develop this insane single focus where nothing else matters. Really, nothing else. You have this one thing you have to get done … I can only try to imagine what he was dealing with on that film. Of course he lost his mind."

She has to admit, too, that her discordant childhood led her to a good place. She loves acting; she has also loved writing and directing a film. "It is really hard to talk about regretting something when it led you to a place you are grateful to be," she agrees. "How can I look back and say I wish that hadnt happened?" She thinks she probably has Gilliam to thank, too, for the kind of actress she has become.

After the Munchausen experience, she developed a kind of phobia about big-budget filmmaking; the only Hollywood film she has done since Munchausen is Zack Snyders remake of Dawn of the Dead. Independent filmmakers, she felt, were her kind of people. Now her filmography reads as a kind of whos who of arthouse filmmakers, from Atom Egoyan to Michael Winterbottom. Egoyans The Sweet Hereafter in particular, she says, was her acting school.

Away from Her, she is the first to say, is not an adventurous piece of film-making. "No matter what your first film is," she says, "it isnt going to be on the cutting edge of anything." She sloughs off the idea of being a visionary. Any wildness in a woman, she says, will be put down not to brilliance "but to a general flakiness". And Sarah Polley is not flaky. She is not indulgent. She has had 20 years in this business.

"One of the weird things I discovered about myself that I never knew," she says as a director, "is that I am an absolute control freak in a completely psychotic way. We kept very much on schedule. Right on schedule." And as almost everyone in Away from Her is over 65, no children were traumatised during the making of this film. Thats a guarantee.

Away from Her is screening now.

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