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Reportedly the most successful self-distributed film in British history, Scenes of a Sexual Nature was produced for $400,000 USD by director Ed Blum’s own company, Tin Pan Films, and was shot in only 18 days. Despite these apparently limited resources, the film manages to deliver a thoughtful exploration of the complicated tendency of humans towards romantic love.
Filmed entirely on location on London’s Hampstead Heath, Blum takes maximum advantage of one of the city’s most important and impressive public spaces. From the notorious gay cruising grounds on the West Heath to the magnificent raised Edwardian walkway the Pergola, Blum uses the length and breadth of the Heath’s 791 acres to craft seven romantic urban vignettes.
The unique setting combines with subtle writing and convincing performances to make the film disconcertingly touching. Writer Aschlin Dita strikes a fine balance of skepticism, humour and compassion in his portrayal of seven disparate couples, ranging from an eldery widow and widower reunited after 50 years after, to a gay couple negotiating the future of their relationship, to two fortysomethings on a cringingly awkward and ill-fated blind date. The actors keep up their end of the bargain, delivering a series of evocative performances with an unexpectedly moving result. The scene where Iris (Eileen Atkins) and Eddy (Benjamin Whitrow) discover that their paths have just missed crossing every week for 50 years is one of the more romantic film moments in recent memory – quite an achievement for an industry and culture that generally dismiss the sexuality of older people entirely.
It is this ability to take for granted, without apparent judgment, the capacity we all have for deep, sincere and complicated love that sets the film apart. Where Hollywood typically mashes the theme of romantic love into one-dimensional, soulless mythologies of perfect mates and happy endings, Scenes of a Sexual Nature takes a different approach, choosing instead to focus on what is profoundly complex about the ways that humans love one another. It is this complexity that Blum captures most eloquently, and the result is both delightful and dismaying. I came away feeling simultaneously sad and hopeful about the absurdity of romantic love, and it was this combination that proved the film’s effectiveness.
Regina’s inner city! Maclean’s Magazine writer Jonathon Gatehouse recently exposed the North Central and Core communities of this small prairie city as national hotbeds of crime, drugs, gangs, racism and poverty. His article (headlined with the inflammatory question, “How did the province where medicare was born end up with a city this frightening?”) has the city and its leadership up in arms in defense of Regina’s safety and honour.
I hadn’t read the article myself until this morning, when I was rudely awakened by a local radio personality raking a speechless Maclean’s editor over the coals. Though in principle I could understand her righteous indignation, it left me cold. I turned her off, grabbed my laptop and Googled the offending article so that I could formulate an opinion for myself.
As an article, “Canada’s Worst Neighbourhood” is a decent example of why I don’t read Maclean’s, or much other mainstream media. I’d categorize it as status quo cultural criticism – focusing on uncovering facts versus capturing truth, a tendency of “just the facts ma’am” news reporting that generally fails to capture the subtlety or magic of what is (or at least could be) at the heart of every story.
Even as a new citizen of Regina I have an appreciation for the unique charm of the place, a quality the article certainly doesn’t capture. But I also feel fortunate to be spared the desire to shake my fist alongside my indignant fellow residents. I get why Reginans are pissed (it’s annoying to have to constantly defend something you love to someone who doesn’t share your appreciation), but I’ve also lived in enough Canadian cities to know that the problems facing Regina are real, and that they won’t go away by getting angry when they’re pointed out, or by sporting a goofy “I Love Regina” logo on a coffee mug. Repeating your love of your city like a mantra won’t adequately address the alienation and systemic inequalities that are the actual root causes of poverty and crime.
I speak as someone who has a great appreciation for cities. But I also believe that the same thing that makes a city great is what can make it wretched: coping with city living requires that the whole be fractured into smaller, manageable parts. I’m thinking of Little Italy in Toronto, Mile End in Montreal, practically any community in New York City, or Cathedral in Regina. Self-sufficient communities evolve to become something like small towns in an urban sea. The upside of this is that vibrant, walkable, livable communities can flourish even within an ocean of suburbs, freeways and big box stores. The disadvantage of the splintered nature of urban life is that it becomes very easy to separate ourselves from what surrounds us. Though we may proclaim our love for the whole city, we generally stick to our own neighbourhoods, neighbours and comfort zones—and stay on own side of the tracks.
If we’re not careful, this can make it pretty easy to ignore the problems that divide us from our fellow citizens. We can stay out of the “bad” neighbourhoods, drive to suburbs with invisible gates, and avoid eye contact with the guy that is asking us to spare some money. By closing our eyes and hearts to something, it’s almost like it’s not actually happening at all.
So what happens when something like a Maclean’s article comes along and shakes our complacency up a little? A balanced piece of journalism or not, it’s touched a nerve in this city, which often points to something needing attention. Though it’s tempting to isolate ourselves in the safety of disempowerment and detachment, perhaps it’s time that we (both individually and collectively, and certainly not only in Regina!) start looking for ways to take steps in a different direction: towards connecting with the pain around us and taking action to build bridges between the most disparate parts of the places we love.
xox n
P.S. Check out the second Maclean’s article that responds to the first one (Regina: ‘It’s not the worst neighbourhood’ by Colin Campbell).
Life often leads in directions that can never, ever be foreseen. And so this finds me, unexpectedly and to stay, in Regina, Saskatchewan. Regina wasn’t just low on my list of potential cities to move to…it didn’t make the list at all. This small cold city is a tough sell, even to a self-proclaimed prairie girl like myself who doesn’t need to have the beauty of flat and rolling places explained.
Most would argue that Regina’s romance flies completely under the radar because it simply doesn’t exist. And yet, when I recently found myself facing the daunting prospect of choosing a new place to live, Regina came a-knockin’. What started as a CV sent on a whim was followed by an interview with a small social justice magazine based in the Saskatchewan capital. My childhood memories of Regina were of family visits to sprawling, colourless suburbs, and I haughtily assumed that a visit to the city would confirm my disinterest: obviously once I arrived in Regina it would be completely apparent that I could never live there.
Expecting nothing more, I was confused when I arrived in a tree-filled downtown core of walkable residential communities with charming heritage homes. Twenty-four hours later, I left Regina stunned to realize that I was considering the possibility of moving there whether I landed the job or not. An Albertan by birth and upbringing but not by nature, it occurred to me that maybe I’d accidentally been born in the wrong prairie province; that moving a little to the right on the map (and a lot to the left on the political spectrum) might ultimately take me home. Barely three weeks later and still in shock, I arrived with my cat at the miniature airport, my belongings following close behind on the Greyhound from Montreal.
One week into my new life the seduction is still a bit of a mystery. It certainly has to do in part with place: that sense of belonging that speaks to heart and bones and blood. The prairies simply feel like home, and my heart opens in this wide-open space. My big city identification has always limited me from envisioning myself returning to a small prairie city, but when I arrived I immediately felt the beauty of this place. Reminiscent of the stunted trees that sprinkle this part of the world (human-planted and struggling to survive), Regina is similarly stunted, struggling to survive the cold, cold winters and the province’s dwindling population. There are a million good reasons to leave, and many people do (for example eight of my mother’s nine siblings). But those that stay see something special in this place.
The potential of this rough little city has caught my attention and won’t let go. But there’s also a practical element to the courtship. As a creative person, I will likely always be relatively poor. So why not go to a city where I can afford to do creative work and still scrape together enough savings to eventually become a property owner with a little extra in the bank?
It’s not a new idea. Artists have always migrated to where they can afford to live, using the unformed potential of a place to build culture and community and creativity. It was in this potential that I started to see Regina’s sex appeal: in its slightly dilapidated inner-city communities and up-and-coming warehouse district. Something about it made me imagine how Brooklyn must have felt when the artists became too poor to stay in the gentrified districts of Manhattan and began to cross the bridge.
Creative people go to where it’s affordable to live because they are generally poor, and the romance of the places they choose is not always evident at first. This is because it’s all about potential, not reality. It’s about a vision for something beyond what currently exists. And that is what art and music and cultural production are really about: taking the potential of an idea or a place and manifesting it. Art sees the potential of humanity and fulfills it, and in so doing stretches that potential further by moving on to the next idea, manifestation, neighbourhood, city…
It might sound insane to compare this tiny flat cold prairie city to the Williamsburgs and Mile Ends before they were cool. But perhaps that is the lot of the creative person: first they sound insane, then people start to pay attention to what they’re talking about, and ultimately the whole thing gets appropriated by the masses. Then the creative person must move on to cheaper pastures.
Am I actually suggesting that Regina is the next Williamsburg? Not really. I guess all I’m suggesting is that Regina might turn out to be my Williamsburg…the place where I get to discover the ways that my creative potential might be wrapped up in the creative potential of place and community.
Having said this much I am wary of saying too much more, because I don’t want Regina to catch on too quickly. I want to enjoy at least a couple years here before the boom spreads. I even hope to be able to afford a small house before the Alberta money spreads and affluenza-afflicted Calgarians start itching to invest their oily cash in Southern Saskatchewan real estate. Advertising the potential of this place will only contribute to letting the secret out. But maybe that’s another cross the creative person has to bear: drawing attention to themselves through self-expression and cultural production. If only I could keep my mouth shut, I’d be able to protect this secret. But that’s not what artists do. They open their big mouths and say crazy things and make big paintings and write ludicrous stories, and make a big show of the whole damn thing.
On that note, here are some facts and romantic things to know about in my new city:
- Cathedral District (my neighbourhood, with a sweet little commercial walking street and annual arts festival)
- 13th Avenue Coffee House (a three-minute walk from my house with delectable rice bowls, including the Sushi Bowl with nori, marinated tofu, edamame, cukes and ginger. Hmmmm.)
- 300,000 trees, all planted to make an “oasis” on the prairie. Reginans take their trees pretty seriously.
- Wascana Park. Ok, so I was totally wrong about it being the biggest urban park in the world, but at 2300 acres it is the second biggest municipal park in Canada. (And yes, it’s tons bigger than Central Park, which clocks in at a puny 843 acres!)
- Regina Public Library Repertory Film Theatre and the Saskatchewan Filmpool
- Briarpatch Magazine: obviously I have to plug my new gig.
And if none of that wins you over, then there’s the fact that according to the Daily Show everyone in Regina is gay:
xox n
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