After blowing up the world of teenagers with his 1999 feature debut Johnny, director Carl Bessai has turned his attention to the quieter anxiety of those in their mid-thirties. With his new film, Lola, the Vancouver director looks at a 35-year-old woman who takes on the identity of another. ‘She’s one of those people whose life has been in limbo for 10 years and she’s troubled,’ says Bessai.

‘It’s quite a subtle film. It would have been easy to write it as a cop movie or a chase, but no one is coming after her. She merely walks away and tries to sort herself out. There’s an ambiguity and open-endedness to the story,’ adds Bessai, who also wrote the script.

He compares Lola to The Passenger, the 1975 Michelangelo Antonioni film in which Jack Nicholson assumes the identity of a dead journalist to escape his own problems. The name alone has both linguistic and filmic echoes. ‘Lola is the name of a drag queen, and in [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder’s Lola, the woman also had two identities, a day and a night persona.’

In focusing on a seemingly ordinary woman, played by Sabrina Grdevich, Bessai also likens this work to that of Mike Leigh or Allan King. ‘King said that as a documentarian if you go out looking for the average person what you find is that everyone is extraordinary in their own way. It’s this direct cinema idea, let’s just train our lens on someone who catches our eye and see where it leads us.’

If Bessai sounds like he has been strongly influenced by documentarians, it’s also because he recently shot a one-off doc for the Independent Film Channel about documentary filmmakers entitled Indie Truth. ‘Talking with D.A. Pennebaker, Allan King or Peter Lynch was invigorating,’ he says. ‘It confirmed a certain way of working. Vancouver is an industry of action films where Vancouver is pretending to be anywhere but. Out of this has grown a rebellion where there’s a strong realist school.’

The strong B.C. community does not necessarily make it easier to corral financing. The first cash influx for the under $1-million production came from The Movie Network and Superchannel in the spring of 2000. After some indecision on the part of Johnny distributor Blackwatch Releasing, Bessai signed up with Forefront Releasing. An application to the CTF, however, yielded a negative response. But then Telefilm’s Feature Film Fund gave the nod and boosted the funding percentage to cover the CTF shortfall. Laura Lightbown is the producer for the film and it was made through Pictures of Light/Raven West Film Productions.

Just as Bessai was getting ready to shoot in the fall of 2000, Forefront closed its doors. The production did not get off the ground until January, by which time Blackwatch had signed on. Twenty-five days later it was a wrap, but of course, this distributor also closed up shop. After a Toronto debut, Bessai was hoping to finalize a distribution deal at press time.

None of this detracts from his enthusiasm for filmmaking – and for working with actors. Much of the script was workshopped prior to shooting. ‘I shoot incredibly long takes so that actors start to think about what they’re saying, there are no two-second close-ups,’ Bessai explains.

His techniques paid off. Colm Feore agreed to be in the film and read 10 pages a day for four days. ‘He really employed his intelligence and instincts as an actor.’

There may be a decade between the ages of Johnny and Lola, but the two Bessai characters have more in common than may first appear. ‘With Johnny it’s an identity theme in late adolescence, where Johnny has two personas: one at home and on the street. Lola is at mid-life, where things have become stagnant…. They’re both stories that deal with age-related turning points.’

Bessai loosened up the Dogme rules he followed for Johnny but still respected them in spirit. ‘The idea is that filmmaking should be liberating.’ The lighting was minimal and a hand-held camera was used. ‘I would rather that there be hot spots and shadows,’ Bessai says. ‘The film is quite beautiful because it has intimacy. It’s not perfect, but I think the world is not perfect.’