Stephanie Joline’s debut film Night Blooms Blooms at Cineplex Park Lane this week | Art + Culture | Halifax, Nova Scotia
Wchicken watching Night blooms, the debut feature from Stephanie Joline, it’s impossible for a viewer’s stomach to remain unsettled. Knots begin to tie in response to the visceral immersion felt from the film’s opening frames: That you’re stuck in the small neighborhood of small-town Nova Scotia in 1998, just like the film’s anti-hero main character, Carly. Watching him go from bad decision (skipping high school classes to use aerosol) to worse (confronting a classmate selling stolen electronics), the joints double back on themselves. By the time she decides to make the next mark on her best friend’s father, the taut line on your stomach will have calcified. But this mess, Joline claims, is exactly the point.
“I had a version of the film that I called ‘Dangerous Draft.’ And then, I added a bunch of stuff – completely with the intention of never telling anyone. I was like ‘I’m going to push the envelope as far as I can. And then, with only my eyes, I retreat to where I must retreat’. So I wrote a risky draft. And then I sat with him for a while and I said, ‘I think this is good.’ That’s the draft we end up doing,” she says, speaking to The Coast days ago Night blooms will make its theatrical debut at Cineplex Park Lane (the film is playing at the chain’s downtown location from April 8-14).
“In my ‘Dangerous Draft,’ the opening scene opened to our main character masturbating with a marker… I was like, ‘Somebody’s going to make me change this.’ Like, at some point somebody’s going to say , ‘Hey Steph, can you turn the volume down?’ And no one ever did. So this is the movie we made.”
Carly’s mess (she’s never in class, she routinely forgets about the younger siblings she has to babysit) is filled with a narrative darkness that will cause Night blooms—and Joline—a lightning rod. “I really like the gray areas of things that are kind of touchy subjects. So it was easy for me to go: oh, let’s write about it“, says Joline.
“The easiest thing to write would be a young girl who is taken advantage of by an older man who is a predator. And that’s a good story to tell. People need to tell that story too. But the hardest thing for me to write would be: Let’s tell that story where none of them are really bad and they all have flaws. And then my friends said, ‘There’s no way you can tell that story and not make him look like a terrible person.’
She continues: “It was just a challenge for me: not to make him the good guy—I didn’t want to do the opposite. I didn’t want her to seduce him and she’s the bad one. I just wanted it to be like what I think real life is sometimes.”
However, even when one is of the age of consent, age-driven power imbalances in relationships have become their own sub-genre in the #MeToo movement. knocking down figures of far more renown than Joline. Her willingness to enter this conversation feels unimaginable to those who witness the currents of cancellation culture. Throughout her call with The Coast, she often talks about consent.
But the film feels like Joline’s attempt to wrestle with and define the boundaries of acceptable and inappropriate behavior—a sketching, erasing, and redrawing of the lines that our culture is struggling to establish. If the question of what makes a bad man is a million dollar question, Joline’s interpretation of Wayne (father of the aforementioned best friend) is her tearing pages from a checkbook in an attempt to decide.
Bis watching Night blooms all wrong if you think it’s just about Carly’s run-in with Wayne. This is not a film about a man, about what a man did to a girl, or even about what legal crime a girl survives. It’s a movie about a girl, period. The one who wears Daniel Johnston t-shirts and hates school and wants to start a band with her best friend more than anything in the world. She’s messy, uses Sharpies for a goth manicure, and accidentally burns her grilled cheese sandwiches. But she’s also hopeful, a dreamer with well-regarded musical taste.
More than anywhere else, the film is set in Carly’s world, and Joline’s penchant for wide shots in blue skis reminds the viewer of this (as does the soundtrack – filled with songs from Babes In Toyland -).
Part of the reason the story is so poignant is the handful of soft truths embedded in the fictional story. Joline says she modeled the dialogue on how she and her friends would talk in high school (“I don’t know what it’s like to be with social media or smartphones in a high school”) and moments like when Carly falls into big trouble at school is removed from her past. (Don’t mistake the film for an autobiography, though. While Joline and Carly both love grunge, the similarities end soon after.)
TheOn the film’s poignant themes, Joline says, “there’s a good lesson to be learned about shame. I think we all have things in our past that we are ashamed of. And some of us really, really never want anyone to know about those things. They are big secrets. But for me, if I just show it to the world, then I’m like, ‘Oh, the shame kind of goes away.’ Because you just showed them. For example, you pick up the narrative and say, “Oh, yeah, here’s my story.”
Her teenage years had “things that as an adult, I didn’t talk about. I was like, ‘I hope my new friends don’t realize I used the air freshener,'” the filmmaker reflects. “And then I said, ‘You know what? No, instead of being afraid that people will find out about these things, I’m just going to take them out and take their power away.’ It takes away the shame, you know? And then, to my surprise, most people say, ‘Oh, yes, I can tell. I did that too.’ You realize everyone has those embarrassing things they don’t want to talk about.”
Joline knows that she shouldn’t just be seen for the messy parts or the parts that others have damaged – and she created a main character that deserves more than that too. “Here is humanity: it is in shame. It’s in what’s in the gray areas of ‘I don’t know what to do with this. Why am I thinking this?’ Or, ‘How do I feel about this? And that’s not really acceptable?’ Like, it’s my pleasure to be like that let’s go there.”