Both times I saw Strangers in Good Company, a film directed by Cynthia Scott for the National Film Board of Canada (and called Company of Strangers there), the audience honored it with rarely witnessed applause. This was compelled by a lively and moving depiction of seven women, ages 69 to 88, who, along with their younger bus driver (out of commission with a sprained ankle), fend for themselves for 72 hours in the woods of Quebec after their day-trip bus breaks down. Their quest for survival challenges and reformulates ageist assumptions about the elderly.
The film's narrative is, in part, the narrative of the filmmaking. Seven women -- Constance Garneau, Mary Meigs, Cissy Meddings, Winnie Holden, Alice Diabo, Beth Webber, and Catherine Roche -- make their screen debut by playing themselves. A professional actress, Michelle Sweeney, plays the part of the bus driver. In the process, they bond to form a sisterly community. Use of non-professional actresses, on-location shooting, and a hand-held camera signal the film's affiliation with the documentary genre, for which Canada's National Film Board is internationally acclaimed.
However, this film might more accurately be described as docu-fiction. The lyrical opening and closing shots reveal the company of women supporting each other as they cross a field shrouded in mist. Although one criticism of the film might be that it is not "realistic" in that there is little of the complaining or fatigue one might expect from lost sleep and food, for me, these parallel "time-out-of-mind" images mark the film as a feminist fantasy. The timeless idyllic setting is a stage upon which to construct these women's "best selves" (as Mary Meigs notes in her memoir of the filmmaking), so that the film may be seen as an allegory of the heroism of ordinary women growing old on their life journey.
MANY OF THE film's sequences are constructed as vignettes that feature two or three of the women revealing themselves to each other in semi-interview fashion. Frequently such documentary dialogue shots are punctuated with lyrical shots of water, field grasses, or the moon, accompanied by a lyrical soundtrack of violin and piano music. This stylistic treatment reinforces the representation of these women as beautiful, one that challenges our North American cult of youth and beauty.
The vignettes often counterpoint differences of age, race, class, and nationality. In one scene, the young African-Canadian bus driver gets 80-year-old British-Canadian Beth Webber, who is prim and self-conscious, to unbutton her blouse, take off her wig, and tie up her hair in a scarf. Across differences these women who were strangers find common ground as young and old; white, Caribbean, and native; heterosexual and lesbian; middle and working class; religious and secular; city and country women.
With unflinching psychological realism, the camera unveils the pains and fears of aging alongside its strengths and beauties. The first morning in their makeshift camp features a comic pill-taking ritual in which the women compare notes on the pills that counter the symptoms of their aging bodies -- arthritis, aches and pains, high blood pressure. "Death is around us everywhere, that's the way life is," Constance remarks upon looking at Mary's sketch of a dead bird her cat had caught.
The pathos of this film is counterpointed by many comedic moments that capture the zest of this mixed company. The camera reveals Sister Catherine, a Catholic nun, with her grease-marked face, singing "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" along with her Walkman as she works on the engine of the broken-down bus. Alice, a Mohawk from the Kahnawake reserve, invents a new use for pantyhose and nets a catch of fish for one night's supper. Another evening the group can be found dancing to an improvised Charleston, sung with much finger snapping and clapping.
As we all do, these women reminisce throughout the film to recover former selves, lost loved ones, past joys and sorrows. Such memory works are manifested visually as the camera cuts away periodically from a cameo focus on each of the women to a compilation of photographs from each one's life. The resulting (dis)continuity between fresh, girlish faces and faces lined with life histories is powerfully moving. In this way, the film lovingly remembers the lives of these exceptional, ordinary women, translating them into film heroines. "Is anybody there, we're alive," the women call out across the lake one evening, even as they call out to a culture that has not honored the presence of elders in its midst.
Brenda Carr was a freelance writer living in London, Ontario and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Western Ontario at the time this review appeared.
Strangers in Good Company. Directed by Cynthia Scott. Released by First Run Films. 1991.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!