This Place

This Place stems from an admirable, earnest desire for representation. The film’s two leads are a Tamil woman and a mixed Indigenous/Iranian woman. The film prioritizes telling the stories of women who often go unrepresented in cinema and queer stories. Regrettably, a desire for representation can’t be the be all end all of a film. It’s a starting point, but the film still needs a polished script and direction and editing that make the story sing. Unfortunately, This Place doesn’t have that.

This Place begins with Kawenniióhstha moving from her reservation to Toronto to study writing. Kawenniióhstha loses her notebook, which is found by Malai. Malai has lived in Toronto her whole life. She studies advanced mathematics as she finds the certainty of numbers and equations comforting. In her personal life, Malai’s father is dying. However, she and her brother are partially estranged from him. Malai and Kawenniióhstha begin a friendship that turns to romance. The two have both many things in common as well as aspects completely foreign to the other. Both struggle with a sense of place and community. Though the ways they deal with their individual culture and lives interrupts their relationship.

Where This Place falls down for me is the screenplay. The outline of the story is good. And there is great insight into the culture and community of these individual women. But the dialogue overall often feels either stilted or bland. It’s hard to engage with Malai and Kawenniióhstha’s budding relationship. Much of their early conversations are extremely basic small talk and character exposition. The dialogue always seems to ping pong between filler sentences and passionate info dumps that relate to the film’s focus on cultural representation. Good dialogue ideally feels both realistic and interesting. This Place struggled with making their screenplay hit both of those marks.

The film also over relies on silence and an unmemorable music score. There’s far too many scenes in this 87 minute movie of a character just walking around Toronto while music plays. There’s absolutely a world where these scenes really could’ve contributed to the mood and themes of the film. But as the debut film from director V.T. Nayani, that mood doesn’t come through strong enough. Kawenniióhstha and Malai’s movement from friendship to romance also happens completely silently. Pulling a scene like that off without dialogue is a tall order. And This Place falls short. The film and this core relationship often feels awkward with its lack of dialogue. And then, when they do speak, you still don’t feel the connection between these two women.

Much of my other critiques of the film do just come down to this being a low budget film from a first time director. V.T. Nayani simply hasn’t mastered her craft yet. You can see the passion and the personal connection she has to this story. And that really does help hold the film together. But when you break the film down on a technical level, it’s unremarkable. The pacing of the overall story and individual scenes feels off. Establishing and ending of scenes is often something that feels awkward. And the editing of the film also helps none of these issues. Nayani absolutely has the potential to go far as a director. You can read her passion in every frame of this film. But there’s a level of polish that this, her debut film lacks.

This Place is ultimately a film I wholly support in theory. WLW films abiut women of colour are rare. Cross-cultural relationships are rarer still. And this is one of only four WLW films I know of to feature an indigenous character. But it’s hard to think of positives beyond the film’s impressive representation. Kawenniióhstha and Malai never feel like real characters so much as well, representations. Because there’s so little representation, This Place felt the need to have their characters hold up and represent their entire cultures onscreen. And that’s simply too much to ask of an intimate, 87 minute film.

Overall rating: 5.1/10

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