Is this the most irritating Toronto-based film in recent memory

If the director Kazik Radwanski intended Matt and Mara to be a sly satire on how Canadian culturati trapped themselves into a complete creative paralysis, then the film actually works. But more likelier, the intention was to air this dead-end, politicized, self-obsessed understanding of literature as serious, and to put it in conflict with its nemesis, the view that fiction should be free to do what it wants and not worry about offense. And there I was, hoping for something along the lines of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, or the Irish film Once. We can’t have good things in this country before literature and film have solved all the social problems.

Mara (Deragh Campbell) is so careful and worried about what fiction does that she doesn’t write at all. She teaches writing at a college, and is raising a child with her husband, the more focused artist of the two (Mounir Al Shami as Samir, who a couple of times in the film emerges from under his mop of curls to speak). Matt Johnson, lending his own name to the male protagonist, is an author who has had some success locally before moving to New York. He is back in town to spend some time with his ailing father, and one day pops in to find Mara at her college.

They begin hanging out in cafes and resume some of their old conversations and squabbles. Against her girlfriend’s advice, she invites Matt to speak to her class. Later, as Samir bails due to touring obligations, Matt volunteers to drive Mara to a conference in Ithaca. A bundle of things said and unsaid complicates their stay there, and by the time they are back in Toronto, both parties are upset. Matt’s father dies, and Mara is there for him. The film ends with Mara back en famille: things resume as before. She now even volunteers to listen to some of Samir’s music unbidden.

Please understand that Matt and Mara is not a bad film: it has a few moments of real feeling and its structure is sound. It also, beautifully, leaves some key things unspecified. It’s its mannerisms (weak dialogue so peppered with “likes” that it sounds completely improvised; characters filmed in insistent close-ups, most frequently in profile), Toronto insiderism and its carefulness that doom it.

Too, Radwanski comes across as an under-informed tourist about the world of publishing and writers. Matt, for example, broke into prominence and made money with a book of essays (“sharp takes on contemporary issues”). In real life, essays are least likely to make any writer starting out famous, especially in Canada, where “the best-selling collection of essays” is a contradiction in terms. Does “sharp” mean politically incorrect, culture-war-y? The film swerves away from any of that. In the scene in which he finally speaks in Mara’s class, Matt urges the students to be controversial because they need to stand out in today’s publishing world. Sound advice. But then the script has him joking about, I’m working from memory here, “that novel Portnoy’s Complaint, where the character rapes half of New Jersey” which is just baffling. There is no rape in Portnoy’s Complaint let alone a character raping his way through any jurisdiction. (There’s an attempted rape of an IDF soldier who fends him off and mocks him; the Jewish-American narrator feels impotent the moment he arrives in Israel anyway.) Any number of other novels with rapey male sexuality could have been included here as an example, but no. To this joke on Roth, Mara says “OK enough” and the scene ends.

In their very first cafe conversation in the film, Mara says to Matt that she thinks it’s arrogant to presume to know someone else’s consciousness. “But it’s imagination” Matt responds, and we realize they are talking about fiction. Arrogance? No viewer will take Mara seriously after this, but the film just doesn’t see it (or doesn’t it?) and goes on documenting all the myriad insecurities and quirks of this puddle of a character. She becomes so irritating later in the story that I started sighing loudly in the almost-empty Cinema 2 in the Tiff tower and wishing she would stop talking.

The other moralizer-about-literature-in-chief is Mara’s close friend Emma (Emma Healey) who warns Mara against letting Matt into her life and into her classroom. How will her innocent students handle that, she wonders? She’ll have to pick up the pieces. She dismisses his book’s success as “everybody in CanLit tripping over their dick about a man saying he feels bad about hurting people’s feelings” (roughly). Surely, you can’t leave it at that, Radwanski? Is this a fair assessment or professional jealousy disguised as social justice feminism? But we move on right away. The two nepo babies of Canadian arts and letters, Emma Healey (father: Michael Healey) and Deragh Campbell (mother: Jackie Maxwell, father: Benedict Campbell) discussing, as characters, the unearned privilege in CanLit didn’t strike anyone involved as… interesting? I guess not.

If the intention was to make Matt appear as the most human of the bunch, the film succeeds. Matt is the only character grappling with actual, existential issues like the death of a parent, or answering your calling even if you know it’ll be imperfect, even if failure is a given - rather than staying pure and perfectionist by not doing anything. Mara’s biggest problems appear to be feeling uncomfortable in a reclining chair, rude Toronto coffee baristas, and not having an ear for music. Why are men in this film free and women the overthinking messes, was this film secretly funded by the manosphere? I’m left with so many questions… and a lot of loud abstract-rock music ringing in my ears (jury is out and remains out on the quality of Samir’s output).

Matt and Mara screens at Tiff until Oct 10.