Film review: Carl Bessai travels through time and midlife crisis in Field Sketches
Moving from architectural marvel to frozen cabin, the film mixes bitter humour with a poetic fugue fuelled by familial trauma
Field Sketches.
Field Sketches is at the VIFF Centre on April 12 and 14 as part of Canadian Film Week; both showings include a Q&A with the filmmakers
IN CARL BESSAI’S most personal film, a widowed architect returns to the family farm in Saskatchewan and encounters the ghosts of his past.
Vince Gale is the proxy for Bessai himself, and not for the first time, but watch closely during a flashback set at the East German border. If you’re eagle-eyed, you’ll get an exact sense of the director’s proximity to the material. For a few decades, Bessai has managed to maintain a career in film and television while producing his own independent projects, so we’re not surprised when Gale’s character, Peter, faces a midlife crisis over the value of his own work or the compromises he’s made on the road to success.
When Field Sketches begins, he’s recently quit his high-end firm to strike out as a sole operator. It immediately costs him two clients (played by Lauren Akemi Bradley and Ben Immanuel in one of the film’s strongest and most bitterly funny scenes). The losses don’t end there: his live-in partner (Sara Canning) decides she no longer wants to live-in, and then Peter has to break it to 20-something daughter Molly (June Laporte) that he needs to sell the home he built for his family—which happens to be played by a mid-century masterpiece located in the British Properties, designed in real life by master architect Ned Pratt.
Divided into four chapters, Field Sketches then relocates to a wintry Saskatchewan, where Peter encounters an against-type Ben Cotton in two roles, one of them being Henry David Thoreau, along with Canning (again) as a small-town bartender. Isolated in a frozen cabin, Peter—as you can guess—enters into a fugue of past lives and familial trauma, which Bessai handles with a certain poetic élan, and which Gale matches with his unkempt and slightly bewildered demeanour.
The filmmaker is obviously working through something here, so it’s forgivable if things don’t entirely cohere in the end. 
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