A single mother struggles to protect her two very different sons, growing up in downtown Toronto, in Clement Virgo’s deeply moving film
), with Marsha Stephanie Blake dominating the screen as the Jamaican-Canadian matriarch Ruth, struggling to hold and protect her sons. Indeed, all ofs most powerfully affecting moments centre on Ruth’s love and loss, with her children the source of her joy and sadness.
We first meet Francis and Michael as teenagers at the foot of a gigantic power pylon, an electrical crackle buzzing in the bright rural air. The older, more adventurous Francis is encouraging his shy younger brother to climb this vertiginous structure. “Follow my every move,” he tells him, “think on every step,” assuring Michael that if he does so he will be safe.
Scenes of Ruth leaving her young children at home while she goes out to work night shifts deftly establish the harsh reality of her single-mother circumstance – a reality explicitly clarified when Aisha later tells Michael that “our immigrant parents cleaned toilets and cared for other people’s children… all for us”.
Of course, behind the bravado Francis has his own secrets, and Virgo does a great job of confounding our expectations of macho masculinity, finding tenderness, protectiveness and even neediness beneath the street-tough exterior. It seems relevant that Virgo’s directorial CV includes a couple of episodes of David Simon’s matchless TV series
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