The Must See in this year’s Cinequest is the Canadian indie Lune, an astonishingly authentic exploration of bipolar disorder. Miriam and her teen daughter Eliza must navigate the impacts of the mom’s illness. Played by writer and co-director Aviva Armour-Ostroff, Miriam is the most singular movie character I’ve seen recently.
Miriam is her disease but not just her disease. Smart and funny, and devoted to her daughter without smothering her, she would be the Cool Mom if she weren’t always on be edge of mortifying everyone.
But then there is the bipolar disorder. Miriam’s streams of manic speech have the rhythm of poetry. When she becomes totally absorbed in a manic episode, she tries to enlist everyone she knows in wildly impractical schemes, like a spur-of-the-moment trip back to her native South Africa to vote for Nelson Mandela. And it can get inappropriate, as when she invites Eliza’s high school boyfriend to tag along to Africa.
Having survived previous episodes, Eliza is forced to parent her own mom, always beseeching her to take her meds. The illness has led to their being evicted countless times, and Eliza bears the emotional scars. Miriam often makes Eliza cringe, but Eliza knows that it can get even worse. Eliza’s boyfriend, with no reason to expect otherwise, vastly underestimates the consequences of Miriam’s illness.
Armour-Ostroff has made Miriam funny, but not only a subject of comedy, and neither harmless nor a dangerous monster.
Now, this authenticity is not easy to achieve. Having had family members with mental illness, I particularly despise the exploitation of mental illness for entertainment. I am painfully knowledgeable about multiple personality disorder, and I can tell you that it may be unpredictable, but it sure isn’t amusingly entertaining like in The United States of Tara. (The Three Faces of Eve, on the other hand, is acceptable to me.)
I asked Armour-Ostroff what drew her to the topic of bipolar disorder? She replied “My dad is Miriam. The character of Eliza is based on me.” Wow. There you have it – the key to the authenticity of Lune.
Armour-Ostroff’s performance is riveting. The rest of the cast is excellent, including Chloe Van Landschoot as Eliza and Vlad Alexis as Eliza’s boyfriend.
Lune, which she co-directed with her partner. Arturo Pérez Torres, is the first feature as a director for Armour-Ostroff. The two co-produced 2017’s The Drawer Boy, which Pérez Torres directed. The Drawer Boy can be streamed on Amazon.
I screened Lune for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021 as the Must See of the festival. Lune‘s next stop on the festival tour is RapidLion – the South African International Film Festival. There’s one more night to stream Lune at Cinequest for only $3.99.