I’ve been meaning to write about Alejandro Adams’ films Around the Bay and Canary for a while now, but kept getting distracted. Canary played yesterday at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival and has a screening coming up at Rooftop in NYC on August 7, so it seemed a good time to finally pull together my thoughts and write about both films. Canary is by far the harder of the two films, both to watch and write about, so I’ll start with Around the Bay, which Adams made first.
With Around the Bay, Adams made a quiet, affecting film about a small family: a father, so deeply wrapped up in his own inability to function that he almost completely ignores his young son, and the boy’s older half-sister, who’s been brought into the home after a long estrangement from her father to help care for him after their father’s girlfriend has enough and leaves. Around the Bay has a languid, deliberate pace and a certain emotional distance about it, and I pondered whether its coldness was, in part, intended to allow the audience to better empathize with the boy by immersing us in the emotional coldness he’s trying to survive.

The boy reacts to his father’s emotional inaccessibility by acting out, a lot, and his antics start to feel annoying in the extreme. As adults, we might be inclined to find his acting out merely bratty and to wish that someone in the film would give the kid some discipline. But it’s not just discipline the boy needs, it’s the attention of his emotionally absent father, and Adams uses the boy’s antics to draw us into the child’s sense of being utterly alone, unwanted and neglected. As to whether this is all metaphor as a part of some greater meditation on human condition in the modern world, given Adams’ penchant for the philosophical, I’d be inclined to say yes. But whether mere story or deeper metaphor, I liked Around the Bay.
And then we have Canary, which on an initial glance, is so different from Around the Bay that it’s hard to believe both films were made by the same filmmaker. Plot-wise, Canary is ostensibly about human organ harvesting and a suspiciously innocuous company that transacts in organ redistribution, but I’m not convinced that the plot itself is at all relevant. At times Canary feels deliberately obtuse, as if Adams is parading a film in which the metaphors are so deeply buried as to be challenging to unearth, while double-dog daring some contrarian smarty-pants critic to find the deeper meaning there. But a lot of folks will probably walk out of Canary saying, “what the hell?”
I find Canary as a film, and Adams as a filmmaker, oddly intriguing. There’s something there; I’m just not sure exactly what it is yet — and I’ve sat through Canary two full times, with another half or so in there going back to re-watch particular bits. Overall, while I found Canary an interesting exercise, I don’t think it particularly connects well with an audience. Adams has written on his blog about how he’s an isolationist, a subject he and I had some back-and-forth on; in interviews he seems to favor making statements that imply he doesn’t make his work for a particular audience and could care less whether anyone “gets” or understands his work at all.
I’m not sure I believe this; it seems to me that if you’re going to the trouble not just to make films, but to submit them to film festivals, get screeners to critics and write about them publicly on a blog, you’re seeking to have more people than just yourself and the occasional contrarian who likes anything everyone else hates see and appreciate your work, n’est-ce pas?
Around the Bay was smart and deliberate without talking down to the audience or being overly obtuse; with Canary, I think perhaps Adams went too far the other way in reaching for the brainily abstract and metaphorical; it’s going to get some festival play because it’s different and weird and getting some buzz, but I expect it will also see a fairly high proportion of walk-outs from your average fest attendee. If you watch Canary trying to understand the plot, you’ll be hopelessly lost (or just bored) and will probably want to give up on it early on; if you go into it expecting to see something different and you’re willing to grant Adams that time even if he doesn’t completely succeed in getting there, you’ll find Canary to be, at the least, an film that aspires to be more than just the mundane.

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