Broken Social Scene is a band created and ruled by the force of chaos. I’m not as familiar with their entire body of work as I should be, but am instead more of a follower of their offshoots/co-conspirators (Leslie Feist, Stars). SXSW hosted the world premiere of “This Movie Is Broken,” which is part BSS concert doc and part narrative love story. Even though I’m not a die-hard fan of the band, I was really quite taken by the whole endeavor.
The movie opens much like a conventional concert doc, but shortly jumps into the story of Bruno (Greg Calderone) & Caroline (Georgina Reilly). They’ve known each other since they were kids. Now adults, they wake up next to each other after a party one night. Caroline is in town on break from school abroad. They run into Bruno’s best pal Blake (Kerr Hewitt) the next morning by chance. Blake mentions that Broken Social Scene is set to play a concert that night, and off we go.
Just as the band itself is a constantly re-configuring series of moving parts, the love story goes from conventional to unconventional at unexpected moments. People wander around and behave like human beings, not the same inorganic constructs that we have shoved down our throats so often in independent cinema. What at first glance seems to be your run-of-the-mill “indie movie hipster romance” finally questions precisely what “conventional” has become or should be, without winks or nudges in the least. Things just happen, as in real life.
Writer Don McKellar won a Tony for one of the most unique and charming Broadway shows in years with “The Drowsy Chaperone,” and he’s composed something similar in spirit here for director Bruce McDonald’s voice to speak through. We get solid sequences of full songs and fragments of others punctuated by the layered in narrative; its not unlike the complex construction of BSS’s music. In other hands, the mixture may seem forced, but MacDonald and his team have baked up a pastry that is at once airy and sweet as well as dense and savory.
Until some time today, the title of “This Movie Is Broken” had me all knotted up thinking it was not much more than a not-so-clever play on the band’s name. In the clearer light of reflection, I see that its evoking the nature of the composition being as unplanned and marvelously chaotic as real life. I had plenty of assumptions and predispositions, all of which were delightfully upended. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a concert film that surprises me and provokes such a prolonged reaction as this one. I expect it’ll be a long time to come before I encounter something so equally unique, enjoyable, and memorable. [A] – Moisés Chiullan