“Your relationship seems young,” a passport photographer tells poetry professor Mara (Deragh Campbell) at the beginning of “Matt and Mara,” when novelist Matt (Matt Johnson) leaves to take a phone call and mistakes them for a married couple. Friends since college, reunited for the first time in years, the two have the playful freshness of a relationship that, for some reason, hasn’t yet faded or been tested.
Though the title of writer-director Kazik Radwanski’s reflective relationship drama gives the impression that the film will be about these two people in equal measure, it is clearly rooted in Mara’s perspective. The story weaves between Mara’s poetic grammar course, her lectures, debates and one-on-one meetings with students, her increasingly sexually charged interactions with Matt in the outside world and the lived intimacy of her moments at home with her husband, a musician named Samir (Mounir Al Shami), and their young son.
Instead, the title reflects her inability to deal with her internal concept of who she is in relation to Matt. It is as if, in the amber of her mind, they are forever the “Matt and Mara” they were in college. Yet Matt and Mara, singular, are now not who they once were. But also, that entity that was “Matt and Mara,” singular, may never have been what she once was. thought In her poetry course, Mara encourages her students to rework the grammar of their poems, asking them to look at poetic structure from different perspectives to better understand the meaning of words and phrases and the feelings they evoke. Mara must also strive to examine her feelings for Matt.
“I’m trying to decide who’s making who self-aware,” Matt jokes during their first meeting over coffee after Mara describes an idea she has for a piece exploring the nature of identity and how it can be shaped by forces beyond our control. Later, Mara compares the bio on the back of his book, “Rat King and Other Stories,” which describes him as someone who has “sharp interpretations and fresh statements about modern life,” to the dry academic bio on his professor page. Both Matt and Mara, as artists and As humans, we are far more complex creatures than can be summed up in a quick summary written by someone else.
Matt describes Mara as “made of glass”; indeed, Campbell’s body is often tense and fragile, with the air of someone who is constantly lost in thought, expressing herself almost exclusively through words. Beneath this controlled exterior, however, she is a deep well of emotion, kept secret or occasionally shared through furtive glances. In contrast, Johnson brings the same laid-back, carefree persona that shone so brightly in her film “BlackBerry.” But here, this outward exuberance and charm serve to mask the character’s deep-seated insecurities about her place in Mara’s life and the clearly still-raw pain that accompanies a long-harbored and unrequited — or at least unconsummated — love.
Samir gets caught up in recording an album and is unable to take Mara to a literary conference in Ithaca, New York, across the Canadian border. This task is left to Matt, whose place in Mara’s life she has not yet shared with Samir. During a break at Niagara Falls, everything brewing between them comes to a head, forcing Mara to confront the situation as it is in the present. Not much is said, though much is expressed. Somehow, everything changes and nothing changes.
At the end of the film, Radwanski focuses on the unspoken connection between Mara and Samir, where a small gesture speaks volumes about the strength of the world they’ve built together. It’s a gesture that stands in stark contrast to the awkward tension of Mara’s current reality with Matt.
Yet she still keeps Matt as a secret, hidden in her heart like a memory whose true meaning only she knows: tucked between the pages of a book, placed on a shelf where she will always know where he is if she wants to reach him in the future.
The film offers no easy answer to her situation. There is no happy resolution. There is only love in all its forms: messy and simple, spoken and unspoken, shared and hidden. Just as a poem can be transformed by a slight change of intonation, so too is this fractal love that lives in Mara, as it lives in all of us.
This review was presented at the Toronto International Film Festival, which opens on September 13.