New film Out Standing is based on the 2017 memoir of Sandra Perron, the first female infantry officer in Canadian military history.Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press
Sandra Perron is not your typical action hero: She never wanted to stand out. As Canada’s first female infantry officer, she didn’t strive to be a lone wolf who went rogue, or a unicorn whose exceptionality lifted her above everyone else. She wanted to be great within the corps. She wanted to be a strong part of a strong whole, and to belong there.
But as the character based on her says in the new film Out Standing: “There wasn’t enough camouflage to hide me in an army full of men.” The sexism she dealt with cost Perron her infantry career and threatened her life.
I met her midway through this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, alongside the film’s Quebec-based director and co-writer, Mélanie Charbonneau, and star, Nina Kiri. Perron wore a T-shirt that read “Fight like a girl,” and she radiated an undeniable authority that was more impressive because it was low-key and unshowy.
The first producers who vied to option Perron’s 2017 memoir, Out Standing in the Field, wanted to highlight the worst of what she endured from 1991 (when she was one of the first women in her Gagetown, N.B., training camp) to 1996 (when she finally gave up on the military after two tours in then-Yugoslavia). In one infamous prisoner training exercise, she was beaten, tied to a tree and left there for four hours, long after she had passed out.
Review: Out Standing in the Field by Sandra Perron is a revealing and moving memoir
Those scenes are in the movie, of course. “But for me, the big events were not nearly as significant as the smaller, daily aggressions,” Perron says, describing a near-constant drip-drip-drip of swats on the backside, misogynistic slurs, threatening notes left in her room, and having to prove herself anew 20 times a day. (Another female character lamented that men had more respect for her when she was bartending.) “Melanie understood those microaggressions,” Perron continues, “and how to show them.”
Charbonneau read Perron’s book in 2017, and “immediately connected to it,” she says, bubbling with enthusiasm. “I love shooting action scenes, I love the physical stuff, I wanted to show the legitimacy of Sandy in the military – the mud, the bruises, the strength. Yes!”
But she was also woefully familiar with harassment. “I started in advertising when I was 23,” Charbonneau says. “Directing is still a man’s world. People treat you differently, doors are closed. I knew that what Sandy went through was unfair, and I needed to show how it was unfair.”
Kiri, who plays Perron in the film, worked out for months to be able to do chin-ups on camera; she was even more desperate to do justice to Sandra’s mental toughness. “I kept thinking, if I ruin this, I’ll never forgive myself,” she says. “And then I realized that is literally all Sandra wanted – to do a good job. That was the key for me.”
From left: Out Standing star Nina Kiri, real-life inspiration Perron and director Mélanie Charbonneau during the Toronto International Film Festival.Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press
It worked. In Kiri’s performance, Perron sees “the young fighter I was, but also how vulnerable I was – the hits that I took when I was just trying to do something I’d been dreaming of doing since I was 13. The hurt, but also the facade: ‘You’re not going to get to me.’”
Soon after she left the military, Perron was recruited by the Minister’s Advisory Board on Gender Integration and Employment Equity. “I jumped at the chance to effect change that way,” she says, ever the team player.
“I wanted to let them know there was a problem with the culture, but the people weren’t the problem – they were the solution.” She now runs the Pepper Pod, a retreat for women veterans and spouses of those who have served.
“We still have a long way to go, but I see huge improvements. I do,” she says. “You’d have to talk me off a ledge if I didn’t.”
Out Standing includes many male soldier characters who are supportive of Perron, as well as a moment she shared with the top ranking general from her regiment: “You were an astronaut,” he told her, “and we let you go. Shame on us.”
Before filming began, Perron contacted the Canadian military’s then-chief of defence; he wrote a letter advising the Forces that “there will be no obstacle, financial, legal or otherwise, to this film.” This helped Charbonneau access a Hercules aircraft and discontinued military equipment from the 1990s. She was able to shoot in a real training field and have military personnel advise her background actors, correcting any mistakes they spotted in wardrobe or action.
Still, Perron warned the chief that the film wouldn’t exactly be a recruiting video. “No,” he replied. “But we have to keep talking about this.”
That was Charbonneau’s objective, too: If she shows, truthfully, how women are worn down or chased away from their careers, that might lead to discussions about how to stop it. “The courage of Sandra, I think it’s a courage a lot of women have,” she says. “It’s not about defeating an enemy. It’s a fight within women’s lives.”
Women often ask Perron why she didn’t fight back more, break some knees. “Because I would not have graduated had I done that. I would have been like all the women who tried to fight the system and gave up,” she answers. “My way was to hunker down, put up with their crap and show them all that women have a place in the system.”
Perron isn’t haunted by the outright torture she suffered. She still remembers it clearly, but she’s made her peace with it.
“I loved being in the infantry,” Perron says. “I loved, loved, loved it. I would have done it for decades.” She shakes her head. “But you can only fight like that for so long. At some point you get battle fatigue – not from the battlefield, but from fighting your own unit. The constant small stuff is what got me in the end.”
Out Standing opens in select theatres on Sept. 26.