Mallori Johnson, left, and Angourie Rice in a scene from the film Steal Away.HO/The Canadian Press
Steal Away
Directed by Clement Virgo
Written by Tamara Faith Berger, Clement Virgo
Starring Angourie Rice, Mallori Johnson, Lauren Lee Smith
Classification R; 113 minutes
Opens Friday, July 17th
Canadian filmmaker Clement Virgo’s Steal Away, which premiered in the Special Presentations section of last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, opens with an intertitle announcing: “Once upon a time, young women travelled to a strange and ruthless land. It was a stop on their way to freedom…” Evoking the levity of fairy tale alongside the weight of language borrowed from abolitionist history, the film is a loose adaptation of Steal Away Home, Canadian historian Karolyn Smardz Frost’s narrative nonfiction account of a real, decades-spanning relationship between two Kentucky girls existing on opposite sides of chattel slavery in North America.
In the book, Frost reconstructs – through years of archival research – the relationship between 14-year-old Frances (Fanny) Thruston, born into plantation wealth, and Cecelia Reynolds, an enslaved nine-year-old given to Fanny as a “gift” and personal maid. At fifteen, Cecelia escaped the Thrustons during a family trip to Niagara Falls, crossing into Canada via the Underground Railroad – yet contact between the two girls persisted even from across the border, preserved in a set of letters exchanged in the years that followed. It’s an unlikely record of correspondence between a girl who had once been property and the girl who had once owned her.
It’s a potent jumping-off point for Virgo’s Afro-futurist science-fiction-vision-meets-political-allegory that transplants this 19th-century history into an unnamed time and place. Here, Virgo’s Cécile, played by Mallori Johnson (of Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is), is a Congolese refugee who is taken in by the wealthy and outwardly benevolent Florence (Lauren Lee Smith, of Virgo’s 2005 film Lie With Me) to work, along with her ailing mother, as a housekeeper. Florence’s sheltered and self-conscious teenage daughter Fanny (Angourie Rice) latches onto Cécile with an intensity that lives alongside the hierarchies of race, gender, and class that striate each girl’s reality, quickly sliding into a dynamic only further burdened by Florence’s possessive admiration.
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Set within Florence’s sprawling estate, the space charts the social structures that govern the people who dwell and labour on its grounds. When Cécile catches the attention of Rufus (Idrissa Sanogo Bamba), the estate’s gardener, Fanny’s envy of Cécile – of her joyful ease, her sexual autonomy, her attentive self-adornment, her connection to both her culture and self – slides into the arena of the psychosexual, hinting at an undercurrent of rot that lives just beneath the surface of genteel estate life.
Fanny is not naive about her own racial and class privilege; if anything, that self-awareness, however initially limited, is key to the entitlement she moves through her world with, and to the discomfiting displays of power she enacts over Cécile. Ignored romantically by Rufus, she takes instead to exposing herself to the estate’s Black labourers; to courting the eye of one of the unnamed state’s soldiers charged with tracking down so-called “illegals”; to seeking out Rufus’s friends for sexual attention while dressed in Cécile’s clothes and jewellery. It’s an uneasy and, in certain ways, understandable need for teenage sexual exploration – one where, for Fanny, desire is inextricable from the material, oft-times violent, conditions that structure the world around her.
Virgo and co-writer Tamara Faith Berger let these politicized undercurrents calcify, uncomfortably and slowly, while also quietly building out the hidden abuses by Florence and her estate. In this sense, Steal Away reveals itself to be far more than a coming-of-age story: it locates Fanny’s sexual maturation inside the very hierarchies of power that have produced it. Her desires are an adolescent awakening as much as they are bound to her maternal inheritance – an entitlement to others’ bodies that is rooted in race, gender, and class that, as we come to learn, has been passed down from Florence in more ways than one, imbuing nearly every aspect of Fanny’s experience of the world.
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It’s an entanglement of intimacy and ownership, rendered under systems built on human property, that speaks potently to the film’s source material. The relationship between Cécile and Fanny sits in a tense space somewhere between friendship and exploitation, but it is only Cécile who innately understands the true nature of these implications from the outset. Johnson plays her with a watchfulness that never succumbs to victimhood or easy triumph, and it’s the film’s smartest performance choice. It’s an incredibly layered performance that witnesses with depth the observations and calculations underneath the respectable composure demanded of her.
Where Steal Away falters is in its hunger for story and thematics. While the combination of fairy tale, gothic melodrama, and science-fiction dystopia is rich with allegorical potential, the film’s ambiguities are compelling exactly to the degree that they remain unexplained – while the film’s first half builds a tense and unsettling poetics, its second half gives way to an uneven narrative reveal that can’t quite carry the weight of everything the film has asked it to hold.
Buoyed by a fantastic cast and wholly attentive cinematography and costuming, Steal Away puts itself in the unenviable position of having to narratively settle up dense thematics. That strain, ultimately, belongs to a body of work from Virgo, from Rude (1995) through to Brother (2022), that has always been most interested in power and the ways in which it has structured and governed the world around us. With Steal Away, Virgo traces how desire, however presupposed to be a private or personal undertaking, carries with it the histories of who has been allowed to want and who has only been allowed to be wanted.