Deragh Campbell, left, and Casey Spidle in Two Cuckolds Go Swimming, the new film from Halifax-based director Winston DeGiobbi.Supplied
There is a certain kind of Canadian film whose familiar premise – something along the lines “a prodigal son/daughter returns to their hometown to face the demons they ran away from” – invites justified dread.
Often set in the Maritimes or in small rural towns across this great land, these movies compensate for a lack of budgetary resources by offering audiences a wealth of tired melodrama. Already, without even naming a single example, you’ve likely formed a picture in your mind of such under-heated CanCon. And few in the industry would blame you.
Certainly not the Halifax-based director Winston DeGiobbi, even though his new film boasts this initially distressing logline: “Adult film star Molly Chambers flies home to visit her mom in a small, coastal town.” Uh-oh. And yet DeGiobbi’s film is far more daring and provocative than its synopsis points toward, up to and including its title, Two Cuckolds Go Swimming.
Instead of being predictably sentimental or desperately cuddly, DeGiobbi’s drama is simultaneously heartfelt and bizarre, a deeply unsettling family reunion filtered through an aesthetic haze that feels half digital daydream, half VHS nightmare. And it is all anchored by Deragh Campbell, the country’s most courageous actress, in a performance that feels raw and intimate to an uncomfortable degree. All of which helps explain why it has taken so long for the film, which was finished in 2022, to make its way out into the world.
“It’s been quite the journey, from having the idea back in 2016, to starting to shoot it in 2019, and then reshoots throughout the pandemic. It took a while for the film to get invited to screen – it has that real underground spirit and managed to slip through almost every crack,” says DeGiobbi.
Campbell plays Molly, an adult film star who flies home to visit her mother.Supplied
The feature made its world debut at the inaugural edition of Montreal Critics’ Week this past January and will have its Toronto premiere at the Paradise Theatre on Nov. 12 through the Bleeding Edge series, which is dedicated to highlighting under-screened work that boasts a DIY quality.
“Those Bleeding Edge guys, they’re the foot soldiers of cinema,” says DeGiobbi. “And the film fits perfectly with what they’ve been bringing to the scene.”
DeGiobbi, who made his feature-film debut with the warmly received 2017 character study Mass for Shut-Ins, seems to keep as much distance from the mainstream Canadian film scene as Two Cuckolds feels removed from the country’s mainstream.
Self-taught as a director – he credits much of his film education with regular viewings of the 1990s late-night cable film series The Showcase Revue – DeGiobbi has trained his cinematic eye closely on New Waterford on Cape Breton Island, his hometown and the setting for his short films. In his cinematic visions of Nova Scotia, from his shorts to his features, there are no clear lines between amateur and professional performer, while any adult story arrives laced with the half-formed memories of youth.
“My grandfather always had this VHS camera around, and his home videos were not like the usual ones – he had this way of just hanging on somebody’s face until the image would almost start to drop, and a moment of honesty would emerge where you would really see a person,” DeGiobbi recalls, noting some of those home movies are interspersed throughout Two Cuckolds. “They were unusual, and I’m sure they had a kind of unconscious influence on me.”
It is not as if the director is working in complete isolation, though. Over the past decade or so, a community of daring Nova Scotian filmmakers have been making a point of sticking close to home, including Ashley McKenzie (Werewolf, Queens of the Qing Dynasty) and Jacquelyn Mills (Geographies of Solitude).
“I’ve never made a film on the mainland yet, and Cape Breton is still building up its film infrastructure, but for me, shooting back home has always been about working with what you have, and I’m drawn to those very contained stories, intimate run-and-gun films,” says DiGiobbi. “That DIY approach of filmmaking isn’t something that you have to look past – it can actually serve the art and keep it feeling alive.”
Stephen Melanson in Two Cuckolds Go Swimming.Supplied
Collaborating with lead actress Campbell was also key. One of the most lauded performers on the festival circuit and beyond, thanks to her work with Kazik Radwanski (Matt and Mara) and Sofia Bohdanowicz (Measures for a Funeral), the actress brings an intriguing inscrutability to Molly, a fledgling porn star who is the tonal opposite of what audiences might imagine. Anora, this ain’t.
“We met back all the way in 2017 at the Vancouver International Film Festival, and we’d just spend time flushing out the character together and subverting certain expectations – like, what if Molly wasn’t met with judgment by her community, but instead was put on this golden pedestal, like the one girl who slipped out and made it,” says DeGiobbi of Campbell.
He developed a similar collaborative relationship with actor Casey Spidle, who plays an emotionally stunted figure from Molly’s past. “They both knew the script so well and could go into it at any given time.”
The film doesn’t completely go against the grain when it comes to more traditional Canadiana. After all, its soundtrack features Bryan Adams, of all people.
“Our music supervisor prepared a pitch deck because you have to show Bryan’s team how his music will be incorporated into this world, and we got a quick response from his management – they sent us a new master he recorded for Please Forgive Me, which he controls 100 per cent, so that made things easier,” DeGiobbi says. “I mean, why not Bryan Adams, you know? That was essential.”
Two Cuckolds Go Swimming screens Nov. 12 at the Paradise Theatre in Toronto, with a post-screening Q&A featuring Winston DeGiobbi.