I’m mostly familiar with the Drifting Snow team for their work in documentary. Director Ryan Noth has a respectable body of work in documentary as an editor, producer, and director across shorts, series, and anthology films. Frequently collaborating with Tess Girard, Drifting Snow’s producer and cinematographer, Noth’s delivered visually striking and thoughtful work in projects like The Road to Webequie, Farm Crime, A Tomb with a View, and The National Parks Project, to name a few. Drifting Snow illustrates a fine eye for realism and a strong sense of a landscape’s power. The sombre and strikingly shot film is poetic, meditative drama with a fine performance at its core.
Drifting Snow’s sharp feat comes from Sonja Smits, who makes a welcome return to feature films. (She’s been quite active in TV the last decade.) Smits evokes a woman roused from a long winter’s nap. Her character Joanne adapts to life alone in Prince Edward County after her husband, John (Colin Mochrie), passes away. The beautiful landscape of Ontario’s wine country looks awfully desolate when one spends the winter nights alone. The chill of routine sets in as Joanne goes through the motions making her pottery and tending to her chores.
One cold winter’s night sees Joanne collide with Chris (Jonas Bonnetta), a thirtysomething in the County. Chris is back home tending to his mother’s estate and dealing with dwindling vision. His patchy vision, combined with the slick spots of black ice on the country roads, brings a fateful encounter.
Windy Roads and Foggy Patches
Joanne and Chris respond to their accident in the most Canadian of ways: they help one another. She accompanies him to Ottawa since his car can’t make the trek because of the bump. Along the way, the narrative drifts in and out. The winding road guides them both through hazy patches of memory and the volley their memories off one another to make sense of the blind spots in their paths.
Flashbacks observe as Chris tries to make a go with a media start-up and struggles with personal relationships. He wonders about the urban/rural divide as life in the county tempts him. Manically paced meetings with motor-mouthed Torontonians inject a whiff of condescension towards the Bog Smoke (and, apparently, a disdain for wind power) into Chris’s journey. His (ex?) girlfriend (Jess Salgueiro) worries about county life because one can’t cross the street and buy an avocado. His (annoying!) sister (Rachel Bonnetta) is an unhealthy presence in his memories that he needs to reconcile. Similarly, Joanne revisits days with John, solo cross-country ski treks, and trips through the county’s winding, undulating roads. She, too, seeks peace, serenity, and comfort with her place in the world.
At a Crossroads
As past and present weave throughout the journey, Drifting Snow puts its travellers at a crossroads. Smits shines in a thoughtful and introspective performance that suits the film’s contemplative style. The interplay between past and present evokes shifts in consciousness. There’s a visible awakening in Joanne as she shakes her memories and roots herself in the present. Bonnetta, who also did the film’s music, makes a respectable dramatic debut. He seems more comfortable with Smits and scenes that favour silence, but less at ease while exchanging frenzied dialogue with over-caffeinated Torontonians. The stillness of the film suggests this is the actor’s shrewdly intuitive take on the character’s relationship with the county air.
Noth and Girard harness the chill of the winter landscape effectively, conveying the isolation and grief that both riders face. Evocative aerial views lend a great sense of calm and composure in these landscapes of loss: this is a film about slowing down and becoming grounded. The melancholic fields and highways heaped with snow surprisingly don’t lend Drifting Snow an essential coldness. Like cold weather in Canada, grief is just something with which one learns to live. It comes in drifts.
Drifting Snow is now available on VOD.
