When Anne meets Matt at a friend's wedding in Kazik Radwanski's 2019 film Anne at 13,000 ft, the latter's presence is felt immediately. The two fall in love and bicker, and though their relationship is only a small part of Anne at 13,000 ft, Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson have a palpable chemistry. That same chemistry animates Radwanski's latest feature.
Matt and Mara finds Campbell and Johnson playing a pair of longtime friends who fall into old patterns when Matt returns to Toronto. While Mara is a creative writing professor who hasn't published in some time, Matt has found success as a writer in New York.
As Matt and Mara, Johnson and Campbell play up the charged and witty dynamic of friends who once could have hooked up but never have, relegating their friendship to a liminal space reserved for just the two of them.
Their banter is plagued by competitiveness to be more clever than the other, yet it masks the familiarity, if not intimacy, that they both crave. However, old friends reconnecting once they've grown up is a romantic notion made all the more complicated when one of them is married, which Mara is — and happily so, by all accounts, to musician Samir (Mounir Al Shami), with whom she has a child (Avery Nayman).
Yet, the tension between Matt and Mara is more frantic than simple pining. Radwanski is less concerned with lingering glances and furtive attempts at fleeting touches that colour an (in this case, emotional) affair, and more with the inherent human need to feel understood. At a tense dinner party with Samir's friends, Mara is grilled for not enjoying music, splaying this underlying disconnect between her and Samir uncomfortably for the dinner guests as well as the audience. Apart from their shared history, Matt and Mara share a language — the art with which they express themselves — that she and Samir don't.
This isn't to say that what attracts Mara to Matt is purely intellectual: we veer as close to sensuality as Radwanski allows when Mara tours Matt's rental apartment. In what is reminiscent of a middle-school mating ritual, Matt does a few chin-ups as he shows her around. Friction emerges as his attempt at proving his physical fitness negates their earlier interactions. That's never been why they've orbited each other so closely.
This would be a very different movie if it was at all interested in sex or sexuality; and it's better for its disinterest. Refraining from oppressing its characters with a moralistic framework, Matt and Mara doesn't delight in the thrills of sneaking around; rather, it ultimately becomes a source of anxiety for Mara as she attempts to reconcile who she is with who her younger self wanted — or expected — to become.
What is so astonishing about Radwanski's films is their unrelenting honesty. Even in a film where deceit runs rampant — Johnson revealed in a Q&A at the film's North American premiere at this year's Toronto International Film Festival, that for a significant portion of the movie he played Matt as though he didn't know Mara is married at all, let alone has a child — the essential need for connection, to be truly seen by another, supersedes. Outsiders are often at the focus of Radwanski's work, and as he's progressed through his filmography, ostracization has become less and less external. Anne seemingly has an undiagnosed anxiety disorder, manifesting in her social awkwardness and general isolation; Mara doesn't suffer in the same ways as Radwanski's other protagonists, but she is searching nonetheless.
Dishonesty has plagued filmmaking of late, condescending audiences with didactic storytelling, flimsy characters and cheap endings. So many contemporary films — I'm mostly talking about big studio output — fall prey to some mangled combination of these three, such that they've eroded the viewing experience into a business proposition, stripping it of its artistic nature. Inflated budgets aren't what make good, lasting movies — Titanic and Top Gun: Maverick are the exception, not the rule.
Matt and Mara is cinema pared down to its most necessary elements. Campbell (one of our country's best actors) and Johnson turn out charming performances with sincere emotional depth. Radwanski's work with cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov, which dates back to Radwanski's 2014 short Cutaway, is an evolution from calculated claustrophobia (like in Anne) to giving everyone a little more room to breathe. Michaylov creates beautiful naturalistic images, of course, but the way he trains his camera on his subjects evokes an interiority, heightening the characters' authenticity.
Even Mara Zigler's costume design sing in the same ways as every other aspect of the film: simple and intentional. Nothing is sacrificed at the altar of enterprise. Radwanski has found collaborators who are able to conjure such magic together, and we, the audience, are the lucky benefactors. Matt and Mara is rooted in friendship, from its story to its craft.
Radwanski, ever the realist, understands that big, swooping change to oneself is hardly ever achieved — nor is it particularly necessary. There isn't anything pernicious about Mara's friendship with Matt; it's more of a question of how to adapt for the present rather than live in the past. A worse movie would lean into the romance, the forbiddenness of it all, but Matt and Mara isn't so vulgar. It is far easier to abandon nuance, but Radwanski trades in moments of radical transformation in favour of solidifying acts of love.