A Simple Curve

by Junius

Where is Gladys now, who swam nude in Slocan Lake in the November cold? Where are Daryll and Shirley, who had me come up to Argenta School in the first place?

A Simple Curve is a BC film that will bring back lots of memories for anyone who has experienced the area north of Castlegar. I knew where Tom was; he had seen A Simple Curve already and appreciated the visual magnificence of his home range from the air, but wanted a deeper plot in the film to match the astonishing physical landscape. Fred Wah has written of those mountains as having “come over him” in his youth. The young hero of the film doesn’t really strike one as having had mountains come over him. For most of the film anyway, he is decidedly not overwhelmed. Maybe that is what Tom meant, who had seven school friends lose their lives one way or another as victims of that countryside.

However, I think of the hero of A Simple Curve as heroically underwhelmed, as an epitome of what Keats called “Negative Capability.” Keats had high praise for those who maintained a calm efficacy and sensitivity in the face of problems and who experienced multiple inputs and stresses without panic or exasperation. This quality of negative capability seems very genuine in this actor—indeed, we read that the director (a Van-couver resident who has here produced a very well-made film) did not really direct the actor much, once he trusted him, letting him be himself. The result is a most attractive figure of rare and proper diffidence.

The contrast to “Negative Capability” for Keats was the “Egotistical Sublime,” and we have two characters who exemplify that, the hero’s two fathers. One is the maker of fine furniture who self-righteously persists in keeping up standards, though there are no customers. The other, an opposite, but equally egotistical, is a business contractor who makes large deals on the basis of a rather ruthless personality.

The young hero takes on the burden of these two sublime egotists, until the rug is pulled out from under his feet. Even negative capability has its limits, thank God. It is, at the breaking point, turned into positive capability, and if you are lucky, you get the active, willful man, the sublime without the egotistical.

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