North of Normal: Mother-Daughter Tale Finds Hope in Love

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B

Filial love, like most kinds of love, is complicated.

Add in drugs, poverty, and general instability and things are guaranteed to not run smoothly. But where there is genuine love, hope prevails. Sidebar: having hippie parents isn’t the best thing ever, even if it looks cool from a distance.

That might be the simplest way to sum up North of Normal, director Carly Stone’s tender coming-of-age drama told as a mother-daughter story with all the passion and upheaval that entails.

Adapted from onetime model Cea Sunrise Person’s 2014 memoir about her deeply unconventional childhood in the wilds of western Canada and the Yukon — ergo the pithy, double entendre title — the film firmly elevates its stars, notably the always-luminous Sarah Gadon, as a young, perennially pot-smoking mother and maker of chronically bad decisions who is nevertheless deeply devoted to her child.

Read our interview with North of Normal stars Sarah Gadon and Amanda Fix

Some of those bad decisions can be attributed to Michelle’s (Gadon) own offbeat upbringing and the teen pregnancy that brought daughter Cea into her life. When we meet the two, they are living off-grid in the woods with Michelle’s anti-authority, free-spirited parents (Robert Carlyle and Janet Porter) in what would be a proper commune if Papa Dick (Carlyle) could keep it in his pants long enough to organize himself and his acolytes.

When Michelle decides to leave the relative stability of her parents’ camp to follow a vagabond paramour — just one of many sketchy meal-ticket boyfriends who will invariably not bode well for Michelle and Cea — we know things won’t end well long before Michelle reveals that she’s a Pisces to the boyfriend’s Aries star sign. Fire and water rarely mix.

Through flashbacks, we watch Cea try to fit in wherever she and Michelle land. As often as not, Cea doesn’t fit anywhere, either because she is too woo-woo to pass for a run-of-the-mill urban kid, or too self-aware and sober to blend in with the thoroughly blunted.

Played as a child by River Price-Maenpaa and as a teen by Amanda Fix, both outstanding, Cea sees modeling as her escape though one can only imagine how that occupation in a pre #MeToo world might have further messed with her head. Especially since Cea pursues it in Paris, far away from even the tangential financial and emotional support of Michelle and whomever Michelle is sleeping with at the time.

North of Normal is gifted with strong and committed performances, and director Stone lingers on her main characters’ faces, allowing them full expression. By contrast, Michelle’s revolving series of lovers — who range from selfish and adulterous to predatory — are captured in less flattering angles. It’s a simple technique but an effective one.

The Scottish-born Carlyle, who lives in British Columbia, is also a welcome on-screen presence even if his affected Canuck accent is more distracting than transporting. Still, this lovely film with its unapologetically female gaze — which premiered last year at TIFF — kept me beguiled throughout. That’s plenty.

North Of Normal. Directed by Carly Stone. Starring Sarah Gadon, Amanda Fix, James Darcy, and River Price-Maenpaa. In select theatres including Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox and Carlton, Vancouver’s Vancity Theatre, Guelph’s Bookshelf, Kingston’s Screening Room and the Hamilton Playhouse Cinema on July 28.