FIELD SKETCHES – a film by Carl Bessai – SPOILERS ⁓

Peter (Vincent Gale) is visited by his daughter Molly (June Laporte) who has just graduated university, and they play a variant of Twenty Questions on the drive from the airport. Sitting by the ocean, they have a talk, and Molly explains that she doesn’t know exactly what she wants to do next, and wants to stay with him for a while. Peter is fine with that, and reveals that Frances (Sara Canning), a younger woman he had been dating, has moved in with him.

A widower and an architect, Peter designed the house where Molly grew up, and currently lives in that same house. He has recently given up his professorship at the local university (not the one Molly went to) and removed himself from partnership with fellow architect Bruce (David Cubitt). When a client he inherited from his old firm pulls out of their contract, Peter decides that he must sell his house. He is thinking about living off the land in Saskatchewan (where his family owns a farm) because he needs to figure things out. Molly is attached to the house she grew up in, but she’s trying to figure things out as well, and reacts sympathetically to the news. “Frances,” Peter tells her, “is not going to take it very well. Her whole identity is wrapped up in the house.”

In an attempt to forewarn Frances, Peter left copies of books by Henry David Thoreau around the house hoping to pique Frances’ interest, but she ignored them completely, except once, when she used one for a coaster. Peter’s evaluation of Frances is spot on. As soon as she learns he plans to sell the house, she leaves.

Molly visits her best friend Flo (Tanaya Beatty) who asks “Are you sure you don’t want to let me fall in love with you?”. Molly still doesn’t want to do that. It is the end of Summer and the end of Chapter One. (The film is divided into four chapters, corresponding to seasons of the year.)

After her father’s house is sold, Molly moves in with James (Emmanuel Trier), and the nature of her relationship with him is unclear. Alone in the kitchen, she has a daydream about Flo, which is one of the loveliest scenes in the movie. In her daydream, Molly is writing a book. As she explains to Jane (Gabrielle Rose) a woman she meets in a nearby park, she wants to write a book, but hasn’t decided what to write about. Flo is definitely on her mind, and might be the topic she’s looking for.

The Prairies

On his family’s farm near Southey, Saskatchewan, Peter builds a cabin in which he hopes to stay the winter, but it is inadequate for the purpose and his cousin George (Ben Cotton) lets him use the farmhouse because he spends winters in the city (likely the closest one, Regina, a 45-minute drive to the south). After that, the ghosts arrive, at least in Peter’s imagination.

At a graveyard where his father, grandparents a couple of uncles and an aunt are buried, Peter meets Freddy (Iain Belcher), who wanted to leave like the rest of his brothers but had to stay behind to run the farm. Freddy’s wife Maggie, of whom the family disapproved, also appears. Freddy is a reverse agoraphobe, afraid of leaving the open spaces. Much to his wife’s displeasure, he is “stuck”, a condition that eventually leads him to suicide. His ghost says goodbye when Peter leaves, and is last seen playing his fiddle in a snow-covered bean field. The truck Freddy drives is a 1953 GMC 9430.

Both Freddy’s wife and Molly’s girlfriend are played by Tanaya Beatty. The two characters have similar relationship difficulties, and Flo could be viewed as a reincarnation of Maggie.

Henry (not Thoreau)

Another ghost is Henry (played by Ben Cotton, who also portrays George). Henry is the author of a book Peter picked up in a two-dollar bargain bin. Henry spent two years alone in the woods and his journals were found and published. He speaks in what are probably quotations from the book, which Peter is reading.

“Intention is everything,” says Henry. “Build because you have need of shelter. Create things out of inspiration – like the cabin. That is a worthy intention, not the pursuit of fame or profit…We have a culture that encourages the accumulation of unnecessary wealth, so a person can amass unneeded goods and gain from the status that those goods provide. Very little of it is necessary, but it drives the economics of manufacturing, all of which drives the decay of the planet.”

Peter sees ghosts when he is alone, and this might be why he walks into town. At the Southey Hotel, a very corporeal waitress named Trudy (played by Sara Canning, who also portrays Frances) serves him a beer and asks where he’s from.

“Vancouver,” he tells her.

TRUDY: “Hmmm. Never been there. I hear it’s expensive.”
PETER: “Yes it is, but it’s beautiful. [awkward pause] I mean, it’s beautiful here too.”
TRUDY: “Is it? That’s nice. I got nothing to compare it to.”

In that part of Saskatchewan, the scenery is stark but spectacular and contrasting seasons do give some basis for comparison. At one point in Chapter Three, we see snow-laden pine branches for a few frames. (Oddly, pine trees are not visible in the farm’s vicinity anywhere else in the film.)

Trudy does not alleviate Peter’s feeling of loneliness, and on the way out of the hotel he sees Maggie and Freddy again, this time in an intense scene that illustrates Maggie’s desire to leave, and Freddy’s inability to understand why he can’t bring himself to go with her.

At the start, Peter explained to Molly that he got into a relationship with Frances because he was lonely. It seems at least possible that he was seeing ghosts in the Vancouver house. His wife was gone, and Molly had left the nest. Maybe ha needed to sell the house, not only for financial reasons, but also because Frances failed to exorcise the spirits that appeared to him there, and in one real estate transaction, he got rid of both the house and Frances.

The only other ghost who speaks to Peter is his grandmother Oma (Inga Rosa Kammerer). His grandmother disapproves of his retreat to Saskatchewan, but reassures Peter that things will work out. He sees his father, but they do not converse.

Henry’s final bit of philosophy is the antithesis of Thoreau. “When I first came out here, I wanted to get away from society,” he explains. “I was tired of the social games, of having to be reliant on other people. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about that. And I think we need society. We need each other. And we need to live together. That’s out nature. It’s individualism that doesn’t work out in the long run. And one day humans will build a machine that will do all the thinking for you. It’ll do all the planning, and they’ll tell you it’s to make things easier for you. Easier for the individual. That’s fine, but we don’t need easy.”

In the spring, Molly worries about her father and decides to rent a car (because she hates to fly) and visits him in Saskatchewan. She mentions Thoreau while explaining things to James and he has no idea who that is. Driving back to Vancouver in Frank’s 1969 Chevy, Peter and Molly play Twenty Questions.

Writer/director Carl Bessai told Nick Wangersky of Hollywood North Magazine: “The reason we went to Saskatchewan was I have a family farm in Saskatchewan and my cousin whose name is George just like the guy in the movie. George actually runs this farm still, my father was born in that little house and my uncle and grandparents came from Germany [and] lived in that house. The books on the shelf, are the original German books my grandfather dragged from Europe. The passport we used while playing a younger version of the father is my actual father’s passport from 1960, he had to get a permit from the East German government to go and get his grandma out of the Eastern block.”

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FIELD SKETCHES can be streamed on TUBI.