Wherever You Stand, Be the Soul of that Place
RED ROVER – directed by Shane Belcourt – SPOILERS ⁓
Phoebe
Geologist Damon Pierce (Kristian Bruun) lives in his ex-fiancé’s basement and spends his spare time walking the nearby beach with a metal detector. It is a pleasant-looking beach with surprisingly few people on it. Damon finds nothing of value there until one evening, Phoebe (Cara Gee) goes walking on that same beach wearing a spacesuit costume. She is passing out flyers for a project called Red Rover, which is looking for volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars. Phoebe, an aspiring singer, has been on this beach before, because after handing Damon a flyer, she asks him to look for her missing star-shaped earring.
Beatrice and her lover Mark who tries to embrace the philosophy of Rumi, and mostly fails.
The next day, Damon’s boss Brad (Joshua Peace) fires him for being too honest in his evaluation of a potential mining site. On leaving the building, Damon notices things to which he previously has not paid any mind. He notices billboards promoting Red Rover. When he gets home, he notices his former fiancé Beatrice (Meghan Heffern) and her new lover Mark (Morgan David Jones) having noisy sex upstairs, and when he goes outside, he sees them having sex through a curtainless upstairs window.
Beatrice, who sees Damon watching, seems disturbed by the implications of this, but in a flashback we see her suggest to Damon (when they were together) that they should have sex with the windows uncovered. “Let them watch,” she suggested. But Damon wasn’t up for it. Beatrice pleaded with Damon to travel with her to Australia, but he wasn’t up for that either, so she came back from Down Under with Mark.
Brad, the hard-working hedonist.
The cumulative effect of newly observed stimuli causes Damon to apply to join the Mars mission. Then he finds Phoebe’s earring on the beach. He returns it and an appreciative Phoebe helps him with his video presentation. Phoebe and Damon have sex inside the small replica of a space capsule he built in his kitchen for training purposes. Then she unceremoniously breaks up with him after pondering a picture of Damon and Beatrice.
Mr. Gopi Subramanium (Sugith Varughese), CEO of Red Rover, calls Damon in for an interview because they are impressed by the video Damon did not know he had submitted. (Phoebe sent off a vastly improved version of the original.) When he gets there, he meets biologist Maya (Anna Hopkins), who is also waiting to be interviewed. Maya is surprised that Damon doesn’t know that the interviews are being streamed worldwide. Another thing Damon doesn’t know is that meeting Maya is very likely the most important thing that will happen to him.
Maya
The interviewer asks Damon if he has any questions before committing to a one-way mission. Damon is reluctant to say anything, but finally decides that he does have a question. “What exactly will we be doing up there?” he asks.
“We came here wanting to start over,” Damon continues, “to be new…I’m just hoping that whoever does get picked that they are rooted in something more meaningful than just hitting the escape button on Earth. I hope that Red Rover is about being truly new, because that would be something. Our best human foot forward. Otherwise, we have no right to go up there.”
Damon and Phoebe at the CNE
When Damon meets Maya for the second time, they are waiting for the same train to the airport, having both been selected for Red Rover. She tries to help Damon overcome his fear by having him imagine being in the ship, leaving earth, and heading into space. In a scene that one wishes was much longer, Damon visualizes the projected voyage, and contemplates his place in the grand scheme of things. “It’s called The Overview Effect,” she tells him, “when at that scale you see all as one. I can’t wait to see that.” Damon zones out for a few minutes, then takes off at a brisk trot to the place where Phoebe is scheduled to perform that evening, leaving a very puzzled Maya behind.
Phoebe sings to an almost empty room: “Just come back / I wanna face it / Between the Earth and Moon / I try to find my place to roam / But just like all the buffalo / my heart is bleached out bone.” As though in response to a magical incantation, Damon enters the club.
Miscellaneous Info
Phoebe sings “Come Back“, a song written by Shane Belcourt
Cara Gee told Charles Trapunski of the magazine Brief Take: “It was just such a dream to be able to play a leading role in a romantic comedy. I think that especially because I’m First Nations, that a lot of the scripts that I see with First Nations leads, and very rightly so, are often focused on trauma or are sort of issue-based stories. To be able to tell a story with a First Nations producer-writer-director that focuses on a woman who falls in love is such a rare and beautiful experience.”
The beach frequented by Damon is Toronto’s Kew Beach, where Leuty Lifeguard Station is located.
Director Shane Belcourt told Jason Whyte of the Whistler Film Festival: “My co-writer Duane and I were fascinated with the whole Mars-One thing. This is a real-life program wherein regular people from around the world could apply to partake in a one-way mission to Mars. One of the funding elements was that the training and launch and life on Mars would be televised in a Truman Show manner and that would spark ad revenue and media deals. And shortly after that announcement people started posting their submission videos online and, it just blew our minds…it seemed like an amazing adventure dream dipped in unbearable sadness.”
Brad (Joshua Peace) mentions two specific asteroids, Davida and Ryugu. He suggests that Ryugu, a near-earth object, is rich in nickel, iron, cobalt, and water, with a value estimated at $95 billion. He further suggests that Davida‘s minerals might be worth $100 trillion. In 2014, the Japanese probe Hayabusa2 (はやぶさ2) was sent to Ryugu for the purpose of collecting samples.