In Canadian filmmaker Kazik Radwanski’s intimate and charged third feature, Anne at 13,000 ft, a young Toronto daycare worker struggling with anxiety finds a sense of release in skydiving.
The titular character, Anne, played with affecting nuance by Deragh Campbell, yearns for connection and stability, but finds herself constantly navigating shaky ground with colleagues, family, and a new romantic partner, Matt (Matt Johnson). Anne’s anxiety and social discomfort follow her through everyday encounters, often leading to interactions fraught with conflict and self-destructive behaviour she claims are “jokes,” whether it’s throwing an empty paper cup at a colleague, revelling in the discomfort of her family and Matt when she initiates a surprise introduction, or trying to shove a piece of twine through a vent in her mother’s electric fireplace.
Anne’s struggle to build and sustain connections with people isolates her further from them. She drives away new boyfriend Matt even as she attempts to get closer to him. She yearns for the comforts of home, but lashes out at her mother. Even Anne’s one solid friendship with supportive and caring co-worker Sarah (Dorothea Paas) undergoes a period of uncertainty as Anne worries she’s losing her friend to a new husband Anne barely knows. At Sarah’s wedding, Anne gives a maid of honour speech in which she highlights her need for Sarah’s continued friendship and support. Sometime after the wedding, Anne struggles to cope after alienating those around her and is unable to reach Sarah, countless text messages going unanswered. We empathize with Anne even as she challenges us, and there is heartbreak in Anne’s confusion and distress over the breakdown of her relationships.
The relationships Anne seems most able to maintain are with the children at daycare she is supposed to supervise. For Anne, the kids are more like companions, as she is able to release some tension playing with them and has a natural ability to connect with them on a level she struggles to emulate with adults. This often lands Anne in trouble with her older, sterner colleague, who reprimands Anne for her lax supervision and for taking “mermaid naps” with the kids. Questionable professionalism aside, the children adore Anne. It is perhaps the carefree nature and imagination of children, their sense of freedom and seeming lack of discomfort that Anne is drawn to—a glimpse of which she also finds in skydiving.
Introduced to the extreme sport at Sarah’s bachelorette party, Anne returns for lessons again and again with the goal of being able to skydive on her own, without the confines of being strapped to someone else as she free falls from 13,000 feet up in the air. With the wind in her face it’s the one place she finds freedom from her anxieties and a sense of control, through the very act of relinquishing control and surrendering herself completely to the fall. It’s a brief escape from the everyday conflicts on the ground below.
Writer-director Radwanski’s fervent use of tight close-ups and hand-held camerawork magnify Anne’s frenetic energy and discomfort, forcing the viewer to maintain a disconcerting level of intimacy that intentionally feels suffocating; we’re unable to step back and orient ourselves, much the way Anne is unable to settle into her own surroundings. Even Anne’s family home, which Anne initially seeks out in comfort, crawling through a window one night after a particularly harrowing day, later becomes intolerable to her after a frenzied outburst. Radwanski’s technique inexorably links us with Anne, heightening our own anxiety and tension with every conflict and awkward encounter throughout the film without offering any kind of release. When Anne feels crowded and trapped by the overly attentive saleswomen at a clothing store, we too feel trapped, our boundaries uncomfortably trespassed. Radwanski’s filmmaking style also lends itself to a sense of realism, compounded by the heavy use of improvisation in dialogue throughout the film. While Radwanski’s cinematography and editing choices are mostly effective, initially the lack of spatial awareness and the cuts between different moments in time hinder our ability to identify Anne’s relationships and whether or not we’re moving chronologically through the film. Or, perhaps it’s simply our instincts kicking in as we fight to create space and maintain personal boundaries before we learn, like Anne, to surrender to the free-fall of sensory experience.
After making its debut at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, Anne at 13,000 ft recently became available for digital viewing after the pandemic delayed its theatrical release. The film has received much praise, earning four Canadian Screen Awards nominations and winning this year’s $100,000 Rogers Best Canadian Film Award from the Toronto Film Critics Association.
Score: A-
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.