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***½/**** starring Zola Grimmer, Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore written and directed by Avalon Fast
by Walter Chaw I’m thinking of an Ani DiFranco song–a fragment, really–called “Hide and Seek” that she’s only released as a live cut. You can find it on her 1997 album Living in Clip. It’s a spooky tune, just a bass riff on a loop with lyrics about a little girl learning of the hell that is the transition from innocence to experience. I listened to it obsessively in the miserable year before I met the woman who would be my wife: struggling through a series of doomed and enervating relationships and wondering, not for the first time, if anything was worth it enough to keep going. I have a complicated relationship with this song. It opens:
Me and all the kids from the neighbourhood We’d play out on the street all summer long. Rule was we’d have to go home at night when the street lights came on.
We were oblivious to the rest of the world. We’d hold up the cars in the street. We always played boys against girls and both sides would cheat.
DiFranco introduces the track as a work in progress, and she has yet to finish it. She punctuates her crystal-clean soprano with groans and nervous giggles. I’m haunted by it. I thought of it a lot while watching Avalon Fast’s sophomore feature, Camp. Both understand that nostalgia is horror and shame, helplessness and terrible inevitability. Nostalgia is the chronicle of the moment before the moment ends. It is, by its nature, a capsule of the delicate, immortal beauty of doomed things. Camp captures the time dilation that accompanies severe depression–how reality flexes so that nothing seems real anymore. Everyone is wearing disguises. Especially you. Camp feels like that summer at the end of the world. Like how the “Ladies First” cartoon from Marlo Thomas’s Free to Be You and Me made me feel when its “tender, sweet, young” hero is boiled and eaten by tigers. Or Braiden Ortiz’s short film The Hunt Among the Green, when tiny Brooke loses her voice beneath a pile of rubble. Or Fast’s own feature debut, Honeycomb, which begins, as Camp does, with a group of young women away in the wilderness in search of their power when awful stuff begins to happen.
Camp worked me over in a way similar to how I Saw the TV Glow did. As in Jane Schoenbrun’s masterpiece, its characters fixate on the decision we blame for the course of our lives. I visualize mine as a literal crossroads. How I’m sitting there looking at the sky until the sun comes up on the last day of my life. I have a highway map for skin. Veins, scars, stretch marks–these are the roads I’ve travelled. When I tell my story, I point out the different paths I should have chosen at every moment of crisis. We seek out the cure for despair, but there aren’t salves for the catastrophe of trauma. Even so, you will spend the rest of your life looking. What if you’d gone in a different direction? What if you’d chosen something else? Would you be okay now? Would you finally be okay? One night, Charlie (Giselle Morison), the best friend of sad-eyed, mordant Emily (Zola Grimmer), ODs in the front seat of Emily’s car as they escape one awful party in search of another. Right before she dies, Charlie is trying to remember something she’d wanted to tell Emily. It’s tickling at the back of her head, and then she’s gone. Months pass, and Emily is sent to serve as a counsellor at a Christian summer camp. She’s not religious. Neither is her kind, well-meaning dad (Mike Tan), although he hopes Emily will be able to find some peace there. Failing that, he trusts that Emily will latch onto a few fun atheists lurking in the flock’s clothing. Emily’s had a tough go of it. Even before Charlie, I mean; where’s her mom, anyway? Her dad is scared he’s losing his daughter. She’s losing herself.
The performances in Camp, save Grimmer’s, are forced and artificial. It works because the film is essentially about feeling as though you’re forced to be artificial. The price of being yourself is high. Emily, challenged to “truth” in a drunken round of “Truth or Dare,” confesses her biggest regret is an accident she caused that killed a child. They all tell her she needs help. They shut her down with their imitation of concern. The reward for candour in a society built on pretense is ostracization and condescension; people make you feel crazy for not caring what they think. They make you the villain because the truth reminds them they’re liars. Emily becomes fast friends with co-counsellors Rosie (Cherry Moore), Nev (Lea Rose Sebastianis), Hope (Ella Reece), and Clara (Alice Wordsworth). Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith) is the camp leader and maybe dipping a little heavily into the Kool-Aid that nebbishy but pathologically devout Dan (Austyn Van de Kamp) is serving. That the religious are creeps is a feature, not a bug, but these people at least seem to have their hearts in the right place. And they do a lot of partying. Drinking, smoking pot, talking about eating disorders and boys and broken hearts. Emily and Clara fall for each other. Then the kids arrive, and Emily is paired with serious, intense Eden (Izza Jarvis), who never misses an opportunity to look for four-leaf clovers. Eden has her first period at camp. Emily steps up to protect and guide her through a tough milestone–one we’re taught to see as a “curse” and treat with disgust.
Fast uses stop-motion animation at various points in Camp–as background elements like a meteor shower during a dialogue exchange, or mote trails that augment a hand gesture. I don’t think you’re supposed to notice it except to the extent that its uncanniness lurks at the edges of your perception. They use it in a few hallucinatory sequences as well, when reality begins to fracture beneath the pressure of so many young women pushing to be freed. Emily starts losing time. She slips between the cracks of social systems she hasn’t agreed to. No one agrees to this shit: we take it as a given. Fast wonders what it would be like if we didn’t just take it. In the production notes, Fast says they’ve always been telling this story, and now that Camp exists, it’s taken over the role of storyteller. “I’ve lost my voice,” Fast says. I hope that’s not true. I hope their voice is film now, the closest simulacrum of paintings on a cave wall animated by fire. Emily has a dream one night that’s bathed in red light beneath a scarlet moon. In the dream, she can’t save Eden from drowning herself in a lake. She doesn’t even try. She talks to a half-submerged Jo, who floats in the water like a corpse bobbing to the surface after a few days among the reeds and fishes. (Fast has a strong command of archetypes.) Jo speaks calmly. As if she doesn’t realize she’s in the water. It’s like a train coming out of a fireplace: it’s wrong, and wrong is terrifying.
Camp is about the oppression of female sexuality. It’s about grief and repression; secrets and lies; daring to tell others the truth, not as a weapon but as a means of defanging trauma and facilitating healing. It’s about fathers letting go of daughters and girls becoming women in the company of other women. The obvious comparison is to The Craft, though the better one is to The VVitch, a film that shares with Camp the same infernal energy, the same atavistic delight. It absolutely nails what it’s like to realize you were a divine creation all along, never a wooden effigy constrained by invisible strings. Camp is a deeply spiritual film, obviously personal and dangerous in its rawness and unpredictability. (Pair it with the Adams Family’s Hellbender.) Late in the film, Nev whispers “follow me” to a sadsack who thinks he’s got a chance with her. When she offers him a hit of something, well, of course he takes it. Emily asks whether it’s wrong to steal from others to enhance one’s own power, and all the girls laugh and laugh. Emily laughs, too.
Towards the end of Camp, Emily calls her dad from a pay phone in an unlikely place and tells him she’s not coming home: “I need to stay.” “Well,” he says, “that makes me sad and happy.” I thought of the call in Oz Perkins’s The Blackcoat’s Daughter, where a lost girl can’t quite hear what her dead father is trying to tell her. I thought of the devastating call from the pier in Rob Zombie’s The Lords of Salem. Every time I talk to the amazing, confident young woman my daughter has become, you see, I also feel sad and happy. In my chest, echoing like a record in a cavernous dancehall, could be playing I Hate Sex‘s “San Francisco,” the track heard over Camp‘s closing credits, furnishing them with its mesmerizing, shoegaze underlay and discordant, ragged, voice-cracking, desperate vocals. I can hear that song in the line of my jaw and the lining of my guts. You think you know what Camp is, and then it’s more. Avalon Fast is someone to watch.
