TIFF ’12: Picture Day
***/****
written and directed by Kate Melville
by Bill Chambers 27 according to the IMDb but convincingly aged down, Tatiana Maslany gives a star-making performance in Picture Day as 18-year-old Claire, who’s forced to repeat the twelfth grade after failing math and phys-ed. It seems obvious that she in fact chose not to be jettisoned from the womb of high school just yet, though she shows little interest in actually attending classes, to the consternation of the vice principal (Catherine Fitch). (“You can’t stay in high school forever, Claire,” the VP tells her. “You did,” Claire snaps.) One day, she joins a kid who’s deviated from his gym class to smoke up–are teenage potheads really this brazen now?–and discovers that he’s Henry (Spencer Van Wyck), the timid boy she used to babysit, all grown up. A science wiz who turned down a private-school education (he sort of resents his intellect–plus, it was an all-boys academy), he even grows his own marijuana, in a closet that contains, among other things, a shrine to Claire filled with enough traces of her DNA–chewed gum, soiled tissues, hair bands–that one wonders if he intends to clone her.