How would your 13-year old self view grown-up you? This is the question explored in the magically surreal directorial feature debut from Lynn Shelton, We Go Way Back.
“Hey, grown-up Kate! What’s up? It’s me, your 13-year old self. How are you? Where do you live? Seattle? Paris? Are you happy? Do you have a boyfriend?”
These questions haunt We Go Way Back, underscoring a life that is both eccentric, strange and utterly banal. We Go Way Back tells the story of Kate (Amber Hubert), a 23-year old accountant by day, actress and theater patroness by night. Every year on her birthday, Kate opens a letter written to herself when she was 13. These letters serve as a haunting counterpoint to the confusing, triumphant ridiculousness of adult life. Until the haunting becomes more literal…
We Go Way Back is a quiet, slice-of-life film following the sometimes interesting, sometimes painful frustrations of Kate-At-23. Kate spends her nights working at a small local theatre in Seattle, where the film takes place. She’s a textbook case of putting everybody before herself. She does the theatre’s bookkeeping, runs every errand by the eccentric theatre director, played by Robert Hamilton Wright, and performs often demeaning roles on-stage, including spending most of her last play as a decapitated corpse. We Go Way Back follows Kate as she undergoes experiences all-too-common for young women – drinking, smoking, having casual sex in the wake of a messy breakup. The words from her 13-year old self are repeated like a mantra underpinning the film, giving a poignant sub-text to these experiences while avoiding heavy-handedness or moralizing.
Much of We Go Way Back focuses on Kate getting cast as the title role of Hedda in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. There’s one catch – the director wants her to deliver her lines in the play’s native Norwegian. Except Kate doesn’t know Norwegian. Much of We Go Way Back revolves around Kate’s late-night study sessions, while enduring her boringly banal day job as an accountant. All the while, the words from Kate’s 13-year old self continue to underscore her day-to-day struggles.
Katie, played by Maggie Brown, was a real wild child, spending her days roaming the forests with a battered old camera. She is the spirit of pure, primal, unbound creativity, forcing Kate to ask the question – “How did I get here?”
The slice-of-life quietude gets interrupted when things take a turn for the magical. Katie becomes real, dogging Kate’s footsteps. She spends much of the film trying to escape this shadow, only to finally submit and befriend her younger self. The two walk down long Pacific Northwestern roads, talking of life. “What’s beer like? Are you drunk? What’s that like?”
While the magical realism could make We Go Way Back light and trite, instead it allows subtle, unspoken themes to ring out, loud and clear. The image of adult Kate walking desolately down the road, followed by her younger self, will likely resonate with any frustrated artist, or anyone confused about navigating adulthood, wondering where our youthful dreams went.
The back-and-forth between magical realism and the painful mundanity of her day-to-day life makes both threads work. We Go Way Back might not be much if it just focused on the arthouse play rehearsals of Hedda Gabler, with Robin Hamilton Wright playing the flaky director to a T. We Go Way Back does for local theatre what Steve Buscemi‘s Living With Oblivion does for indie film. It offers some humour and levity in what could otherwise be an oppressively heavy film. It also serves as a poignant lens to view the string of casual sex Kate engages in. She’s rarely an active participant, it’s just one more realm where Kate prioritizes others before herself.
It’s a good opportunity to note a content warning – a number of the sexual encounters throughout We Go Way Back are non-consensual at best. Those who have trouble viewing sexual assault should tread lightly. It’s a painfully clear depiction of what many women have to deal with, their entire lives. We Go Way Back is an important feminist film for that reason alone.
It’s worth watching for the cinematography, as well. Benjamin Kasulke’s cinematography lovingly recreates young Kate’s wild gaze, lingering on the primordial forests of the Pacific Northwest. It’s a quintessential vision of Pacific Northwestern film, full of rural roads carved out of sprawling, ancient forests; the nearly molecular detail of mushrooms and moss. For anyone not fortunate enough to live in this beautiful part of the world, We Go Way Back offers a welcome window into the Pacific Northwestern wilds.
We Go Way Back is the directorial feature-length debut of Lynn Shelton, best known for 2009’s Humpday. If you follow movie news at all, you may have heard that Lynn Shelton passed away last week due to a blood illness. She was only 54. Watching We Go Way Back, we are reminded of what a great talent we’ve lost. It also offers a depiction of what can happen when mumblecore, a movement Shelton was often associated with, is paired with higher production values, hinting at an indie/Hollywood hybrid that really should be explored further.
We Go Way Back is an unexpectedly moving experience, especially for creative types who wonder how their life’s turned out the way it has. It invites us all to rediscover the joy, optimism, imagination, and endless possibilities of making art when we’re young.
We Go Way Back is screening for free tonight via the always excellent NWFilmForum.
It can also be streamed on Kanopy.
NW Film Forum
ig: @nwfilmforum
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