Written by Amy Nostbakken, Patricia Rozema, and Norah Sadava, based on the play by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava
Directed by Patricia Rozema
Starring Amy Nostbakken, Norah Sadava and Maev Beaty
Running Time: 1 hour and 31 minutes
Unrated – nudity, language

by Audrey Callerstrom

Adapting a play for the screen can be tricky. If it’s a musical, there’s more room to breathe, opportunities for costumes, production design and choreography to expand the space. Smaller dramas, like Mouthpiece, are trickier. Audiences for a film don’t want to see characters spend a lot of time in one room. If characters are in one room, we don’t get the feeling that things are moving forward. This moment is an “in-between.” To mitigate this, filmmakers often move scenes of dialogue that originally took place in one room to a second or third, location and, for whatever reason, it’s almost always a grocery store. Additionally, some plays just don’t translate well to the screen. Either the theme is dated, the transitions are messy, the casting is off, or important plot points are lost.

Mouthpiece is based on a play, and it doesn’t have the clunky transition to the screen, largely due to its director, Patricia Rozema. Rozema has directed many films based on the works of women. She directed the 1999 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, a 2015 film called Into the Forest and most recently, the 2008 Kit Kittredge film. She’s also a writer, having written and directed a couple feature-length films as well as some short films. She respects and preserves the source material, a 2015 Canadian feminist play written by stars Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava. Simplified, Mouthpiece is about a young woman struggling with grief. Cassandra, a Canadian writer in her late 20s, unexpectedly loses her mother to a stroke. Suddenly her world is consumed with things she wasn’t prepared for, like choosing caskets and finding the words to say in her mother’s eulogy. The rest of her family insist that Cassandra shouldn’t write the eulogy, alluding to an incident that had happened the previous Christmas.

In lieu of Cassandra performing monologues to the audience to share her inner thoughts, Cassandra is played by two actresses, Nostbakken and Sadava. As the film opens, their proximity makes it unclear if the two women are close friends or lovers. They sleep in the same bed, they ride on the same bike, they dress alike. Nostbakken is credited as “Tall Cassandra,” Sadava as “Short Cassandra.” They move similarly, but not perfectly, in sync. When one trips on her scarf, the other does, too. When the film ends, it’s not like “Short Cassandra” disappears. They’re equal parts of her personality. When a man makes a pass at Cassandra, Tall Cassandra smiles and says “Thanks!” While Short Cassandra snaps, “Go fuck yourself!” Short Cassandra is not as inclined to be polite.

While practicing the eulogy in (you guessed it!) a grocery store, suddenly the beef aisle lights up and people are dancing on the registers like Stevie Nicks, complete with fringed jackets.  A normally dull place is suddenly the perfect scene for a musical number. At key moments, Rozema includes flashbacks from Cassandra’s childhood of her mother, Elaine (Maev Beaty). Each of these memories pops in Cassandra’s mind as she’s processing grief, regret, and trying to understand her mother before she fully got the chance. Cassandra no longer sees Elaine as “Mom,” but as a person, a person with passions, faults and quirks, much like her own. Elaine was also a writer, but she set aside her passion to focus on her children. It’s around Cassandra age that we start to see our parents objectively. Perhaps it’s because we’re not as dependent on them anymore, or it’s because we’re starting careers and keep our parents in mind as we try to find our footing. It’s likely that Cassandra is at the age that her mother was when she had her. Family drop hints on Cassandra’s own possible future as a mom. “As you become a mom, your mom will watch over you,” her aunt tells her over the phone. Not a welcomed comment if you’re ambivalent about the subject like Cassandra is.

The film never feels constricted in terms of space and time. Rozema has a keen eye for capturing things within the frame. Take, for example, the scene where Cassandra must pick out her mother’s casket. While Tall Cassandra talks about casket styles with the funeral director, we see, in the right of the frame and out of focus, Short Cassandra slipping into the casket. She also keeps Cassandra close in earlier scenes; a tight shot in profile, a close up of her hand as she sits in the bath. The Christmas party flashback lends itself more toward the melodramatic, which kind of offsets the tone. The film is also dryly funny in parts, particular in a scene where Cassandra meets a funny and understanding lingerie saleswoman at the department store. Mouthpiece is about the vulnerable early stages of grief but, more importantly, it’s about how our memory can pull up moments we might have seen as unimportant or trivial in our efforts to understand someone we have lost.

I watched this film through a limited engagement via the film website Seventh Row and is still available there in Canada. In the US,  Mouthpiece is only available to stream on Kanopy and to rent or buy via various sites.