Harry Cepka, the director of Raf, uses the dreary Vancouver winter to create an effective atmosphere in this portrait of a young woman ready to burst out of her shell.
Raf is a twenty-nine-year-old prairie girl whose Vancouver life consists of sketchy manual labour jobs and watching her boyfriend’s friends drink and play video games. Her real life takes places in private, and it is epic. When she is alone, Raf dances. She listens to techno and lets her body express her feelings with a freedom she never feels in the company of other people. She turns up the music and projects videos of other dancers as part of her experience. She also photographs herself wielding knives and creates quirky characters that she inhabits. Raf is inarticulate but she expresses herself through movement and creating outsider art.
Everything changes when she meets Tal, who jogs by, asking for a high-five. Raf responds by dropping her groceries to raise a hand, an indication of things to come. The two women later see each other across a noisy club, and bond through ironic dancing. Then it is full-steam ahead for this intense friendship. Raf has been waiting for someone to notice her, and she is happy to be the sidekick in Tal’s adventures. They rampage around town, throwing paint on a car belonging to a cat-caller, pushing teenage boys into the ocean, and taking men home only to unceremoniously reject them.
Tal is entitled, needy, bossy, and mean. She is the type of self-assured woman who enjoys collecting people who strike her as interesting specimens; she is a user who will soon tire of Raf. This is obvious to the audience, but not to Raf. Cepka creates this dynamic with subtlety, so that, even though this kind of lopsided friendship is a common trope, the story still feels fresh. The film is an original take on the fascinating, liberating new friend, due to the remarkable character of Raf and the intense performance by Grace Glowicki. Raf has a “fantasy of splendour,” said the director in a Q&A after the film. She longs for something more but isn’t sure what it is or how to get it. She has never before found anyone who inspired her or who pushed her until Tal comes into her life.
A trip to Tal’s fancy vacation home sets the scene for tension and confrontation. Tal’s brother arrives, ludicrously pretentious and self-involved, and also unimpressed by Raf. Raf overhears a conversation between the siblings which sheds light on how she is seen as a pet project rather than a person. Raf is persuaded to take some magic mushrooms, almost chokes, and finally explodes in anger at being constantly patronized and underestimated. Raf ends up alone again but, after the wonderfully abrupt ending, there is a strong sense that she is finally about to find the life she wants and ready to make her mark on the world.
Much of the film is about class. Whatever her demons, Tal has an easy life and does not need to work as a janitor or trim hedges for a man who never pays on time. She describes her current occupation as ‘getting into teas.’ She has an expectation of security and comfort that Raf will probably never achieve. My only real criticism of the film is that the rich people are uniformly selfish and patronizing in a way that feels one-dimensional.
Raf was filmed on a tiny budget in twelve days in Vancouver. It was January and the grey weather worked perfectly to create a slightly dreamy, hazy palate for the film. Nothing is prettied up, including Raf herself. It was a brave choice to show Raf as untidy, badly dressed, with bad skin, since it is still so unusual to see a woman who doesn’t have to be physically perfect on screen. Stylistically, Cepka builds a vibrant insular world for the two women by combining downbeat realism with a more heightened ambiance. The film is animated further by some weird minimal techno and original musical compositions. As a whole, the film welcomes innovation and makes a lasting impression.