Matt and Mara: a sharp cocktail of suppressed desire and professional envy
Kazik Radwanski’s wry Canadian romance follows Mara, a disillusioned creative writing professor, as she reconnects with a man from her past who’s now a successful author.
The protagonist in Kazik Radwanski’s fourth feature belongs to a particular subset of the stymied creatives we so often meet in movies: the writer who doesn’t write any more. Instead, Mara (Deragh Campbell) teaches it, albeit with a listless air that’s largely impervious to the enthusiasm of her keenest students. She can seem nearly as distant and distracted when she’s with her amiable musician husband Samir (Mounir Al Shami) and their adorable toddler Avery (Avery Nayman).
Shortly after she reconnects with Matt Johnson as Matt and Mara’s other title character – a now-successful writer friend from her younger days who becomes her fixation as she prepares for an academic conference – he asks her what she might write if she ever did it again. She tentatively tells him that she’s most interested in “a person who truly believes that they know nothing about themselves” and whose desires are “complete secrets.” Worse yet, these desires could be revealed at any moment “and ruin her life.”
Mara is of course describing herself, but lacks the clarity to realise it. The question of whether she’ll figure that out or go ahead and ruin her life by tumbling into an affair with Matt generates a very satisfying blend of wry humour and nervous apprehension. Radwanski’s film – which has deservedly earned wider attention for the Canadian director since its premiere at Berlin last year – greatly benefits from its warmth and breezy charm, qualities that it shares with one of its inspirations, Eric Rohmer’s Chloe In The Afternoon (1972).
Those qualities also make it very different from Anne At 13,000 ft (2019), Radwanski’s previous feature, which has the same two leads. Whereas the former induced a state of high agitation with its portrait of a woman perennially on the edge of collapse, the new film’s scenes bristle with a more playful kind of energy thanks to the rapport between Campbell and Johnson, both of whom share Radwanski’s young-lion status in Canadian cinema. (The former’s best known for her collaborations with director Sofia Bohdanowicz on films such as Measures For A Funeral (2024), while the latter is the motor-mouthed star and director of Operation Avalanche (2016) and BlackBerry (2023)).
Even at a briskly paced 80 minutes, Matt & Mara manages to be remarkably astute about its central relationship’s cocktail of suppressed desire and professional envy. Radwanski also demonstrates a keen understanding of the dissatisfactions encountered by anyone who ever sought to ameliorate the risks of being an artist by seeking refuge in academia. But in spite of her moments of prickliness and self-sabotage, Campbell’s character ultimately elicits more empathy than scorn. Viewers can only watch with diminishing hopes that Mara will finally realise this man is no answer to her problems.
► Matt and Mara is available on MUBI UK and Ireland from 1 February.