Movie Response: Nobody Waved Goodbye
The movie is simply a simple story about two romantic Toronto couples. The girl is naïve but decent and attractive. The boy is typically a rebel and always at loggerheads with the parents because of the materialistic orientation of the family (Ohayon, par 5). Though romantic like Romeo and Juliet, the couple is faced with truancy and petty offences. When things got to the boiling point and a slant downhill, the romantic fantasy fades out until the couple splits. In this confusion, the girl is pregnant while the boy wrestles his conscious whether to return and face the music while he still has the opportunity to rehabilitate. The movie ‘Nobody Waved Goodbye’ exemplifies the realistic tradition in Canadian cinema in terms of family dysfunction, cultural oppression, and its production techniques.
Even though the movie sounds exciting, it is not flawless at all. In some scenes, the dialogues are dull and boring. Also, some of the acting in the film is a bordering bush-league due to lack of emotional touch, excitement, and fascinations. The camera work is most likely pretentious at best. However, by and large, even as the storyline of the film is increasingly hokey with some combination of soap-opera-ish content, the movie can still win some awards. In fact, in 1984 the movie was ranked number nine out of ten of the Canadians movie at the time by Toronto International Film Festival (Ohayon par 1). The movie could have lost touch with the audience because initially it was designed to be a short documentary. As such, it was assigned a lower budget. But in the process of shooting, director Don Owen decided to shoot a full-fledged movie of a troubled teen (Ohayon, par 2). Being a low budget film, it is obvious it would not have translated into the standards of high budget.
However, even with those limitations, the movie is a perfect example of dysfunctions in society or family. In the film, the parents of the main character Peter Kastner place a heavy burden on the kid. The parents require him to live a bourgeois life in the future even though the kid is just in high school (McSorley, Tom & Andrew McIntosh, par 4). Peter is, in most cases, left wondering and questioning the morality of the social values that are incapable of appreciating even the most basic pleasantry. It is funny that the parents reported the vehicle was stolen, although Peter was with it, they had him arrested. When he decided to leave, Peter discovered that life is not a rose as he had imagined.
Furthermore, this movie paints a picture of a culturally oppressive society of the 1960s in Canada, Toronto to be specific. This movie received an internal mixed review because of highlighting the real-life situation in Canada at the time. Most likely, the film gets the initial negative reviews because of the director’s inability to mould his young protagonist from a non-judgmental depiction (McSorley, Tom & Andrew McIntosh, par 7). The movie was also had a substantial impact on Canadian cinema. Additionally, it was a powerful encouragement to later generations interested in venturing in the film industry. The movie was better precedence to modern films in Canada and the emergence of other movies industries (McSorley, Tom & Andrew McIntosh, par 6). Canada is among the top international film producers that get great attention and audience throughout the globe.
As I conclude, I believe this movie is a crucial milestone that frontier the development of the film industry in Canada. The movie is also an essential reflection of serious generational problems, economic and cultural fissures affecting the postwar Canadian suburbs. Even so, the film demonstrates the relevancy and dramatic power that the Canadian film industry has, and the ability to tell their own stories in a manner that dominates Hollywoood.