The Company of Strangers

Company of Strangers, The

 Seven elderly women, between the ages of 65 and 88, and their 27-year-old bus driver are stranded in Québec's Mont Tremblant region when their small bus breaks down. Abandoning the bus, the group finds refuge in a deserted farm house. For three days and two nights the strangers join forces and skills to survive within a picturesque, benign wilderness. The urgency and potential life-threatening danger of the situation is minimized, most notably, by shifting attention away from the crisis situation and towards casual conversations which recount the women's lives. Each of the women's histories is punctuated by a series of family photographs which, along with the use of non-actresses who retain their real names and real lives, convey the authenticity of the women's stories. In the tradition of the NATIONAL FILM BOARD's Alternative Drama program, however, this documentary material is blended with dramatic elements which include a narrative premise, a loose dialogue script and a fictional setting.

The Company of Strangers (directed by Cynthia Scott, 1990) is a disquisition on the process of female aging. The film's skeletal fictional narrative and a rambling, leisurely pace obscure the intricate and heterogeneous details in its representation of "people who are old." The film carves out a space for old women who refuse to become invisible in our culture and who, in their association with thresholds, passages and margins, are rendered, above all, figures of ambivalence. The film presents the aged female body as a visible sign of degeneration and impending death, but it does so by rejoining that same body with the tenacity and vitality that belong to life.

See also Canadian FEATURE FILM.