Rachel Sennott stars in I Used to Be Funny.Janick Laurent/Supplied
- I Used to Be Funny
- Written and directed by Ally Pankiw
- Starring Rachel Sennott, Dani Kind and Jason Jones
- Classification N/A; 105 minutes
- Opens in select theatres June 7
Critic’s Pick
Rachel Sennott has the greatest face. It cannot lie, no matter what her characters are saying. That honesty makes her ideal for films with tricky tones: the funeral comedy Shiva Baby; the murder comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies; the fight club comedy Bottoms, which she co-wrote. (Are you seeing a pattern here?) And it’s essential to I Used to Be Funny, in which Sennott plays Sam, a stand-up comedian and nanny to a young teenager, Brooke (Olga Petsa), who is gut-punched by PTSD after Brooke’s father (Jason Jones) sexually assaulted her. Humour wasn’t just Sam’s livelihood, it was her essential self. Who can she possibly be now?
Writer/director Ally Pankiw (making her feature debut after directing prestige TV including Feel Good, The Great and the “Joan is Awful” episode of Black Mirror) structures the film like a puzzle – we meet Sam when she’s hollowed out, and for a while, we are catching up to why, finding clues in the fleet, naturalistic conversations between her and her roommates (Sabrina Jalees and Caleb Hearon), also comedians. But not because it’s a mystery. The assault is not in doubt. Instead, Pankiw builds her film toward flashbacks of a preassault Sam, so we can mourn how bright her light was before it was extinguished.
I love so many things about this movie: How organic Sam’s comedy feels (“My flirty trick on first dates is to make the man pinky swear not to kill me”). How hard she tries to make the assault not happen. How difficult it was for her to tell the truth, knowing it would devastate Brooke. How long everything stays difficult for assault survivors (in some ways, forever). I love that what Sam is robbed of – being funny – is everything, but not something we often think about.
Mostly I love how Pankiw drops important pieces of information in almost casual ways, because she knows that’s how people, especially funny people, talk. Listen for the line that Sam’s ex, Noah (Ennis Esmer), said in the immediate aftermath of Sam’s assault – the one he wishes he could take back, the one she can’t get over. Huge traumas crash your life, but the smallest betrayals can break your heart.
Special to The Globe and Mail