Power games

Leelee Sobieski, left, and Tricia Helfer get into the dominatrix business in the film Walk All Over Me. (Mongrel Media/Capri)

The songs of mellow folksinger Gordon Lightfoot don’t usually conjure up images of whips and chains. But that was the case for Robert Cuffley, director of the kinky new comedy-thriller, Walk All Over Me.

“The movie’s first title was Alberta Bound,” reveals the Calgary filmmaker, referring to a classic Lightfoot tune that’s a particular favourite in Cuffley’s home province. “I was sitting, drinking coffee, and thinking, What if Alberta wasn’t a place, but a young woman?” And suppose that young woman was played by actress Leelee Sobieski of the TV miniseries Joan of Arc, and she got mixed up in the world of S&M?

Cuffley was eventually convinced to scrap the punning title, which, as one of his distributors pointed out, would be meaningless outside Canada. But Cuffley did get Sobieski and retained the sadomasochism theme.

The result is a quirky little crime caper with debts to Tarantino and Lynch; it arrives in theatres after screenings at the Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver film festivals. Walk All Over Me has already been sold to the U.K., Australia, Russia and India, but perhaps most significantly, ex-Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein scooped up the U.S. distribution rights during the film’s premiere at TIFF.

The Weinstein sale is a sweet deal for Cuffley, an up-and-coming writer-director with only one previous feature on his CV: 2002’s Turning Paige. “We’re excited by it,” he says, speaking by phone from Vancouver. “It means that hundreds of thousands of people who wouldn’t have seen it are now going to see it.” Although, he adds, he’s been confident of the film’s potential ever since he first pitched it to an executive at Canada’s Movie Central. “Halfway through the pitch she said, ‘I can already see the poster!’ As soon as I heard that, I knew we had something.”

Any movie that puts Sobieski and the equally statuesque Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica) into bustiers and knee-high leather boots has got to be bankable. But Cuffley claims he never considered the film’s marketability when he and co-scenarist Jason Long dreamed up the story. “I’m not naïve, but I just don’t think, What’s going to sell?” Cuffley says. “It’s much like humour: if you go into it thinking, I’ve got to write something funny — or in this case, something marketable — it comes across as forced.”

That may explain why Cuffley also didn’t realize until the festival showings that his film is funnier than he intended. The humour comes mainly from Sobieski’s disarming performance as Alberta, a timid, gawky klutz who essays the unlikely role of a whip-cracking dominatrix. When the movie opens, Alberta is working as a grocery clerk in tiny Coaldale, Alta., where she accidentally screws up a boyfriend’s drug deal and has to flee the consequences. Hopping a bus to Vancouver, she arrives on the doorstep of her old babysitter, Celene (Helfer), who came to the West Coast years ago with the dream of becoming an actress. It turns out that Celene has found a more lucrative profession in Lotusland — as a high-end S&M hooker.

Seeing how much ice-queen Celene gets paid for humiliating her servile clientele, Alberta decides to have a go at it. She secretly assumes Celene’s identity and sets up a meeting with a new client, a harmless-looking nebbish named Paul (Jacob Tierney). He’s also new in town — and new to S&M games — and their assignation, in the public glare of a shopping mall food court, is an amusing spin on the awkward first date. Although she arrives tricked out in Nazi regalia, Alberta’s idea of dominating Paul is to order him to buy her hot-fudge sundaes. An over-eager Paul, meanwhile, takes her command that he act like a dog a little too literally.

Cuffley, who shot the film in Winnipeg, says the scene’s nutty vibe was partly due to sleep deprivation. The production rented a mall for the shoot, but could only do it after-hours. “That was a day where we started at 11 p.m. and finished at noon the next day. There were so many takes where the actors were so tired they started slurring their words,” he recalls. “But that weird energy added to the scene and made it a little bit goofy, which I think is really sweet.”

Robert Cuffley directs a scene from his second feature film, Walk All Over Me. (Mongrel Media/Capri)

At that point, the film looks like it’s about to become a romantic comedy with a pervy twist. But then the crime plot resurfaces. Paul, it turns out, is also on the lam, from a trio of thugs led by the creepy Rene (Jesus of Montreal’s Lothaire Bluteau, looking like Iggy Pop) who believe he’s made off with a half-million dollars of their cash. They show up at Paul’s place just as he and Alberta are about to get down to business and proceed to add some unplanned sadism to the proceedings, involving spanking and (wince) a steam iron. Alberta escapes their clutches, but she soon has Celene — and Celene’s favourite client (Ross McMillan), a submissive with a well-equipped torture chamber — involved in a sketchy plan to rescue Paul and get a hold of the missing money.

Cuffley says he and Long, a Calgary playwright, wanted to use the S&M theme for more than just titillation and laughs. In the course of playing dominatrix, mousy Alberta learns to stand up for herself — sort of. “We wanted the strong to become weak and the weak to become strong,” Cuffley explains, “but I didn’t want it to be overly Hollywood, in that Alberta at the end is some kickboxing powerhouse who completely dominates. I wanted her to dominate and still be an awkward, clumsy mess.”

Cuffley says Sobieski brought a lot of her own touches to the role, including the gawkiness. Although he conceived the part with the 24-year-old actress in mind, he says he didn’t realize how tall she is until their first meeting in L.A. “She had to lean down to hug me,” he recalls with a laugh. Sobieski is five foot 10, “and then she’ll put on high heels. If you ever lose her in a crowd, she’s easy to find again,” he jokes. “So with the character of Alberta, she may often want to disappear, but her height makes that impossible.”

Sobieski isn’t the only actor giving an atypical performance here. The role of Rene finds Bluteau, star of Quebec art films like Le Confessionnal, doing a rare comic turn. “He made sure to remind me of that every 20 minutes,” Cuffley says. “Lothaire usually plays the sombre, oblique person standing shrouded by shadows that speaks four times in the movie. He doesn’t play the guy wearing a toupee who pulls a knife on a girl who’s two feet taller than him.”

Cuffley, who calls himself an actor’s director, says he got along beautifully with his stars. “You hear stories of really difficult actors all the time, the horror stories of ego and not coming out of their trailer and all this bullshit that people try, and I know eventually that will happen to me,” he says. “But so far it never has and I feel really lucky. I think it helps if you respect them and their process, and they’ll give that respect back to you.”

Now, with Walk All Over Me in release, Cuffley is gearing up for his next project. “It’s a comedy about a deli clerk who falls in love with a giant woman wrestler,” he says. Don’t bother to point out a recurring theme. “I’ve heard that many times. The tall woman thing is probably subconscious, it’s just a happy accident.” 

Walk All Over Me opens Dec. 7 in Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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