When Night is Falling, Canadian director Patricia Rozema's third feature, is a passionate love story between two women set partly against the backdrop of a strict religious doctrine. Camille is a successful lecturer at a Calvinist college and engaged to fellow theologian Martin. Her comfortable life is shattered when she falls in love with Petra, a free-spirited circus performer.
The film is about the struggle between desire and emotion against religion and its domination over a person. "I fear a kind of religious revival," tells the director. She explains that she used the career Christian couple to "characterise religion as a bit of a corporation. They only talk about advancement and career because I think that's what religion is like. It starts up full of faith and inspiration and ends up being about building an empire."
But Rozema is no atheist. "I just don't know and I think there's a kind of wisdom in not knowing and you have to dare to claim ignorance in these kinds of matters." That means of course, living with the security of answers.
Rozema wants to find "the wonder, sacredness, reverence and all the tenderness and love that the church seems to preach, without any arrogant speculations about the beyond."
She portrays the search in her film by drawing together the contrasting words of Petra's circus and Camille's devout Christianity. "I wanted to confuse sacred and secular," says Rozema. "It was a goal to give the circus a kind of sacred aura." For example, the same classical music that accompanies the opening shots of the Christian college is performed during the love scenes between the two women.
When Night is Falling also blurs the lines of sexual preference and gender. "We're not either straight or gay," says Rozema, explaining that often men are attracted to what is considered a masculine characteristic of a woman and similarly a woman might be drawn to a man for his feminine traits. "It's just such a hodgepodge. There's a tremendous desire to simplify on this isue but I think it's important to be humbly baffled."
As in any commercial film, Rozema had to balance priorities and compromises. A major priority, obvious to viewers, is aesthetic. "I wanted to have a kind of glow. I wanted to paint beautiful portraits of women together and of men and women together and I wanted it to be carnal but never vulgar."
The director also wanted the circus to be magnificent, à la Cecil B De Mille, "but with budget realities it ended becoming kind of limping."
Another major priority was the development of characters, the foremost being Martin. Rozema likes Martin and wanted the viewer to "respect that his grief, pride and his journey are in the context of compassion."
She included a subplot with a couple running the circus; a man who is a dreamer and a woman who wants to escape the free but unpredictable and insecure life under the tent. Even the dog who Camille stores in her refrigerator plays an important role: "If it gets too beautiful, I have to put a dead dog in the fridge."
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