Filmmaker Sharon Hyman seeks adulthood. Finds it on CBC. Maybe

MONTREAL - When are you a grown-up? When you marry? Create kids? Receive the first bill with your name on it?

Had you grown up with or around Sharon Hyman, you would have been asked on camera in Neverbloomers: The Search for Grownuphood, the Montreal filmmaker's exploration of the unfinished self.

Hyman insists her film, screening Monday on the CBC Documentary channel, "isn't about 'failure to launch' or Peter Pan syndrome - it is the opposite." Because this is not about the wilful dodgers, clueless flops or escapees from adulthood. "This concerns people who wanted to be grown-up." And awoke from the afternoon nap of their lives to wonder: What happened? Am I still a child?

Hyman traces the film's genesis back a decade, when, herself on the cusp of 40, she "fixed up" friend and author Joel Yanofsky with the woman he would marry. He moved out of his childhood home - at 43. "Nobody prepares you how to be a grown-up," Yanofsky said at the time. (You can hear the plangency.) Hey, that might make a good movie ...

Hyman had been making short autobiographical films with friend Naomi Levine since childhood, so why not? And the more she posed the question, the more friends and family recognized themselves in the Neverbloomer premise. Hyman wondered: "Is it because I don't have all the external trappings?" She has lived for 30 years on the same N.D.G. street, is unmarried, childless, un-9-to-5'ed, does not host shmancy cocktail parties for the boss or use a cigarette holder. She doesn't have a driver's licence.

And as Hyman explored Neverbloomerdom, she found herself embodying it, spending a decade completing her film. She enlisted family members from multiple generations, mom (dad wouldn't be filmed - brave dad), grandparents, a nurse, a doctor, a rabbi, lifelong and long-lost friends, associates, a filmmaking "mentor" (to be explained), Aunt Rhoda ...

Neverbloomers is informal, disarmingly personal and playful in style and tone. Gazette colleague John Griffin once called Hyman ?funny and scarily real,? and you can see his point. She is comfortable with self-doubt and neurosis, and thereby frees her subjects to lower whatever defences there might be and muse away. Editing down 50 to 60 hours of footage into an hour, she found revealing moments with people of a previous generation ? people one might have assumed were adamantine in their self-assurance, who wonder themselves about the difference, in personal terms, between 77 and 7.

?These are people that I have relationships with, and it?s intimate, and that?s why it works," Hyman says. "Most of all, the people are amazing in it. You don?t see this on TV, people talking about how they really feel inside.?

There are gems like: "So now I feel bad that I'm making you feel bad that I'm insecure," and "It's like one endless high school experience." What is? Everything is.

But this level of querulous openness leaves one ... well, open to challenge, criticism, tweaks, barbs. As Hyman observes: "A lot of the people in the film are really mean to me."

Well, one thing the film is not is a documentary. The instructively withering voice of Peter Wintonick, the acclaimed director behind Manufacturing Consent and a 2006 Governor General's Award winner, rings throughout as an almost goading spirit. This is the guy who supposedly provides guidance to Hyman in her film career, throwing out the word "neurotic" and challenging the very premise beneath Hyman's investigation: Why would you even want to "wither into adulthood? Do you know any adults who play?" And hearing mother Guita say "you're still struggling as a filmmaker" will make every daughter of a mom wince.

Hyman observes that "we're always comparing our insides to everybody else's outsides," which, yes, guarantees self-doubt. Credit also the whimsical art direction and Randy Bishop's '70s song Don't You Worry, which loops through the film with blithe irony.

"I remember growing up and my parents had cocktail parties, and my father was a Mason, and my mother looked like an Avon ad," Hyman says, but she clearly states this is not some paean to residual nostalgia. "You know, I don't idealize the '50s or the past at all. You just have to think about what it was like to be a visible minority or gay."

When do you become a grown-up? And when do you know it? How about when you watch the CBC broadcast of your documentary on Monday night surrounded by family who have yet to see it and live-blog the experience? Surely withstanding that level of discomfort would prove Hyman has undercut or outlived Neverbloomerdom. Or that she's still a kid on the couch with the folks, waiting for confirmation of the uncomfirmable: that you've arrived. You're a big girl now.

Neverbloomers: The Search for Grownuphood airs Monday, Feb. 27, at 8 p.m. on the CBC Documentary channel.

markjlepage@yahoo.com

? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette

Source: http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/movie-guide/Sharon+Hyman+seeks+adulthood+Finds+Maybe/6213730/story.html

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