7 Times Lucky

MONTREAL GAZETTE REVIEW

Smart, devious first feature hooks and keeps you

Find out why Seven Times Lucky stormed Sundance, and get to know Gary Yates's name

Seven Times Lucky is a $2-million dollar movie that looks like a billion bucks. This remarkably poised, pretzel-logic riff on the who's-ripping-off-whom? sub-basement grifter genre is a first feature shot in Winnipeg in winter by a Pierrefonds native named Gary Yates. It stars American Kevin Pollak and Canadians Liane Balaban, Jonas Chernick and James Tolkan as small-time con artists. Everyone in this movie is scamming everybody else. But nobody scams like Yates's script scams its audience.

We will reveal nothing here except to say this is the tightest, smartest, most devious, doublecrossing-est narrative to emerge from the middle of nowhere - Winnipeg- in a very long time.

There are reasons why It stormed the last Sundance Festival

Seven Times Lucky hooks the observant viewer through the lip in the opening titles and doesn't let go till the credits roll 87 short minutes later.

Every aspect of the production is crafted at an elevated level, from the fabulous cinematography, and era-blending design to uniformly realized acting, editing and direction.

This isn't a Canadian picture. It's a picture made in Canada, and it will make Yates's name. In fact, it already has.

"The reaction in Sundance exceeded our expectations" Yates explained yesterday during a tagteam interview with the (currently) Montreal-based Balaban.

"Audiences were eating it up. Every screening was sold out and we ended up playing a 2,000-seat hail," Yates said.

Thanks to the reaction, the director was immediately able to start production on his second feature, Niagara Motel, a 'sprawling, Altman-like" movie set near, uh. Niagara Falls.

That's why Yates won't be around to answer questions for today's screening as he was for last night's premiere. He's working. He's a young guy, he's Canadian and he's working. In movies. Who's scamming whom?

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Here's a short-form Yates bio. When we last saw him he'd been turfed out of the Concordia University film program for making a tasty little S&M piece called Made for TV that got great reviews at places like the Berlin Film Festival.

He moved to Winnipeg, where he hooked up with the vibrant art scene there, continued his mania for watching movies and kept honing his craft. An epiphany of sorts occurred when he was asked to make a nature documentary about our national animal - the mighty beaver.

Though not by nature a nature boy, he accepted it for the paycheque, then found God in the interconnected details of a beaver's behaviour and the world. The complexities of Seven Times Lucky would not be far behind.

Maybe we should mention that Yates is a professional magician and doesn't see much difference between pulling a rabbit out of his sleeve and shooting film. It's all illusion. That's why Seven Times Lucky works so well. It's not real. It's not of this world.

"I went through this period where I was reading all these sleazy crime novels by people like Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiassen and I knew I wanted a lowlife milieu for my first movie"

Yates lucked out in Winnipeg - "not rich enough to pull down its old buildings, like Toronto, or restore them, like Montreal"

He lucked out in the gifted Balaban (New Waterford Girls) - "I'd never heard of her until my brother Al got me the Waterford cassette We met in Toronto on Valentine's and I knew right away she was it,"

He almost didn't luck out on Pollak, who was always his first choice but wasn't top of the list for the money people at Alliance Atlantis. Three weeks before production, they said OK. Pollak read the script and came on board.

After a 25-day shoot, "eight or nine different endings" and a story found in the editing room, Seven Times Lucky is ready for its theatrical debut.
- John Griffin