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http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/movies/2013/04/25/hot_docs_the_manor_chronicles_mans_life_growing_up_in_guelph_strip_club.html
Hot Docs: The Manor chronicles man’s life growing up in Guelph strip clubWhen Shawney Cohen was 6, his dad bought a strip club, the setting for The Manor, Hot Docs’ opening night film.
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 AARON HARRIS / FOR THE TORONTO STAR Shawney Cohen, manager of The Manor strip club and motel in Guelph, turned a camera on the family business for The Manor, opening Hot Docs on April 25.
By: Linda Barnard Movies, Published on Thu Apr 25 2013
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GUELPH—The carved oak trim and high ceilings give the grand staircase at The Manor motel a baronial look; the reek of stale cigarettes and thin, buckling carpet, stained with you don’t want to know, brings the atmosphere down a few pegs.
One floor below, in “Canada’s premier gentleman’s club,” a clutch of guys sit at the bar, sip $4 beer and watch a stripper who looks like a young version of 30 Rock ’s Liz Lemon peel off her underwear to music from satellite radio. At 3 p.m. on a Tuesday, it’s quiet. Things won’t get busy until after 11. It’s amateur night and that always draws a crowd.
Strip club manager-turned-filmmaker Shawney Cohen , 38, grew up around The Manor, a peeler bar and rundown 32-room motel housed in a once-grand 19th-century mansion built for legendary Ontario beer baron George Sleeman . Cohen’s father, Roger, now 62, bought the Guelph business, about an hour’s drive west of Toronto, more than 30 years ago.
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It has defined and shaped the Cohen family, for better and often worse, ever since. Example? Cohen celebrated his 13th birthday with a lap dance, a bar mitzvah gift from the old man. The boy had wanted goalie pads.
The Manor , Cohen’s first feature-length documentary, opens the 20th edition of Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival on Thursday, the result of three years filming his family at home and work. It’s his quest to figure out what happened to his once-typical suburban family and the role the club had in the transformation.
Shawney Cohen’s tough-talking father Roger, whose bombast only seems to soften when it comes to helping strangers, has seen his weight soar to nearly 400 pounds and compulsively mows through food. His anxious and anorexic mother, Brenda, trembles and frets yet won’t eat. Gentle and sweet-natured, she weighs less than 85 pounds and her struggles are heartbreaking to watch. A family Passover seder is like a Greek tragedy.
The Manor is an unblinking, often sad look at the family’s lives and their struggles to change, and Cohen says making the film forced him to strike a balance between “the ethics of filmmaking and the ethics of family.”
Younger brother Sammy, 34, also seen in the film, is a York University business graduate who has worked at The Manor since he was 18. He loves the place and the people, and sees no future in getting out.
“This is his passion,” says Cohen, who quit his own successful career as a film animator in Toronto six years ago to work as a manager at The Manor.
“I was so burned out from animating, I couldn’t stand it,” Cohen says. Initially “judgmental” about his family’s business, he decided it was time to come back to help. His first night on the job was almost his last. Cohen was tossed through a glass door when tempers flared among a bunch of guys there for a stag party.
Sammy and his dad envision condos and development on the land, moving the strip bar to a new location. Cohen, who is clearly outnumbered, would like nothing better than to see the business sold.
He didn’t start to film his family until he’d been working at The Manor for about a year. “I was very cautious,” Cohen says, adding that what he chose not to shoot — a suicide attempt, a fight involving a hearing-impaired patron — was just as important to him as what he did.
“I really tried hard not to make the film exploitive,” Cohen says as he and Sammy sit in his father’s cramped office, a portrait of his dad with a beloved golden retriever on the wall behind the desk. “It kind of comes through and I think in many ways people in the film, especially my parents, appreciated it because there’s a level of truthfulness to it. It’s still raw, but I think when you grow up in that situation, it’s normal.”
His parents, who are on vacation in the Bahamas and will be back for The Manor ’s premiere, have seen the film. Cohen rented the private screening room at Toronto’s swank Thompson Hotel to show it to them, an expense he feels was worth it to let them “experience it alone in a theatrical setting,” he says.
“It was the longest 80 minutes of my life,” Cohen admits. “I got worried my mother would freak out, but they both liked it. They were OK with it. At the end my mother turned to my father and said: ‘Roger, that’s exactly who you are,’ and that told me I was truthful in the editing.”
Sammy calls The Manor “a family portrait.”
“It’s nothing new,” he says. “I see this every day. For other people to see it, for some reason there’s an appetite . . . which I find a little weird.”
Both Cohen sons are protective of their mother and respect their father. “He has a big heart and he loves helping people,” says Sammy. As for his mother, Sammy hopes seeing herself onscreen — including a half-hearted attempt at counselling — will encourage her to get help for her anorexia.
“For me, it’s my mother. She’s the one who is not eating and not well, so now we’re showcasing that,” he says.
The editing process took 18 months. “I made the hard realization about two months in (editing) how tragic some of the footage was,” Cohen admits. “But for me, I saw it as vulnerable and beautiful, and I love what I’ve shot. But you have to realize there’s a responsibility with this stuff.”
Still, it was emotionally wrenching. He cried the first time he watched the footage of his mother.
“She rarely talked about her issues. But when the camera was on it was almost like a tool that let her talk about this stuff,” says Cohen. “We accepted it, but I began to really feel for her. When the camera came on, she really opened up.”
Cohen also isn’t shy about turning the camera on his own life, including filming an onscreen breakup with a girlfriend. Relationships are tough because of the business.
“I find something beautiful in it, almost poetic,” says the soft-spoken Cohen of life at The Manor. “Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a Bukowski novel. There’s something beautiful in the vulnerability of people here.”
Cohen may be talking about the strippers, some of whom live in a pair of crummy rooms downstairs from the bar and who flirt with him in the change room (he was babysat by a generation previous as a kid). Or maybe it’s the motel’s transient residents, the down-and-outs his father wants to help get off drugs or off the streets — or both — with cheap room rates.
The Manor , which was voted Best Round Table Pitch by the 2011 IDFA Forum Pitch in Amsterdam and is one of 12 films at Hot Docs chosen for funding from the Tribeca Film Institute, has been picked up by indie film distributor KinoSmith , and will be in Canadian theatres soon. Cohen plans to start work on a new film project this summer.
And Sunday, he’ll be back at work at The Manor, changing bottles in the liquor room, mediating fights between strippers and making sure all goes smoothly at Canada’s premier gentleman’s club.
The Manor screens at Hot Docs April 25 and 29. For details go to hotdocs.ca
REVIEW: THE MANOR
Strip club manager-turned-filmmaker Shawney Cohen has made a shockingly honest and often heartbreaking film with Hot Docs opener The Manor, an examination of how his father’s decision to buy a peeler bar and motel in Guelph some 25 years ago, moving the typical suburban Toronto Jewish family to a new life, has been a ruinous decision for his family.
Like the prodigal son, Cohen returns to his family after years working in Toronto to take on a couple of shifts a week at The Manor, mediating fights between strippers, changing bottles in the liquor room and making sure things run according to his father Roger’s wishes.
Bullying Roger is morbidly obese and can’t stop eating despite stomach reduction surgery (scenes of which Cohen includes). His brother, Sammy, who seems happiest with the business and dating a stripper/nutrition student, refuses to face what The Manor is doing to his family.
Our sympathies are drawn by Brenda, their perpetually anxious mother, an 85-pound anorexic and daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her decline is a visual metaphor for the damage the club inflicts and her fragility is demonstrated in a dramatic scene that caused Cohen to drop his camera mid-shoot.
The place is rife with gritty stories and marvelously oddball characters, especially Roger’s second-in-command, Bobby, a down-and-out Quebecer who has more than a few demons nipping at his heels.
The strength of The Manor is that Cohen hasn’t taken the easy way to capturing attention and the naked women are almost incidental to the story. Nor does he let himself off the hook. Gradually, he finds he’s no longer an outsider with a camera; he’s pulled into life at The Manor as much as the rest of the Cohen clan.
The Manor makes us consider what binds a family together and whether the changes its members are willing to at least entertain will be enough to keep them if not emotionally and physically healthy, at least at peace with each other and themselves.
Linda Barnard
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发表于 2013-4-25 16:40:02