Canadian Women Film Directors Database
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Take This Waltz

Directed by Sarah Polley
Canada, 2011 (fiction, 116 minutes, colour, English)
Also known as "Bu Dans Senin", "Entre o Amor e a Paixão", "Notas de Amor", "Take This Waltz: Une histoire d'amour", "Volt egy tánc"
Take This Waltz
Image: © Mongrel Media
Film Description:
"Take This Waltz is a film about love, emptiness, romance, sex, and the progression of long relationships. Bittersweet, it oscillates between levity and the profound, catching us unaware and surprising us with its often uncomfortable intimacy."
-- Telefilm Canada (source)

Film Description:
"Twenty-eight-year-old Margot (two-time Academy Award-nominee Michelle Williams) is happily married to Lou (Seth Rogen), a good-natured cookbook author. But when Margot meets Daniel (Luke Kirby), their mutual attraction is obvious and immediate. To make matters worse (or perhaps better), Daniel lives right across the street. The two begin spending time together and try to restrain themselves from doing things they might regret, but the sweltering Toronto summer has a way of making certain desires more urgent. There are no easy answers here, no heroes or villains. The emotional texture of the performances—perhaps most surprisingly from Rogen [...], whose depth of feeling proves as potent as his gift for comedy—only heightens the film's complex dance of love. [...]"
-- Toronto International Film Festival (source)

Film Credits (partial):
Written by: Sarah Polley
Produced by: Susan Cavan, Sarah Polley
Principal Cast: Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Sarah Silverman, Aaron Abrams, Luke Kirby, Jennifer Podemski, Raoul Bhaneja, Vanessa Coelho, Matt Baram, Diane D'Aquila, Danielle Miller, Diane Flacks, Albert Howell, Avi Phillips, Jean-Michel Le Gal, Dustin Peters
Cinematography: Luc Montpellier
Film Editing: Christopher Donaldson
Music: Jonathan Goldsmith
Production Company: Joe's Daughter Inc.
(sources)

Award won by Take This Waltz

Notes about Take This Waltz

(sources)

Quotes by the Director

"I ran into a film critic about eight months after Away from Her came out. He said, 'Just so you know, it doesn't matter what you do next. The reviews are already written. They're going to say, disappointing sophomore attempt. So this is the moment to do whatever you want.' It was the most liberating thing anyone ever said to me."
-- Sarah Polley (source)

"I wanted [Take This Waltz] to be about restlessness and emptiness and all the ways we try to fill that gap in our lives. How often we fail at it, and how bewildering it is that we can't seem to fill ourselves up enough. How many dramatic things we will do... to try to dissolve this basic feeling of being human—which is, I think, that there is always something missing."
-- Sarah Polley (source)

"I've heard people say: 'It made me feel so good about leaving my long-term relationship.' I've heard people say: 'How could she leave such a great guy? I hated her for that.' People feel very passionately one way or another, and they also feel certain that the film backs up their point of view."
-- Sarah Polley (source)

"[Take This Waltz is] a celebration of Toronto in many ways; it romanticizes Toronto. One of my first ideas for the film was this was a film where you feel a living, breathing, hot, sultry Toronto. One that pops and is vivid with colour. I want to show Toronto the way I see and experience it [...]."
-- Sarah Polley (source)

Quotes about Take This Waltz

"[Toronto's] recently gentrified west end gets a love letter in Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz. The emotionally naked film is set in the neighbourhood during a hot summer, full of torrid colours and amidst the new haunts of an emerging hipsturbia."
-- David Fleischer (source)

"There is a scene, at the beginning of [Take This Waltz], of Margot at work in the kitchen, baking. It seems at first to be a deft, up-close-and-personal depiction of the nature of her daily life, of the rituals and habits of the everyday. But it turns out to be more than that—it is an example of how context changes the way we see certain things in this film, and how we understand Margot and her choices."
-- Philippa Hawker (source)

"Polley denies Margot any easy sense of empathy. She does not let her off the hook by making her husband an obnoxious or abusive bore, and she does not make Daniel a glowing knight on horseback."
-- Katherine Monk (source)

"Margot is stubborn, decent and disciplined, but also selfish, needy and coy. Nobody in this film is just one way. Ms. Polley, as a writer, a director of actors and a constructor of images, excels at managing the idiosyncrasies and contradictions of her characters so that our knowledge of them is both intimate and mined with potential surprise."
-- A.O. Scott (source)

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