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| Directed by Andrea Dorfman |
| Canada, 2000 (fiction, 76 minutes, colour, English) |
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| Image: © Mongrel Media |
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Film Description: "The quest for a soulmate, for the perfect partner, can be a lifelong search. But what happens when you decide that you are no longer in love with your perfect boyfriend, that you are not 'lifers'? With her first feature film, Andrea Dorfman has created a charming and heartfelt tale about the difficulty of falling out of love. [...] Kate wants to end her relationship and her pregnancy, and her friends try to offer support in their own quirky ways. Chloe, an herbalist, assures Kate that parsley can induce a miscarriage. So Kate embarks on her parsley days, a steady diet of parsley sandwiches, tea, snacks, and even baths. Populated by a cast of wonderful characters, Parsley Days is a touching film with a comedic twist that asserts the need for independence while recognizing that love and compassion are still possible even in the final days of a relationship." -- Liz Czach (source) |
| Film Credits (partial): | |
| Written by: | Andrea Dorfman |
| Produced by: | Andrea Dorfman, Kim Boyd |
| Principal Cast: | Megan Dunlop, Mike Le Blanc, Marla Mac Lean, Kenneth Harrington, Marcia Connolly |
| Cinematography: | Andrea Dorfman |
| Film Editing: | Scott Simpson |
| Music: | Robert Benvie, Ian McGettigan |
| Production Company: | a.d. pictures |
"I wanted to make a movie [Parsley Days] that was not about 'should I, shouldn't I?' That was really important to me, because there are women who just get pregnant, and sure there is pain and they wonder what it would be like to have the baby, but they make that decision [to have an abortion] really easily."
-- Andrea Dorfman
(source)
"[Andrea] Dorfman couldn't afford ACTRA members, so she cast mainly amateurs actors in the film [Parsley Days]—none had ever been in a movie before. Most important to her, though, was that all of them hailed from Halifax, where the movie was shot; she thought that would add to the film's distinct East Coast flavour. The same went for the indie pop soundtrack. Dorfman's friend, Halifax music guru Colin MacKenzie, supervised the music, rounding up contributions from a who's who of local musicians—Sloan, Mike O'Neill and Julie Doiron among them."
-- Dinah Clarkson
(source)
"For all its nonconformist airs, Parsley Days is populated with uniformly drab and uninteresting thinkers. Kate's (Megan Dunlop) ineffably sad musings about life are all junior league Sylvia Plath, while too faithful Ollie (Michael Le Blanc) reminds us of a whimpering dog leashed outside a store waiting for its master to return. Yet the film asks us to believe that Kate and Ollie are a golden couple, and that all their friends are delightfully zany characters. They aren't."
-- Stephen Cole
(source)
"Parsley Days is [...] very well shot. [Andrea] Dorfman, who took on the added responsibility as the cinematographer, has a keen eye for creating straightforward but beautiful frames in which the action can easily inhabit. Her use of simple imagery, such as the repetition of the couple in a canoe in happier times under a bright blue sky and Kate all bundled up in winter wear mid-conversation with friends from whom she feels isolated, is actually quite effective."
-- Simon Ennis
(source)
"As she and Ollie part, [Kate] agrees to meet him at the lake ten years from the day they met. The site of their first meeting has taken on its own meaningful existence independent of their transformed daily lives. [Andrea] Dorfman suggests that no matter where we go in life, it is the local places we inhabit that live in our memories and help shape our identities. Parsley Days celebrates the local as a site of self-knowledge and familiarity in the face of anxieties that threaten to disrupt our routine."
-- Jennifer L. Gauthier
(source)
"[Andrea] Dorfman, who has made award-winning shorts and documentaries but is a feature-film rookie, shot Parsley Days on a close to non-existent budget over 11 days with non-professional actors. The film looks amateurish is many ways, but it's a fresh, easy, cheerful, unpretentious kind of amateurism, and it works with its characters' impoverished, boho, twentysomething milieu."
-- Alison Gillmor
(source)
"[In Parsley Days] immediately upon discovering her condition, Kate opts to have an abortion. For her, the decision is quick and unequivocal—no agonizing, no moralizing, end of story. South of the border, of course, that would be the whole story. To treat the abortion issue as essentially a non-event, subservient to larger themes, would be impossible in a Hollywood film."
-- Rick Groen
(source)
"There's a lackadaisical laid-backness to Andrea Dorfman's low-budget romantic comedy Parsley Days that may be too effective for the movie's good: As a portrait of people too disaffectedly postmodern to really get worked up about much of anything, the movie practically defies you not to respond in kind. Love means having to say, you know, whatever."
-- Geoff Pevere
(source)
"Parsley Days came out in 2000, and played major cinemas in Toronto and Vancouver. Since then, it has also shown at repertory cinemas in 12 Canadian cities: Edmonton, Winnipeg, Regina, Waterloo, Kingston, Ottawa and Charlottetown, plus Victoria, Vernon, Prince George, Terrace and Salmon Arm, B.C. It hasn't been screened here—in the town where it was made—because Halifax is thought too small for commercial theatres to take a chance on a small-budget Canadian film. And although Halifax is many times larger than Victoria, Vernon, Prince George, Terrace and Salmon Arm combined, we have yet to replace the dearly departed Wormwood's repertory cinema."
-- David Swick
(source)
"While most movies aimed at young adults would make you believe sex is nothing less than a breathless and sweaty moment of rousing spiritual epiphany, Parsley Days deals with the messy reality of copulation and the flipside to romantic love."
-- Katherine Monk
(source)
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