Notes for a Film About Donna and Gail (1966)

Original title

Notes for a Film About Donna & Gail

Directed by

Don Owen

Genre

drama film

Country

Canada

Runtime

49 min

Rating

6.5 of 10 from 4 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Two young women working in a dress factory share a Toronto apartment. Their friendship grows and then fades, and a narrator's unreliable commentary shapes how you see what happens.

reflectiveintimateobservationalpoignantunreliablerestrainedmelancholicunderstated

What happens

Notes for a Film About Donna and Gail is a 1966 Canadian drama film, directed by Don Owen for the National Film Board of Canada. The film centres on Donna (Michèle Chicoine) and Gail (Jackie Burroughs), two young women who work together at a dress factory and live together as roommates, tracing the evolution and decline of their friendship in a documentary-style format. It shows the currents that brought them together and the facets of their natures that first made them seem compatible but eventually drove them apart. Their story reflects, to a degree, the situation of anyone who has ever shared the life of another person. The film makes use of the then-novel device of an unreliable narrator, ultimately revealing that the film is much more about the narrator's skewed perceptions of the women's relationship than it is about the women themselves. It was inspired in part by the contemporaneous films of Jean-Luc Godard. The characters of Donna and Gail recurred in Owen's 1967 feature film The Ernie Game. Prior to the release of The Ernie Game, in which Donna and Gail were involved in a love triangle with Alexis Kanner's Ernie, some critics who had seen only Notes perceived Donna and Gail as being in a quasi-lesbian relationship; however, Owen demurred on this perception by saying "I really don't know, because, well, what is a lesbian relationship?" (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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