Heyday!   Starring: Joanne Kelly, Adam Butcher, Peter MacNeill, Tom McCamus and Deidre Gillard-Rowlings Distributor: Simply Media RRP: £12.99 164437 Certificate: 12 Release Date: 08 February 2016

Spending much of his life living in his own imagination and the flickering illusions playing at his local cinema, Terry Fleming dreams of working in the Airlines Hotel in Gander. When his mother falls ill the house is quarantined and Terry falls back on his imagination, filling the house with the glamour and characters he presumes have passed through the hotel...

Heyday (2006, 1 hr, 28 min, 18 sec) is a Canadian coming of age drama, written and directed by Gordon Pinsent, who has worked predominantly and prodigiously as a television actor.

Terry (Adam Butcher) has a very close relationship with his mother, Violet (Deidre Gillard-Rowlings) who is confined to her bed with diphtheria, the reason the house has been quarantined. His father, Frank (Peter MacNeill), is a good man but is not as close to his son. As his mother becomes increasingly ill Terry fills her with stories of the comings and goings at the fictitious Airlines Hotel. As the film progresses Terry’s imaginary world and his reality mingle and blend. Central to his fiction is a neighbourhood girl, Laurie Dwyer (Joanne Kelly) who Terry has a not so secret crush on.

The film has an effective World War Two setting. When Terry is not getting lost in his imagination, the Hotel is less effective, but if you take that it and all the characters there are products of Terry’s imagination this becomes less of a problem. As a television film, occasionally the lack of budget does show through, but this is balanced by good performances by the actors, a good script and an intriguing concept for the film.

There are some nice touches where Terry’s father intrudes into the fictional world. Whilst Terry, his Mother and Laurie become integrated to the narrative, Terry’s father does not - always a perennial outsider, a situation which reflects his standing in the house. He is aware that Terry and his mother share something special, something from which he is excluded, but rather than express bitterness, he rejoices in the individuality of both his son and wife.

As the film is set during World War Two, Violet’s prognosis is not great, in fact, as the audience, you do wonder how much his flights of fancy are designed to entertain his mother and how much is Terry using them to hide from the fact that his mother might be dying. It might sound a bit dour, but this is not the case as we follow Terry through his imagination, meeting movie stars and catching spies.

The picture has grain, probably inherited from the film stock, otherwise the print is good. It’s a pretty vanilla disc, not even English subtitles.

In the end it's an interesting concept, which does well to fulfil as much of its potential as is possible for a film made for television.

6

Charles Packer