Exley

You know that old saying that gets trotted out again and again about filmmakers aged 50+ "This guy has been making films for XX years and shows no sign of mellowing"" Well, never has that sentiment rang more true than with our own Larry Kent, a director who has been making subversive films on his own terms since 1962"s The Bitter Ash (considered the first Canadian independent film). His latest film Exley lets you know where it stands right from the get-go: with the one-two punch of a fight scene and a sex scene, followed by some of the most hysterical post-coitus behaviour imaginable, you know Kent"s not going to hold anything back. But these very physical confrontations are only the foreplay for the anarchic mental skirmishes to come.
A young man named Exley wakes up one morning in the arms of a beautiful woman. The phone rings, and on the other end someone from his past breaks some horrible news. The woman in bed beside him starts clamouring for attention, ignoring the distress registering on his face as the phone call continues. As she gets louder, more manic and in his face, he is eventually forced to eject this screaming and naked woman from his apartment. Thus begins Exley"s very bad day.
Over the course of this day he will be led from place to place under increasingly bizarre circumstances in search of the $1000 plane fare that will bring him to his mother"s bedside. With such a modest and noble goal, and a protagonist willing to do practically anything to earn the money, surely it can"t be that hard to come up with the funds. But as he is led through a labyrinthine underground of gangsters, witches and weirdos who all use him and leave him to dry, he starts to get the feeling that someone is conspiring against him " and as the audience, we tend to concur.
Although he didn"t write the film himself " the treatment was written by Vancouver actor/director and Vancouver Film School prof Bill Marchant who also co-stars " Exley is also an interesting analogy for Kent"s own career, and the nonsensical bureaucratic obstacles that have prevented him from getting a film made with the same kind of support enjoyed by other Canadian directors of his calibre and pedigree.