Antoine Bourges has made an admirable attempt to capture the pathos of the worst neighbourhood in all of Canada. East Hastings Street is Vancouver’s equivalent of the Tenderloin in San Francisco or Chicago’s south side – a great place to suck dick for crack, not so much for raising a middle class family or avoiding Hep C. Bourges explores this jaundiced and browbeaten community through the comings and goings of recovering addicts at a methadone dispensary on the strip.
Cast superbly from the local community and framed by reconstructed transactions between staff of the pharmacy and its decrepit clientele, Bourges provides an intimate, humanising snapshot of the revolving ensemble of temporary refugees from the hostile street outside. Shauna Hansen excels as the stoic pharmacist listening patiently to a chorus of pleading and rambling, her eyes occasionally venturing glimmers of sympathy or weariness, but outwardly offering nothing but transactional formality.
It’s never easier to be callous about poverty and suffering than when it’s foreign to us, a lesson that we should be – but aren’t – better acquainted with than any other country. Urban blight does not exist in Australia like it does in the cities of our New World cousins: we enjoy neither the privilege nor the luxury of entire downtown streets littered with junkies, panhandlers and other human refuse trudging back and forth like the army of the walking dead. In one of the most confronting environments in the western world, Bourges should be applauded for demonstrating the immense talent and restraint needed to find splendour in people who would otherwise automatically be treated as beneath contempt.
