I Used to Be Funny shows recovery isn’t a straight line

I realized something unsettling about myself while watching the excellent new Canadian film I Used to Be Funny, written and directed by Ally Pankiw. It’s artfully constructed so that we meet Sam (Rachel Sennott, Bottoms), a Toronto comedian and nanny to young teenager Brooke (Olga Petsa), after a painful event, and we have to pay attention to fleeting references, flinches and facial expressions within Sam’s yakky conversations to gradually piece together why she has been flattened like a tin can: The event was a sexual assault, the assailant was Brooke’s father Cameron (Jason Jones), a cop, and Brooke, blaming Sam, has gone missing.

Pankiw doesn’t cast doubt on the facts. Sam is telling the truth; Cameron was tried and convicted; Brooke is angry and frightened (her mother died recently; how can she lose her father, too?). I knew Pankiw wouldn’t show the assault itself – those images are way too fetishized, and her film is too thoughtful. But here’s my discomfiting confession: As the film went on, I found myself wanting to see … something. What were the circumstances of the attack? Who said what and when? I wanted, I’m embarrassed to admit, an explanation.

I’m supposed to be a feminist, I said to Pankiw during a recent video interview. What’s with my reaction?

“Because we don’t believe women,” she replied. “We want to. But even more, we don’t want to believe that the authority figures in our society, the father figures, the protectors, can do the awful things some of them do. Even though the truth should be enough: that it happens constantly, a million times a day; that every woman you talk to has some degree of an experience like this.”

I Used to be Funny is Pankiw’s first feature, but at 37, she’s the force behind a lot of buzzy television, much of it concerned, she says, with “how women are consumed by the gaze and pop culture, and their consent within that experience.” She directed the “Joan Is Awful” episode of Black Mirror starring Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek, which arrived just as anxieties around Chat-GPT and owning one’s likeness hit the mainstream. She’s directed episodes of Shrill and The Great, and was a story editor on Schitt’s Creek.

Born and raised outside Edmonton, Pankiw moved to Toronto to study journalism at what is now Metropolitan University. “Then I realized I didn’t want to be a journalist,” she says, grinning. “No offence.” She took broadcasting courses, learned to shoot and edit, and found her community in Toronto’s alt-comedy scene alongside Mae Martin, Sabrina Jalees and Kayla Lorette. “Every gay woman or person in Toronto at that time knew each other,” she says, tongue in cheek. She made hundreds of shorts, commercials and music videos for the likes of Janelle Monae and the Arkells, plus a web series, Terrific Women, for CBC Gem, and cast her “funny, talented friends in everything I could.”

Despite her pile of credits, she couldn’t get hired to direct a television series, because she’d never directed a television series. So when Martin put Pankiw forward to direct their breakthrough show, Feel Good, “I said there’s no effing way I’m not getting this,” Pankiw recalls. “I wrote a 75-page pitch doc – my visual plan for how I would shoot every moment of it; how, tonally, it was the exact kind of thing I make well.” She was hired to direct all six episodes of Season 1, and the other jobs followed. She’s currently working on her second feature.

One of Pankiw’s strengths as a director is her ability to get natural, grounded performances from her actors, whether they’re playing a highly stylized empress in The Great or a movie star defiling a church in “Joan Is Awful.” “Because I’m also a writer, I’m interested in specificity of voice,” she says. “So I really engage my actors in collaborations, to allow their specificity of voice to come through. Guiding natural and motivated performances is a through-line in my work. The humanity in people.”

In I Used to Be Funny, Pankiw fractures the timeline, so we meet Sam in the aftermath of the assault, when she’s believably, sometimes maddeningly, lost. (“There’s barely a me right now,” she says.)

“In the beginning, I want you to be a bit frustrated with Sam’s passivity – because that’s how people with PTSD can be, they’re not fully in their lives,” Pankiw says. “Then slowly, you get to see who she was before her trauma. You get to understand the weight of what happened to her. I wanted to mirror the unfair frustration our society has with victims. And I wanted to portray a more realistic story of recovery and what recovery means. Because recovering from trauma is not a straight line, and resolution – be it vengeance or justice – is imaginary.”

When a flashback to the assault finally arrives, Pankiw concentrates on the moments before, and it’s heartbreaking to see the lengths to which a woman will go to try to talk her attacker in a different direction, to try to make everything go back to normal. “My friends and I talk about this a lot,” Pankiw says. “These situations are rarely uncomfortable or dangerous at the beginning. Things are okay, until the moment when they’re not. We don’t see that a lot in pop culture. It’s usually, ‘This perpetrator is evil, and this evil thing will definitely happen.’ I wanted to show the very clear moment where you realize, ‘Oh no, this is not fine,’ and the delicate dialogue on either side of that moment.”

Television and film are rife with scenes of women being assaulted. No wonder I’ve been conditioned to expect them; I’ve probably witnessed tens of thousands. Pankiw shows us something else, something I wish we thought about more: “One of the less-discussed aftereffects is how much humour and joy we miss out on from traumatized young women,” she says. “The contributions that society and humanity loses when a woman’s humour and joy are taken away.”

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