Leah Fay Goldstein and Peter Dreimanis are the couple at the core of the Toronto rock group July Talk.Supplied
Leah Fay Goldstein and Peter Dreimanis are experts at blurring the line between the personal and the professional.
As the couple at the core of the Toronto rock group July Talk – Dreimanis is the guitarist with the gravel-throated baritone, Goldstein is the sweeter-voiced singer – the two have long learned to balance the creative highs of marathon studio sessions and the thrill of deafening live performance alongside the sometimes less glamorous duties of managing a household and raising a toddler.
Yet in the charming and droll new Canadian romcom Middle Life, the two are asked to take their creative and romantic lives, toss them in the blender and hit the pulse button. When the film begins, Goldstein’s character, Andie, is in a situation not too dissimilar to the performer’s own life: trying to balance her career ambitions with the responsibility of raising a young child. And then there’s Dreimanis’s character, Ryan, an eccentric who seems to wander to the beat of his own drum. But the two aren’t romantically attached – at least, not initially.
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Instead, Andie is married to a real dud of a dude (played by Luke Lalonde), while Ryan is a plumber with a metaphorically apt urinary-tract condition. Can a chance and intense encounter involving a car crash push these two mismatched souls together? More importantly, did the real-life couple’s relationship survive a run-and-gun shoot in which they play would-be lovers pulled together and apart by one crisis after another?
“It was crazy rehearsing for the first time together in that way. We’d never even acted together, it wasn’t our mode,” Dreimanis says one afternoon from the basement of the pair’s Toronto home, with Goldstein Zooming in from the floor above. (The two are experts at time-management, conducting the interview while their three year old naps upstairs.) “We’ve been on hundreds of stages together …”
“And collaborated in all other ways,” Goldstein adds.
Toronto’s indie music and film scenes are inextricably intermingled.Supplied
“But I remember the first night when we rehearsed scenes together, as if we had just met, and it was just fun to play. Our whole relationship is grounded, but I think we just take on new things all the time. If somebody asks us to do something, we have to have a pretty good reason to say no. We’re interested in challenging each other and ourselves. We’re just really big ‘yes’ people.”
And no filmmaker has a better window into the couple’s “yes” tendencies than Pavan Moondi. The Canadian writer-director, now based in Los Angeles, has known Goldstein and Dreimanis for more than a decade, stretching back to his 2015 comedy Diamond Tongues, which starred Goldstein as an aspiring actress and was shot by Dreimanis. The threesome would reunite two years later for Sundowners, which also featured Lalonde, whose band, Born Ruffians, has long collaborated with July Talk.
If Toronto’s indie music and film scenes sound inextricably intermingled, well, that’s because they are. Moondi first pitched the idea of Middle Life to Goldstein and Dreimanis during the wedding of the film’s eventual cinematographer – and veteran music-video director – Jared Raab.
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“Back during Diamond Tongues, we were still figuring each other out, it was a completely different type of relationship. But we stayed friends, and every time I’d come back to Toronto, I’d stay at their place, and over time we’d talk about filmmaking as they started getting more into that, with their music videos,” says Moondi. “I always had it in the back of my head, this two-sentence movie idea about someone who is in a car accident and the effect that near-death experience has on them pushes them into a newfound appreciation of life. And so I pitched the idea right during Jared’s wedding.”
For Goldstein and Dreimanis, the closeness and longevity of their relationship to Moondi engendered a crucial level of trust.
“We’ve known him for so long now and have read so many of Pavan’s scripts over the years. And the great thing is that, at any given moment, he’s someone who aims to defy genre. Diamond Tongues and Sundowners were completely different experiences from Middle Life,” Goldstein says. “This was an experiment for us. But Pete also had the acting bug, having just come off of Sinners.”
Up to that moment in his career, Dreimanis knew little else but the sweat-equity, behind-the-scenes life of Canadian indie film. Yet this time, he joined the production shortly after stepping in front of the camera for a crucial supporting role in Ryan Coogler’s mega-budget, Oscar-nominated thriller Sinners, where he plays one half of a Southern couple turned into vampires by the film’s lead villain. (Coogler cast Dreimanis after hearing his raspy cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising.)
“I just grew up making independent films out in Alberta and I love that sort of summer camp feeling of making something with your friends. And Sinners deep down is just a bunch of friends making a movie, but with way more resources,” says Dreimanis. But as he observed making Sinners, despite more resources, “they’re still tight on time and barely pulling it off. Some things don’t really change.”
What also isn’t changing is the couple’s commitment to music. When Middle Life makes its Ontario premiere at the Kingston Canadian Film Festival next week, its screening will be programmed alongside a live concert from both July Talk and Born Ruffians.
“All of these industries, movies and music, seem to be changing by the minute, and it’s hard to be reactive,” says Dreimanis. “But we just love the process, because it means we’re part of that artistic community.”
“I feel like the singers of July Talk being in a romcom was a pretty big left turn for us, it was not something that we ever imagined doing,” Goldstein adds. “If we’ve been asked five years ago, 10 years ago, with less perspective and experience, we wouldn’t have done it. But I’m grateful for the opportunity to do something out of nowhere, because that’s what makes a life well lived.”
Middle Life screens at the Kingston Canadian Film Festival Feb. 27 and Feb. 28, and plays Toronto’s Revue Cinema April 10; July Talk and Born Ruffians play Kingston’s Grand Theatre Feb. 27 (kingcanfilmfest.com).