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Big Picture: Hello again, Bye Bye Blues

What a difference 27 years makes. That’s how long it has been since Anne Wheeler filmed Bye Bye Blues, her beautifully understated Second World War-era drama.
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Rebecca Jenkins on piano and Luke Reilly on trombone in Anne Wheeler's 1989 film Bye Bye Blues.

What a difference 27 years makes. That’s how long it has been since Anne Wheeler filmed Bye Bye Blues, her beautifully understated Second World War-era drama.

The Edmonton-born filmmaker has directed many fine films (including Loyalties, Cowboys Don’t Cry and Chi, her 2013 documentary on the late Vancouver actor Babz Chula) since A War Story, her 1981 feature debut chronicling the experiences of her father, Maj. Ben Wheeler, a doctor captured by the Japanese during the Second World War.

Bye Bye Blues, made in 1988 and released in 1989, is arguably the film for which Wheeler is best known, however. Who can forget Rebecca Jenkins’s luminous performance as Daisy Cooper, the conflicted young Prairie wife and musician, who joins a band to support herself and her two children when her husband, a British army officer (Michael Ontkean), is taken prisoner by the Japanese?

Twenty-six years after its release, Wheeler found herself directing another romantic drama with music — With This Ring, a Hallmark Channel movie starring Jesse Metcalfe (Desperate Housewives).

“It’s about a guy who’s a singer with a band, of course,” Wheeler said with a laugh, referring to Metcalfe’s character, a country music star who rediscovers his roots during a visit to his rural hometown.

While the Hallmark picture and Bye Bye Blues might seem worlds apart in terms of tone, target audience and visual style, they share Wheeler’s passion for storytelling. “Directing a Hallmark film gives you an opportunity to work out,” she said. “It’s a very short shooting schedule, but you get to tell a story and for that I’m grateful.”

Indeed, authentically telling a story has always been a priority for the award-winning filmmaker since she formed a film collective with nine friends in Alberta in the early 1970s.

Her first film, shot in 1971, was How To Brush Your Teeth, a humorous one-minute commercial set to a madrigal written with the late William Thorsell.

While Wheeler has embraced today’s digital technology, it’s never at the expense of story, she said. “Now you can get inspired by all the tricks you can do, rather than keeping the story clear. Some stuff is visually a sparkle, but there’s not much substance. You have to be sure you have a story.”

Since storytelling was an essential component of Bye Bye Blues, Wheeler finds it appropriate that her Canadian classic is being screened at Cinecenta, on Saturday at 7 p.m., because of the fundraiser’s nature.

Proceeds benefit the Community Association of Oak Bay’s Sno’uyutth Pole Project, a Welcome Pole for the new Oak Bay High School, designed and carved by master carver Butch Dick and his son, Clarence.

“This is a great event to support because the pole-carvers are the storytellers of that nation,” Wheeler, 68, said. “And, in a way, this film is a totem pole of Prairie culture. It’s one of the few films for western Canadians to clearly tell our story.”

Indeed, it’s a rare opportunity to see Bye Bye Blues. Because of confusion over who owned distribution rights, the film was never released on DVD, and broadcasters stopped showing it.

“I’m in the same position as many filmmakers whose work is in [copyright] limbo,” Wheeler said, adding she is grateful to Jenkins and her husband, legal scholar and filmmaker Joel Bakan, for rescuing it from oblivion. After years of legal wrangling, they facilitated production of a digital version accessible through Mongrel Media and iTunes.

“It’s like a mini-cult film,” Wheeler said, adding that a recent screening in Edmonton was akin to a Rocky Horror Picture Show revival. “People were singing and dancing.”

Despite the film’s lack of availability, apart from a few old VHS copies and two celluloid prints — one at the University of Alberta and another in the National Archives — fans even contacted Wheeler to try to find it. “The film has a following that has been very quiet, because it’s a Canadian following,” she said, chuckling. “It just seems to have heart. People come away very moved by that character.”

But Bye Bye Blues didn’t fare as well at home as in the U.S., she said. “It had a terrible release in Canada,” Wheeler said, attributing its success in the U.S. to the distribution vision of Circle Films, which also released the Coen Brothers films.

Wheeler said she was fortunate that she made Bye Bye Blues when films had “one producer and one writer and we had agencies who put money together.” There were conditions, however, that have since been reversed, largely because of today’s emphasis on foreign sales, she added.

“You couldn’t make a film with an American star, and I had to agree not to have the relationship between Daisy and Max [the trombonist played by Luke Reilly] go further,” she recalled.

Less than five years after it was released, she was told “if I had come forward with that same story, then it probably wouldn’t have been made.”

Canadian filmmakers today still have a tough time trying to make independent films, she said. “We’re so close to the big guy south of us, and there’s so much pressure to be middle of the road, it’s hard to be original. Telefilm won’t put money into the NFB now, and the CBC won’t put money into anything.”