MY SALINGER YEAR

Wednesday, March 18 / 7:45 pm / Ottawa Art Gallery

Program: Canadian Masters interview followed by My Salinger Year
Guest: Director Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar)

Feature presentation \

Joanna (Margaret Qualley) dreams of being an author. But in the 1990s New York, that is a difficult path to take. So, when she gets a job as an assistant to literary agent Margaret (Sigourney Weaver), she is only too aware that she must seize this opportunity with both hands. She stays calm when the phones don’t stop ringing and deals confidently with her rather old-fashioned and stubborn boss. In any case, everything in the agency seems to revolve around just one person – the ageing cult author J.D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey, et al), whose fan mail Joanna answers. While in her private life she distances herself more and more from her socialist “boyfriend”, Joanna soon makes progress towards her literary vocation through the elusive Salinger, of all people, who has become something of a phantom inspiration. His third film in English, following The Good Lie in 2014 and Chuck in 2016, Falaradeau’s typically witty, literate My Salinger Year is a sparkling adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s eponymous bestselling coming-of-age memoir and is a valentine to those who pursue a life in literature. Tom McSorley