Can You Love Me?

Adam Garnet Jones and Sarah Kolasky combine film, video, and experimental animation to create a painfully intimate documentary about Toronto artist Morgan Mavis. ‘Can You Love Me?’ is a seductive exploration of the artist’s narcissism and insatiable need for love. The film begins by describing a poster campaign, which was launched by Morgan Mavis as her thesis project for the Ontario College of Art and Design. She posted a self-portrait around the city of Toronto on every available surface, with text that read, “Can You Love Me?” and listed a phone number. In the photo, Morgan’s pierced tongue sticks out impishly from below a dark pair of sunglasses and her trademark hot-pink hair. She soon received over a thousand calls, but one man left a total of 53 messages in a single evening, essentially convincing himself that he was in love with her. Intrigued by the unknown man’s intense attraction to her, Morgan decided to push the conceptual boundaries of her project by responding to his calls. As they corresponded, and eventually met face to face, their interactions became incorporated into Morgan’s project. The film explores Morgan’s complex and often unsettling motivations behind using herself as a subject in her art. Throughout the film, Morgan plays with fantasies of self-made fame, while willingly exposing herself to public criticism. The documentary becomes a formal extension of Morgan’s initial project, as the filmmakers become an active audience, evaluating her personality, interpreting her intentions, and re-presenting them in a new form. Sarah Kolasky and Adam Garnet Jones employ a startling variety of techniques, combining live action film and video footage with scratch animation, paint on film, stop-motion and cut-out animation, to deepen the viewer’s understanding of Morgan’s story. ‘Can You Love Me?’ is not simply a documentary, an animated film, an experiment with formal techniques, or an examination of one woman’s art and sexual politics, but it manages to be all of these things at once. “Stuns viewers… What we want is more of this kind of experimentation.” – Guy Dixon, Globe & Mail “ **** ” – Eye magazine