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Home / Essays / Film Reviews / TIFF Review: Learn to Swim is treading water

Alex Heeney / September 11, 2021

TIFF Review: Learn to Swim is treading water

Thyrone Tommy’s feature debut, Learn to Swim, is all vibe with little substance but it nails the milieu of twentysomething jazz musicians in Canada.

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Thomas Antony Olajide stars in Learn to Swim directed by Thyrone Tommy. Photo courtesy of Mongrel Media.
Thomas Antony Olajide stars in Learn to Swim directed by Thyrone Tommy. Photo courtesy of Mongrel Media.

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Thyrone Tommy’s Learn to Swim is the rare film in which you can actually believe that the jazz musician characters — saxophonist Dezi (Thomas Antony Olajide) and singer Selma (Emma Ferreira) — actually play their instruments and listen to jazz. Dezi will throw on a moody record while repairing a trumpet. Selma will test out versions of a song she’s working on while sitting on the floor in the living room with Dezi. They hang out with their instruments in hand, dreaming about a future of better paid gigs and exciting collaborations. They aren’t chasing bleeding fingers from playing the drums too hard too fast, but looking for a way to express themselves through their art.

The film is all vibe: blue and red lights, soft focus, and unexpected geometries fill the frame. That extends to the music, too, which is more about setting a tone than revealing a backbone to riff off of. Though set in a very specific milieu — twentysomething Black and Latinx aspiring musicians — there’s a strange placelessness and timelessness to the film. Where in Canada (where the film is set) can you still light up a cigarette in a jazz club? Nobody has cell phones or digital music players; they take polaroid photos and listen to records. It’s almost nostalgic in how it elevates the tactility of physical media, in a film that is itself very tactile.

Emma Ferreira as Selma in LEARN TO SWIM, Courtesy of Mongrel Media 
Emma Ferreira as Selma in LEARN TO SWIM, Courtesy of Mongrel Media 

But Learn to Swim meanders around, like a riff that never figures out what it’s riffing on. The film switches between a present tense story of a grieving Dezi with a tooth infection and the past tense story of his dreamy romance with Selma. Though Ferreira is luminous in every scene, she’s given little to do beyond playing a mentally ill Manic Pixie Dream Girl, while Dezi’s snobbery about music is never really backed up by an obvious talent on his part. Tommy is clearly a gifted visual stylist, but the film needed a stronger script to really come together.

Screens digitally across Canada for a 4-hour window on Saturday September 11 at 9 pm and Tuesday September 12 at 1 pm.

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Filed Under: Essays, Film Reviews Tagged With: Canadian cinema, TIFF21, Toronto International Film Festival

Alex Heeney

Alex is the Editor-in-Chief of The Seventh Row, based in San Francisco and from Toronto, Canada.

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