Ally Pankiw’s I Used to Be Funny addresses coping with PTSD with a light touch, in this story of a struggling female comic. The film had its world premiere at SXSW, its Canadian premiere at Inside Out, and will be released in Canadian cinemas in 2024 by Level Film.
You may be interested in our ebooks on LGBTQ+ films Portrait of a Lady on Fire, God’s Own Country, and Call Me by Your Name. You may be interested in our books about films that deal with PTSD: Leave No Trace: A Special Issue and You Were Never Really Here: A Special Issue
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Ally Pankiw’s I Used to Be Funny is the latest entry in a small, growing canon of films about female comics. These films tend to tackle social issues women face, through the lens of our protagonist’s comic perspective. Arguably, the abortion comedy Obvious Child (Gillian Robespierre, 2013) invented the genre. The Forty-Year-Old Version (Radha Blank, 2019) addresses race, class, being child-free and forty, and the challenges of being an artist. Ninjababy (2021) was about a graphic novel comic who only discovers her unwanted pregnancy after it’s too late to abort. Meanwhile, TV shows like Feel Good (2020-2021) tackle LGBTQ+ identity issues.
The film is about a twentysomething woman, Sam (Rachel Sennott), who is coping with PTSD from a workplace sexual assault. Told in two separate timelines, we meet Sam post-assault, in the midst of a year-long depression. She feels alienated from her former self, her friends, her boyfriend, and her professional work as a comic. When her former charge, Brooke (Olga Petsa) seeks Sam out after a year of no contact, Sam spirals. Painful memories come flooding back.
Before Sam in Ally Pankiw’s I Used to Be Funny
Pankiw’s script flashes back to Sam’s first encounter and growing relationship with Brooke. Because Sam’s trauma is still very much in the present, there are few visual indicators that we’ve entered a flashback. In the past, Sam’s hair is different, and she dresses slightly better. In these flashbacks, Sennott plays a notably happier, more energetic, and more self-confident version of Sam. She stands up straighter, looks people in the eye, and takes up more physical space. As the film’s title suggests, she also cracked jokes — good ones — and made people laugh. Meanwhile, in the present, Sam never budges from her uniform of hoodies. That is, if and when she actually manages to get out of bed and leave her home. Her MO is avoidance: avoiding her roommates, avoiding eye contact, and avoiding processing her trauma.
When Brooke goes missing, Sam feels responsible for finding her. And it’s the first thing that pulls her out of (understandably) wallowing in her misery. She gives a statement to the police. She tries to write. And she eventually takes a road trip: a necessary outward journey to trigger Brooke’s inner journey toward self-acceptance. There are cliches along the way. For example, Sam’s sassy best friend, Paige (Sabrina Jalees) and gay best friend, Philip (Caleb Hearon) could have been dropped in from the script for Mean Girls or Obvious Child. But Pankiw makes up for these shortcomings with her smart, sensitive handling of the realities of PTSD.
Addressing Sam’s PTSD
Panikw spends a lot of time with Sam, alone, in her cocoon of PTSD misery. PTSD can take you out of the world, and makes you feel like a burden to your friends and society. It’s very hard to get out of that rut of low self-worth. At the same time, the film isn’t misery porn, in part because we keep getting glimpses of the Before Sam. Before Sam may have been a struggling artist, supplementing her income, as she put it, as an adult professional babysitter.
But Before Sam was making a difference, even in the au pair work she was embarrassed about. She figured out how to connect with Brooke, a grieving, shy, and uncertain teenager. She supported Brooke in the wake of Brooke’s mother’s death and her now single dad’s inadequacies. Unlike its female comic film predecessors, I Used to Be Funny spends little time on Brooke’s comedy routine. That feels à propos because the film is about Sam’s search to regain a sense of self. We still see Sam’s off-the-cuff jokes, in the before times, so we still get a sense of her talent.
Panikw wisely chooses to keep the workplace assault offscreen. What we imagine from the lead-up and the aftermath is worse than something she could show. From the start, we sense Brooke’s Gen-X cop dad (Jason Jones, in a great and unrecognizable turn) is bad news. He can’t stop himself from saying misogynistic, fatphobic, and other offensive comments. We immediately clock him as creepy because of his thin mustache and goatee. I didn’t even initially recognise Jones because of the odious facial hair. He looked familiar, but not the like the warm presence he’s usually been on TV and film.
Ally Pankiw’s direction of her first feature
I Used to Be Funny is Pankiw’s first feature as writer-director after stints directing for TV, including on Feel Good. Pankiw is at her best when directing actors. Sennott believably shows us two versions of Sam — one a carved out version of the other. They are physically distinct, but still clearly the same person. Pankiw mostly directs the film as though it’s TV. She focuses on coverage and character relationships rather than more complex blocking and aesthetics. For this low-key hangout film with a dark twist, that works.
On the other hand, the film is packed with so much potential in its supporting characters that’s left unexplored. I’m not sure these characters are fleshed out enough, as is, to make for, say, a six-part series. But the actors bring a lot to the roles that the script merely outlines. It opens up the possibility for something more that we don’t get.
The budding Sam-Brooke relationship ends abruptly, when it feels like it had only just started. Sam’s relationship with her ex-boyfriend, Noah (Ennis Esmer), a supportive guy and good listener, is complex, but largely unexplored. He wants nothing more than to be there for Sam, even after she kicked him to the curb a year ago. But she doesn’t know how to have him in her life because he was there at the time of the assault. He’s a constant reminder of her trauma, even if he’s perfectly lovely.
An unabashedly Canadian film
As one of the few Canadian films at the festival, I was delighted to discover that I Used to Be Funny is unabashedly a Toronto-set film. From the Ontario license plates, to the Toronto city signs, to the Toronto-branded garbage bins at Sam’s house, never once does I Used to Be Funny try to masquerade as an American-film, even if it isn’t overtly a Toronto film. It also features rising star Rachel Sennott, an American actress who has done some of her best work in Canadian films by women directors, notably Shiva Baby (Emma Seligman), 2020).
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