The Company of Strangers
1990 · Cynthia Scott
A busload of women become stranded in an isolated part of the Canadian countryside. As they await rescue, they reflect on their lives through a mostly ad-libbed script.
dir. Cynthia Scott · 1990
Seven women in their seventies and eighties, plus their younger bus driver, are stranded at a derelict farmhouse in the Quebec countryside — and while they wait, they forage, mend, sing, and talk: about widowhood, faith, lost children, first loves, the nearness of death. Cynthia Scott, an Oscar-winning documentarian at the National Film Board of Canada, cast non-professionals essentially as themselves and let them improvise from the merest scaffold of a script, producing that rarest of hybrids — fiction with the grain of lived testimony. Among them are Mary Meigs, the painter and lesbian memoirist, and Alice Diabo, a Mohawk elder whose stillness anchors the ensemble; real photographs from each woman's youth surface onscreen, quietly measuring the distance a life travels. Released in the U.S. as Strangers in Good Company, it stands in the NFB's proud line of documentary-fiction experiment, and remains almost without peer: a feature in which old women are neither grandmothers nor victims but the entire subject. The stockings-as-fishnet scene alone justifies its cult.
Lines of influence
- Nanook of the North (1922) — Establishes the docufiction contract of having real people restage their own daily existence for the camera — the reenactment-of-self premise Scott's women perform at the farmhouse.
- Bicycle Thieves (1948) — Neorealism's casting of non-professionals whose actual faces and biographies supply the film's texture, the principle Scott extends by casting seven elderly women essentially as themselves.
- Shadows (1959) — Pioneers building narrative from actor improvisation over a loose emotional scaffold rather than a locked script — the exact working method of Scott's stranded ensemble.
- Chronicle of a Summer (1961) — Rouch's participatory cinéma-vérité provokes non-actors to reflect aloud on their own lives to the lens, the interview-into-drama technique behind the women's confessional monologues.
- La Jetée (1962) — The photo-insert device — a whole life and its memory conveyed through still photographs — which Scott echoes by cutting from each aging face to its youthful snapshot.
- Pour la suite du monde (1963) — The NFB's founding docufiction, prompting a real community to revive a beluga hunt from memory; Scott inherits its in-house method of scripting real lives loosely and letting participants improvise.
- Grey Gardens (1975) — Direct-cinema portrait of aging women whose performed self-mythologizing and reminiscence to camera anticipates Scott's improvised recollection of a life lived.
- The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) — Olmi directs actual peasants speaking their own dialect and unhurried rhythms, the non-professional authenticity Scott seeks from her rural-stranded women.
- Vagabond (1985) — Varda braids staged drama with witness-testimony to camera, the same weave of performed scene and direct life-account that structures Scott's hybrid.
- Close-Up (1990) — Made the same year, it has real people reenact their own lives and dissolve the documentary/fiction boundary exactly as Scott's project does.
- Colossal Youth (2006) — Costa has slum residents perform stylized versions of their own memories and losses, extending Scott's non-professionals-playing-themselves into an elegiac register of aging and dispossession.
- The Florida Project (2017) — Baker embeds non-professional locals in a loosely scripted ensemble to win documentary texture inside fiction — Scott's hybrid recipe transposed to a Florida motel.
- The Rider (2017) — Zhao casts a real rodeo cowboy to reenact his own injury and biography, the self-portraiture-as-fiction method Scott used with her women.
- Faces Places (2017) — A road-trip docufiction that photographs elderly rural subjects and mounts their images as memorials to lives and mortality, uniting Scott's photograph-insert impulse with her subjects of aging and remembrance.
- Leave No Trace (2018) — Granik's regional realism folds real communities and non-actors into a scripted frame, continuing the docufiction integration Scott practiced at the farmhouse.
- Nomadland (2020) — An ensemble of real elderly nomads plays themselves adrift in the landscape — the closest heir, marrying Scott's aging non-professional cast, transient-ensemble structure, and improvised reminiscence.