Upstream in Toronto

Nobody Waved Good-Bye gives lively evidence of the creativity of the National Film Board of Canada, the government-sponsored agency that has won hundreds of international awards for adventurous shorts and cartoons on such diverse subjects as jazz, religion, tourism, sibling rivalry, Eskimo art, and even the life cycle of the small-mouthed bass. This film, N.F.B.'s first full-length feature to be distributed commercially across the U.S., is a winsome if wobbly essay on the plight of two affluent delinquents swimming against the stream of life in Toronto.

At first, the boy Peter (Peter Kastner) rebels through habitual truancy. After romping in a cemetery with his girl Julie (Julie Biggs), he climbs onto a bridge rail to explain that he doesn't know what he wants, but does know what he doesn't want: a nice home, broadloom rugs, "living the way my parents do." The audience groans. All this has been said, hasn't it? Blackout of communication between parents and youth. Rejection of adult values.

The difference is that Writer-Director Don Owen, a gifted 30-year-old Canadian, approaches his rusty theme the way a junk sculptor approaches a scrap heap--with zest and spirit and an evergreen appetite for discovery. Improvising action and dialogue, Owen achieves a cinema of spontaneity. His film is choked with words, yet the words effectively express the jumpy, inarticulate restlessness of youth.

Stifled by his anxious, insensitive parents, Peter gets in Dutch for driving without a license, goes on probation, ducks school, packs up his guitar and moves into a furnished room, supporting himself with a job as a dishwasher. Freedom turns out to mean long hours at low pay. While urging Julie to run away with him, he finds work at a parking lot where the boss teaches him the art of short-changing customers. At length Peter empties the cash register, jumps into a car, and goes.

Like impassioned people who have opened their doors to a visiting case worker, the characters in this conventional family disgrace are aware of the camera but cannot keep the truth about themselves from its puzzled, sympathetic eye. In one warmly accurate scene at a restaurant, Peter and his mother jockey through lunch, both full of affection but unable to find a way for the man-boy to return home and do exactly as he pleases without breaking any house rules. Actress Biggs touches the nitty-gritty core of teen-age ambivalence when she half proudly, half sorrowfully apologizes to her beau for passing a final exam: "I got 75. I'm sorry, I had pressure from my parents. I had to." Later, squatting on a deserted subway platform late at night to strum and hum folksongs, the two embrace all of a troubled generation's inchoate longings in one full, quiet moment. At such moments Nobody Waved Good-Bye conquers its simple ideas and tangled verbiage with cool cinematic assurance, turning a problem play into a poem.

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