I just spent ten weeks isolated with my Dad in Montreal due to Covid. He was waiting on a heart operation postponed as “nonessential” during a pandemic. So, during the day I write the scripts for The Last Place You Look. In the evenings my Dad and I play Scrabble. Watch Netflix. I buy a new bike and ride around the city. I left Montreal when I was 17. I learn that the city is somehow embedded in my DNA. On my jaunts, I see palimpsests. Shades. The strip mall with the cool toy store fro when I was six and the barbershop and the Steinberg’s. All gone. Replaced. The Seville Theatre where I saw Casablanca and The Big Sleep hollowed out into a Starbucks. And then I reach my grandparents’ house at the dead end of Cote St Luc Road. A tiny one story semi-detached not built for six people and yet six people lived there. There was even a spiffy wood paneled wet bar in the basement rec room. In The Last Place You Look my hero Anise says: “So long as you remember someone, she isn’t really gone.” I’m not sure that’s true.
By James Nadler
