Disc 2, Betty, Death by Landscape

From the series "The Atwood Stories (DVD)"

Go back...

Betty
In post-World War II rural Ontario, eight-year-old Alice and her family move into their small summer cottage along a river next door to kindly Betty and her handsome and charismatic husband Fred. Before the summer is over, Fred has run off with another woman and Betty has suffered a breakdown. Years later, when an erratic Betty reappears in their lives, a teenaged Alice must come to terms both with the world's unfairness and with its mystery.

Death by Landscape
Sixty-five-year old Lois compulsively collects landscape paintings, but to her family's incomprehension, has never ventured anywhere near real wilderness. A new painting sends her back to the day when young Lucy first steps out of her chauffeur-driven car at summer camp. Lucy is rebellious, sophisticated and worldly; by the end of that summer, Lois and Lucy are inseparable. Several years later, as veterans, they embark on the camp's ritual canoe trip. In a moment which Lois has contemplated for over fifty years, Lucy silently and inexplicably disappears from somewhere near the edge of a cliff, never to be seen again. Lois' life is irrevocably altered; all these years later, she gazes into these paintings as if her young friend might mysteriously reemerge from deep within the wilderness they depict.