From urban Canada to rural Ireland: Taylor Schilling wows in new film 'Stay'

The film, Stay, is about people who are “between the chairs,” says writer/director, Wiebke von Carolsfeld. Characters who are in search of a place called home or a place to stay.

Aidan Quinn’s character, Dermot, is a disgraced archaeology professor who has fled to Connemara. He’s aghast when he learns that his younger, Canadian lover, Abbey, is pregnant, but he proposes marriage, which she rejects.

Taylor Schilling, who stars as bisexual Piper Chapman in the TV series, Orange is the New Black, plays Abbey. She, too, is rootless. “I cannot form a lasting relationship with anything other than my backpack,” she says, despairingly, having returned to her native Montreal.

The film is adapted from a novel by Canadian Aislinn Hunter. Von Carolsfeld identified with Abbey, the film’s protagonist, as she has also lived half her life in a place she is not from — Canada, having grown up in Germany.

“She’s a displaced person,” says Von Carolsfeld. “Being an emigrant, it’s an experience that I share. The other reason I was interested in the story was because it’s a relationship between an older man and a younger woman, but these stories are often told from the male point of view, because most movies are made by males; I thought it would be interesting to tell it from the female point of view.

“Usually, in these films, the younger woman is gorgeous, but the older man is, like, whoever. For me, it was important to cast a good-looking male. Someone I could imagine a younger woman finding attractive. He’s funny. He’s kind to her. He does nice things for her. He brings her breakfast in bed. It was important for me to show why Abbey would want to be with this older man.”

Von Carolsfeld says that the predominance of male directors means that female characters are often passive, and male characters make the big decisions. “But in this film, Abbey decides to leave. She decides what she’s going to do with her pregnancy, not him. It was important to counter-balance that a little bit — to show a woman making her own decisions.”

The film is populated with familiar faces from Irish TV and cinema, including Gina Moxley, as a crabby local woman, and two of Love/Hate’s cast — Brian Gleeson, and the teenager Barry Keoghan. He’s one of two drifter teenagers taken under Dermot’s wing.

The film was shot in Connemara and Montreal. This created challenges for Von Carolsfeld. She had to use two production crews, with the exception of her cameraman.

Connemara’s ruggedness and isolation contrasts with the cool, bohemian French-Canadian city. The Irish outpost has rarely looked finer on film, even in the midst of forbidding, squally weather.

“Connemara is beautiful,” says Von Carolsfeld. “It’s very remote. It’s stones and heather, mountains and water. It’s nothing like Montreal when Abbey goes there, which is sunny and hot, and urban, with construction sites everywhere. The contrast is extreme. The other thing that happens to Abbey, when she goes home, is that she doesn’t fit in anymore. She thinks she knows this place, but she doesn’t. She can’t find her friends. She’s kind of stuck, because she doesn’t fit-in in Montreal or in Connemara.”

* Stay was screened at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival and will be released later this year.