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Hemingway set the fashion nearly 40 years ago with Jack Barnes, hero of "The Sun Also Rises", who became the archetype for countless thousands of young North Americans who have subsequently gone off to France and Spain "in search of themselves". What happens to the expatriate once he has thrown off the yoke of respectability, the nine-to-five routine? Running Away Backwards looks at some of Canada's expatriates living on the island of Ibiza, off the coast of Spain. The Jack Barnes of the film is Richard Gardner, a young novelist who expounds the joys of the expatriate life of freedom from puritanical Anglo-Saxon attitudes.
The director, Allan King, has turned his back on the classic documentary style to make a marriage of fiction and fact. The result is highly individual and always fascinating.