It’s the Mafia, Balkan-style and kinked up in feather boas in Vancouver duo Roger Evan Larry and Sandra Tomc’s Crossing.

While working other film-related jobs and raising their young daughter, Scarlett, in Vancouver's West End, Roger Evan Larry and Sandra Tomc managed to write, direct, and produce a first feature, Crossing, and to get it into theatres starting this Friday (April 20).

Of course, husband-and-wife teams are nothing new in cinema, especially of the independent stripe. Granted, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who made Little Miss Sunshine, are a rare codirecting team. More common are pairings like Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, the couple behind Half Nelson, and there are long-standing arrangements, such as that of French heavyweight Bertrand Tavernier continuing to write with his Irish wife, Colo O'Hagan, long after they were divorced. (Lately, their daughter, Tiffany, has been writing with Tavernier.)

Movie-making has a heavier emotional toll than most collaborative activities. But according to Larry (it is hard to know how to refer to a director with three first names), Crossing came out of a desire to put their experience in and love of movies to work right out of their home. Unlike the other couples mentioned, Larry and Tomc, who both write and produce, are not out to make art movies. They are looking for commercial hooks and feel they found one with this genre exercise, which combines movie conventions with Tomc's ethnic roots and a kinky twist to provide an unexpected frisson to this otherwise familiar tale of warring crime clans.

As usual, and almost always necessary for first-timers, the couple had to call in countless favours to get their feature off the ground. (They previously collaborated on “Tested”, a well-received short, 10 years ago, and Larry wrote and directed Knocking on Heaven's Door in 1994.) The filmmakers are proud to have assembled a deft crew behind the camera. In particular, the film was shot by cinematographer Kamal Derkaoui, a Moroccan Jew who has worked on numerous features in Africa and Russia and also lensed more than a dozen episodes of Robson Arms.

They also scored in casting hunky up-and-comer Sebastian Spence, who played recurrent characters on series such as Dawson's Creek and Battlestar Galactica, as their protagonist, Daniel Cimmerman, heir to an ill-gotten fortune and a criminal organization drawn from Vancouver's Croatian community. His attempts to take the family business legitimate are derailed when an encounter with an odd street person (played by Bif Naked) leads him to a prostitute (Crystal Bublé, sister of crooner Michael, who is heard over the end credits). When the hooker, Davina, spies Daniel's penchant for cross-dressing, she reluctantly helps a Gastown hustler called Uncle Bunny (Alan C. Peterson) to blackmail him.

Everyone in the breezy tale is trying to get out of, or into, some kind of trouble, including a character played by Intelligence heavy Bernie Coulson. Mostly, the protagonist—soon to be married—is worried what others will think if they find out how good he looks in a red feather boa.

That's a lot of balls to keep in the air, and some float (or bounce) better than others. For the filmmaking couple, it mostly meant a chance to have fun with noirish clichés.

“We have this sense of ourselves,” Larry says over lunch at a South Granville bistro, “as doing something that is both deeply pleasurable and entertaining and also has a kind of aesthetic richness.”

Both count Jeff Wall and the postmodern school of painters and photographers as influences. But deconstruction has its limits in storytelling.

“You can lean on that too much, though,” Tomc says, with her husband interjecting: “as a drunk uses a lamppost”.

Tomc continues: “When something doesn't work, I always say: ‘That's not an homage; it's a writing flaw.'?”

“More often,” Larry slips in, “she says it's a directing flaw.”

“Leaving some space to ponder is good,” she continues without missing a beat, “but pondering later is better. If the audience has so much space to think that they get bored, then you're screwed. As far as genre devices go, my weakness is romance; that's my little niche, because there's always a puzzle that goes with seeing if it will all work out.”

“And there's always a romantic subplot in Hitchcock movies,” Larry adds. “Romantic thrillers—that's what we're into.” (They are working on another, called Pippa's Dream, to be set in the Gulf Islands.)

There's also a big dose of family psychology to spice up the fun.

“The movie is really about shame,” Tomc declares. “Everyone is trying to get some kind of respectability; they are all trying to get out of some ethnic gutter, or crime gutter, and move into some form of legitimacy.”

Larry says the tale relates even more closely to his own family background, which has nothing to do with Balkan Mafiosi.

“I was watching TV with my mom one day, quite some time ago, and she said that if I ever made anything as vulgar as Madonna's ‘Express Yourself' video, she would disown me. This also relates to my dad—who cut us off from all our Jewish relatives—very successful, and sent me to Upper Canada [College] to beat the Jew out of me. This gave me a sense of how people are moulded and formed and learn to be ashamed of themselves, how they learn to suppress their ethnicity or orientation or class background.”

Specifically, the kernel of an idea for Crossing came from yet another media resource.

“Sandy and I were kicking around these ideas and we were watching The Godfather for the umpteenth time; there's this scene where Sonny is shtupping one of the bridesmaids and he has her dress hiked up around his waist. I had never noticed that before, and I thought: ‘Wouldn't it be funny if he was wearing the dress?'. This psychiatrist friend told me that 80 percent of cross-dressers are straight, and they tend to be these really macho guys who grow up in families where anything feminine is simply not allowed. So bingo: you've got Glen and Glenda.”

Tomc subsequently developed the story line of the hooker who wants a creative life but also enjoys her power, especially over macho men.

The movie must be striking a chord, since it has already been picked up by distributors in the U.S. and abroad—a rare feat for Canadian efforts of any persuasion. And the Canuck-rock soundtrack tie-in, from Warner Music Canada, will also get a wide release.

Hopefully, exhibitors will be as happy as Larry with the film's performance so far. Some of Crossing 's themes, or at least its cast, emerge again in the team's next project, a half-hour series pilot currently called Donovan Life. Larry describes the comedy—shot on high-definition video and again starring Spence and Bublé along with Matty Finochio (Martin Short's nephew)—as “a cross between Will & Grace and Sex & the City, with a lot of Lucy thrown in”.

Admitting that he and Tomc are “obsessed with Lucy”, he launches into an amusing disquisition on the visual “grammar of the sitcom” as invented by Karl Freund, the Czech-born cinematographer who went from Metropolis, Tod Browning's Dracula, and Key Largo to small-screen black-and-white work at Desilu Productions.

The banter continues like this for some time, and one can, with some nostalgic imagination, almost hear bongo breaks in the conversation. Somehow, we always knew that Ricky couldn't keep his wife out of show business forever.