I’m walking down a very long, almost
intestinal, amber-lit, fully carpeted, labyrinthine corridor in Toronto’s
Fairmont Royal York Hotel, built in 1929, though there’s been some sort of
hotel on that site since 1843. (“…you’ve always been here, Mr. Torrance.”) It’s
an old place by Canadian standards, creaky, trance-inducing, seemingly out of
time while you wander its quietest, windowless passages. And an ideal place to
meet with Rodney Ascher and Tim Kirk, director and producer, respectively, of Room 237, the new essay film that
explores a multitude of deep readings, some verging on conspiracy theories, of
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. The
film is very fun, nerdy and obsessive, ridiculous and compelling; in some ways
feels to me like a parody of film criticism at its most niggling and
caffeinated. The film made a big splash at Sundance and Cannes and is now a
major highlight at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, which as I
finally sit down to write something on it is just a few days from closing.
Room
237 is essentially constructed from a combination
of intricate visual montage, music and voice-over, which, at least in terms of
form, makes the experience of it not entirely dissimilar to that of some other
notable TIFF ’12 titles, such as Miguel Gomes’ selectively soundtracked Tabu, a gorgeous, spellbinding film
that’s at once a work of romantic cinema and a critique of romantic cinema, or
Jem Cohen’s lovely Museum Hours, with
its many moving passages of voice-over monologue from a Viennese museum guard
who befriends Montrealer Mary Margaret O’Hara, in town to visit a comatose
cousin, or Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s
Guide to Ideology, which once again deposits sweaty Slovenian critical
theorist Slavoj Žižek into myriad movies and lets him talk and talk and talk,
or Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder,
which even more than Tree of Life feels
like a fluid palimpsest of collective memories: I know there were some scenes
of actual dialogue in the film, but the overall impression it left me with was
one of a stream of internal voices asking questions, images of fingers brushing
walls, trees, objects and bodies, of landscapes and music and drifting
emotional states. It’s a good thing, I think, that Malick is working more
steadily these days, making more films with more manageable runtimes (ie: under
two hours), so that every new Malick movie is less of a monumental cinema
event, so that something like To the
Wonder can simply be regarded as another step in this singular director’s
path, part of a larger whole, an ongoing exploration. Flawed or not, I’d still
rather enter into any of Malick’s cinema spaces than I would watch most normal
movies.
Heightening tension between sound and image
feels to me like a running theme this year. In Peter Strickland’s wonderfully
paranoid and funny, eerie and elegantly crafted Berberian Sound Studio Toby Jones plays a late ’70s sound mixer who
travels to Rome to work on a trashy Giallo film and gradually seems to be
sucked into some wormhole hybrid of the fictive aural realm he’s cutting and
pasting together and his own personal world of quiet English despair. In Pablo
Berger’s Blancanieves, Snow White is transferred to the milieu
of bullfighting in 1920s Spain, rendered as a black and white, silent melodrama
brimming with bold music, some of it flamenco-inspired, all of it totally
overcooked. Every scene is belaboured; Berger makes a self-congratulatory meal
of every variation on the familiar tale; for all its ostensible large-scale
emotions Blancenieves feels like an
utterly academic formalist exercise, a parade of impeccably shot and edited
clichés. The final scenes are almost great, until a single teardrop
contaminates everything with faux ambiguity and supposed depth.
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