2013: The year in underseen cinema

from top to bottom: The Strange Little Cat, 

Elena, Touki Bouki

This list is about other screens, other places, alternatives; it's about films that constitute some of 2013's best cinema yet received very little or no theatrical distribution in Canada. In a way, this is the more important, or useful, or impassioned, or purposeful of my year in review pieces. Useful? As in practical? Well, I tried to focus on works you can actually track down, but even in the digital age such a thing as rarity still exists. It’s not so bad, having to seek, having to wait. Anticipation and imagination are key aspects of desire—the core subject of so much cinema. So I apologize in advance if some of the 11 works discussed below are a little more elusive than others. Widely available DVDs and Blu-rays of older, usually classic films (from Criterion most especially—and deservedly) get plenty of coverage on this site throughout the rest of the year. For this year-end look back I want to tell you about things I’ve come upon a little further off the beaten path. Most are available on home video or some web-delivery format. Others, well, I’m crossing my fingers that they may find some route to your eyes and ears soon.

The Oxbow Cure

This list gets far-flung fast, so let’s start close to home: the best Canadian film of 2013 that I’ve seen and you probably haven’t is a mysterious work of chamber sci-fi. The Oxbow Cure is the second feature from the resourceful Toronto directing duo Calvin Thomas and Yonah Lewis. A woman (author Claudia Dey) retreats to an isolated cabin to recover from an unspecified ailment. She seems alone—until she spots a creature in the wintry woods whose gait suggests that it shares the same affliction. Spooky, pretty, and all kinds of weird, elegantly handled.

Post Tenebras Lux

Heading south, the most recent work from Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas (Battle in Heaven, Silent Light) also features a house in the country and an otherworldly creature distinguished by a peculiar way of walking. And horns. And a toolbox. It might be the Devil. In any case, it’s a memorable cameo in a beguiling film whose unapologetically personal overtones recall Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. A little girl wanders a vast pasture as a storm brews; a couple visits a sex club; there is a rural Alcoholics Anonymous meeting presided over by a man named R2D2. The film seems a diary of sorts, though one with fantastical, dream-like interludes. It’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Strand.

Manila in the Claws of Light

Lino Brocka’s 1975 melodrama, widely considered the greatest Filipino film of all time, is an archetypal tale of a love-struck country boy losing his way in the big city, but its stunning imagery and darkly picaresque storytelling techniques are anything but cozily familiar. Restored by the World Cinema Foundation, it’s no wonder Manila in the Claws of Light would appeal to WCF frontman Martin Scorsese—it is in its way a third-world Taxi Driver, tracing the way innocence is consumed by corruption and frustration until it morphs into madness and violence. I caught the restoration in the Cinematheque section of TIFF '13.

Touki Bouki

The late Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 masterpiece Touki Bouki is likewise a work of monumental importance to African cinema, combining a seemingly straightforward plot—two lovers attempting to raise money to leave Dakar for Paris—with a dense palimpsest of exotic narrative elements, images drawn equally from animist regional mythology and brutal social realism—like Manila, it’s is partly about the things we do for money. It’s also been restored by the WCF and is now available on Criterion’s new box set entitled Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. (I tried to keep Criterion out of this. What can I say?) I had the great fortune of seeing the restored Touki Bouki presented by French director Claire Denis, who made it her ‘Carte Blanche’ selection during a recent retrospective of her work here in Toronto.

Once Upon a Time Was I, Verônica

Not unlike Denis’ 35 Rhums, Marcelo Gomes’ sensual character study, set in his hometown of Recife, Brazil, concerns the very particular sort of bond shared by a father and his adult daughter who still live together. Once Upon a Time Was I, Verônica slips between its titular heroine’s internal psychic struggles, her professional challenges—she’s a recent med school grad who lands a gig treating patients with odd psychosomatic issues—and, most memorably, her erotic adventures.

Neighbouring Sounds

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds, available on DVD and Blu-ray from Cinema Guild, is also set in Recife (and also features W.J. Solha in its cast) but could not strike a more different tone. A portrait of a gated community prompted by varied criminal activities to hire a battalion of full-time security guards, this dryly comic, at times inexplicably unsettling film builds a sinister air of paranoia and fraught class and familial relations. Confident and controlled, yet open-ended, it’s hard to believe this is Mendonça Filho’s first fiction feature. (But take note: like a number of great filmmakers, he used to be a critic!)

Elena

Petra Costa also hails from Brazil. Her first-person feature-length debut concerns two women, one an elusive ghost, the other (Costa) trying to contact this ghost—and very much in danger of becoming her. Elena, Costa’s big sister, wanted to act and sing, to live only for art, and moved to New York to realize this. But her promise was thwarted by her own paralyzing despair. Elena is drenched in sadness, but it also flows with tremendous beauty.

The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear

In Georgian director Tinatin Gurchiani’s fascinating feature debut we see several subjects from her hometown stand before her camera in a sort of elegantly rendered screen-test. They’re often shy and uncertain, yet so articulate about their lives in this infamously fraught former Soviet region that, within moments, we feel immersed in their world. Following these quasi-auditions, Gurchiani selects events from her subjects’ lives and stages them for her camera. These stories blend into a lyrical panorama of contemporary Georgia. The Machine is available on DVD from Icarus.

Viola

Matías Piñeiro’s Viola invites us to a Buenos Aires all-female theatre company’s rehearsals for Twelfth Night. Taut, intimate, light in tone and heavy on arresting close-ups, context is forgone in favour of a singular approach guided by a profound affection for rooms, chemistry, actors, and the magic of uttering timeless texts.

    

        

The Strange Little Cat 

From a family of thespians to actual blood relations: Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat limits its scope to the preparation and execution of a simple Swiss family dinner, yet is full of clamorous life, everything seemingly normal until some cryptic comment or event intrudes before slipping away again. As weirdly enchanting as it is hard to describe.

A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness

One, make that two, last variations on family: the commune and the rock group. Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s Spell examines life at a rural Estonian commune, then follows musician Robert A.A. Lowe as he finds tranquility in the Finnish wilderness, then enters a small club where Lowe’s heavily made-up Finnish black metal outfit takes the stage. The camera movement is as sinewy and lovely as the music is crushing, and, at times, a little silly. It ends with Lowe leaving the stage, wiping off his white make-up, putting on his coat and going out the back door, re-entering a world where it’s arguably harder than ever to get a band heard—or a challenging movie seen. Thankfully, such odds don’t seem to discourage numerous bold international filmmakers from getting behind the mule and making cinema magic. Here’s to a new year of image, sound, and opportunity.  

                       

TIFF '12: True stories of people and animals

Once Upon a Time Was I, Veronica

Hotel rooms and bars, coffee shops and offices, street corners and many different screening rooms. In long lines. Every once on a while, at my desk. Here and there, in my own warm bed. It was a good TIFF for ol’ JB, busy, largely free of the runaround, free booze, too much coffee, too little food, movies movies movies, including several very good ones, some of which will make their way toward the regular sorts of cinemas, many of which will recede into the vast film festival fog. In that former, happy category, keep your eyes peeled for an expansive post here in phantom country about something we like to call Tabu, from Portugal’s Miguel Gomes. In that latter, frustrating category, a great discovery for me was a character study entitled One Upon a Time Was I, Veronica, from another Gomes, this one a Brazilian named Marcello. It’s a sensual, wise film I knew nothing about going in. Its eponymous heroine (Hermila Guedes) is a young doctor who lives with her ailing dad, whom she loves—seemingly to the exclusion of others; the film belongs in that small niche of sensitive, complicated films about fathers and daughters, a niche which also includes Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums and Ozu’s Late Spring. Veronica has good friends, loves to swim and to dance. She has an active, often fulfilling sex life, vividly captured in several memorable scenes, often full of laughter and happy fumbling, but she feels no great urge to get serious with anyone. Using a handheld recording device she undertakes some amateur self-analysis; she conceives of a movie of her life where she gets a happy ending of her own idiosyncratic design. Refusing to force any artificial resolutions upon Veronica, Gomes helps her find that ending, which became only more satisfying to me the more I thought about it in the hours and days afterward.

Something in the Air

More likely to garner a proper theatrical run in the near future—one would hope, anyway—is Something in the Air (Après mai). Set in the early ’70s, the latest from Olivier Assayas, the prolific writer-director of Irma Vep, Summer Hours and Carlos, is an autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young dissident, trying to forge a political identity while struggling to come to terms with a calling as suspiciously bourgeois as painting (Assayas’ métier before he got into cinema). The film moves fluidly from one extended scene to another, through demonstrations, nocturnal vandalizing, ideological powwows, travels abroad, brushes with mysticism and drugs, trysts with likeminded lovers, hellos and farewells with sundry friends, art classes and film sets. Elegant and inquisitive, rich with period detail, Assayas keeps just the right distance at all times, never judging his characters, however young and zealous, never over-emphasizing a single scene to give us a false sense of sudden realization: self-discovery is an ongoing process, and Something in the Air simply lets us drift along with its teenage protagonist for a while, long enough to sense the great changes that occur both in his own psyche and in that of an entire generation trying to make sense of the world in the wake of that titular turning point of May, 1968.

Ginger and Rosa

Sally Potter’s Ginger and Rosa takes a somewhat similar tack, tracing the collapse of a friendship between two teenage Londoners in the early ’60s, one of whom (Elle Fanning) becomes increasingly devoted to the cause of nuclear disarmament, the other (Alice Englert) to finding some bohemian-traditonally domestic hybrid life with her best friend’s handsome writer father (Alessandro Nivola). The film ends rather too neatly, but the lead-up is utterly engrossing, and the supporting cast, which includes Timothy Spall, Annette Benning and Christina Hendricks, is marvelous.

Post Tenebrus Lux

Family life may seem wildly fraught in Ginger and Rosa, but those aspiring adolescent radicals and their lusty, misguided dads ain’t got nothing on the violent, neglectful, doomed patriarchs of Mexican writer/director Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux. Like Something in the Air and Ginger and Rosa, the film is very much grounded in autobiography, though when refracted through the prism of Reygadas’ (often beveled) lens, personal memories and anxieties blend with fantasies and dreams, visions of radiant demons carrying toolboxes (a archetypical fatherly accessory if ever there was one) and spectacular acts of self-destruction. There’s little in the chronologically amorphous Post Tenebras Lux that lends itself to easy synopsizing; let’s just say that the young family at its center, living in beautiful rural Morelos, move through a series of crises both banal and mythic: the sexual dissatisfactions of life after kids, substance abuse, betrayals, attempted thefts, and petty acts of revenge. The kids are played by Reygadas’ own children, and give some of the most natural and mesmerizing performances I’ve seen this year from humans. (See below for non-humans.) Just watch that gorgeous, eerie opening bit, where little Rut, just old enough to walk, scurries through a dusky valley where all sorts of livestock get restless and the sky darkens and thunders. Tenebras, indeed.

Bestiare

Of the Canadian titles I caught, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (yet another fascinating, formally engaged, autobiographical work) and Peter Mettler’s smart but deeply groovy hypno-essay film about the nature of time, The End of Time, are both strong works that will be dealt with in this here country soon enough. But my favourite Canadian film this TIFF? Bestiare, from Quebec’s ever-inventive Denis Côté, auteur of Carcasses and Curling. As the streets of downtown Toronto were stampeded by fans, stargazers and nut-jobs clamouring like wild beasts for a closer view of, say, Shia Leboeuf, I was tucked away in Lightbox, delighted and mesmerized by the many animals on display in Côté’s observational, but also witty, playful, maybe political (but probably not), quietly provocative and beautifully crafted study of four seasons of life at the Hemingford Parc Safari zoo. For all the big stars striding the red carpets in expensive clothes over the last week and a half, I confess that I was most drawn toward the hairy ones, the four-legged ones, the odorous ones, the inarticulate yet inherently cinematic stars that graced Bestiare. Here’s hoping you get a chance to see them yourself soon.