The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Level Five.
At rep cinemas this week: Chris Marker’s playful essay film on the internet and the Battle of Okinawa, an offbeat profile of a day in the life of Nick Cave, and Richard Linklater’s rich paean to American youth.
Level Five
Directed by Chris Marker
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Long before The Social Network was even a glint in Aaron Sorkin’s eye, there was Chris Marker’s Level Five, a prescient early take on the internet as a means of connecting historically and geographically disparate communities. Quietly released in 1996 and largely unseen in North America since, the film is a characteristically playful, dense, politically resonant missive from the French master of the essay film, worthy of being spoken of in the same reverential tones reserved for his landmarks Sans Soleil and La Jetée.
Level Five is nominally a narrative film about a video game designer named Laura (Catherine Belkhodja) who takes up her dead lover’s project of creating an interactive online game based on the Battle of Okinawa, a kind of dry run for the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As always with Marker, though, that conceit teases out all sorts of playful and intellectually rigorous digressions, ranging from his usual tributes to Cheshire cats and cryptic owls, to the more serious consideration of the modern temptation to archive traumatic memories as a means of deferring the moment they have to be faced endlessly into the future. When Marker, via his chief surrogate Laura, turns to face the horrors of the battle and its destruction of the island, it’s all the more devastating for following those puckish tangents, a reminder that sometimes playtime has to end even in the age of the internet, with all its digressive clicking and distancing avatars.
20,000 Days on Earth
Directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Nick Cave fans will find a lot to croon about in 20,000 Days on Earth, an admirably offbeat, stylized look at a day in the life of the Australian singer-songwriter, sometime novelist, and murder balladeer. Rigorously plotted, controlled, and designed, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s documentary is a near perfect doppelgänger for the perpetually self-fashioning artist, who we see at work, at rest (in a conspicuously manicured home office), and, in the increasingly dreamlike sequences that take him out of his home, at play in the imaginative space of his car.
As slick as the profile is, newcomers to Cave may wonder what the fuss is about, particularly in a tedious extended visit to his psychotherapist, an all-too-convenient way (which the filmmakers exploit with a touch of irony) of disclosing his personal backstory for the novices in the room. Whatever you think of him as a musician, there’s no denying Cave is the foremost expert on the history of Nick Cave, which he is all too happy to expound on, delivering an illustrated lecture on his youth at one point in a low-lit cellar that houses an archival collection of old band photos and clips. As that silly but ultimately touching moment might suggest—does Cave really own a library devoted to himself?—the overriding spirit here is hard to pin down, and it’s for the better. Whether this is a work of unabashed hero worship or playful self-effacement—and at times it is both—it goes down smoothly.
Boyhood
Directed by Richard Linklater
The Royal (608 College Street)
The culmination of a 12-year commitment to filming a young actor in yearly instalments from age of six to 18, Boyhood is a remarkable formal achievement. That it’s also a fine film, a textured and offhandedly detailed portrait of one Texas family from the early aughts to the present, is a testament to the particular talents of director Richard Linklater. Though he’s often praised for his storytelling experiments—his Before series spans more than a decade, while Dazed and Confused famously restricts itself to a single summer day—Linklater’s role as one of the most consistent and humane of contemporary American filmmakers has until recently been fairly underrated. Boyhood has certainly rectified that.
As any of the critical hosannas the film has received since its Sundance bow will tell you, Ellar Coltrane plays Mason Jr., an adolescent whom we watch develop from his first days in grade school to his first day of college. An aloof sort in his early moments, Coltrane proves himself a sensitive actor in his own right over the course of the film—the passing years are marked by more than a series of haircuts. As impressive as it is to watch him age and mature as a screen presence, though, the finely tuned performances by Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke as his divorced parents are equally striking—and the story of their child becomes also an incidental biography of middle-aged liberal parents in Texas from the Bush years onward.
For all its ambition and tenderness, Boyhood isn’t perfect: the early moments can feel rudderless at times—a series of scenes scored with pop music from the early 2000s in search of purpose greater than the creation of either nostalgia or ironic distance. But when it finds its groove, the film becomes not just a longitudinal study of Mason or a paean to American boyhood, but also a record of its own development from a scrappy conceit to a nuanced and entirely real coming-of-age drama about a teenager and his family.