The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from The Act of Killing.
At rep cinemas this week: A powerful documentary on Indonesia’s violent past, an end-of-the-world comedy, and a profile of a marriage in crisis.
The Act of Killing
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
It’s been nearly 30 years since Claude Lanzmann directed Shoah, his landmark nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust, which is comprised of present-day interviews with survivors, second-hand witnesses, and perpetrators. In light of the countless television specials about the Holocaust that followed, most of them spent panning and zooming over archival photos of atrocities, Lanzmann’s decision to dispense with historical mementos and make his own archive at the scene seems even more radical now than it did at the time. At last, it’s found an odd companion piece in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing.
Oppenheimer’s film treats the mass murder of Communists, intellectuals, and ethnic Chinese in mid-1960s Indonesia—unpunished crimes committed by killing squads sponsored by the U.S. and British-backed government. What sets Oppenheimer’s approach apart from other portraits of genocide is his bold decision to focus not on the survivors, who are no longer around to give an account of their experiences, but on the murderers, who have not only avoided prosecution but been held up as heroes by the still-reigning government. Oppenheimer grants a measure of storytelling control to one such trio of boastful gangsters, encouraging them to reenact their most heinous murders. Noticing the men’s fondness for American popular culture, he also invites them to stage those scenes in tribute to the Hollywood gangster pictures and musicals that ostensibly inspired them.
That’s a risky concept, and Oppenheimer’s brazenness gets the better of him at times. He has a habit of letting interviews run just long enough that the gangsters say something absurd and psychotic in an otherwise banal conversation, then cutting away to another scene, creating an uncomfortably jokey rhythm that feels borrowed from John Oliver’s exposés on The Daily Show. All the same, this is a powerful, complex, and wholly necessary film, an antidote to the creatively bereft documentaries that package atrocities in the most mundane fashion. Its outrage is palpable, and contagious.
TIFF will be screening two different versions of the film. The 160-minute director’s cut will be shown daily at 2:45 p.m., excluding Mondays. All other screenings will be of the shorter theatrical cut.
This is the End
Directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
The success of Superbad was a watershed moment for producer Judd Apatow, whose comedic interest in raucous male bonding—in movies like Knocked Up and TV shows like Undeclared—finally solidified into a recognizable (and marketable) brand. If there’s anything interesting about This is the End, an amiable but middling apocalypse comedy, it’s that it changes the narrative, suggesting that Superbad’s trademark mix of the sweet and the crass may have had more to do with screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who direct this latest film.
Based on “Jay and Seth versus the Apocalypse,” a 2007 short the co-directors slapped together as a lark, This is the End is set at a housewarming party for James Franco, where the all-star revelers—a slimy Michael Cera, a street-smart Emma Watson—are jolted out of their drunken hijinks by the rapture. The ensuing carnage forces the all-male (save Watson) cast, which also includes Jay Baruchel as the straight man and Jonah Hill as a smarmy proto-villain, to reflect on their lives as they count down.
Goldberg and Rogen, the latter of whom also stars in the film, get a lot of mileage out of the cast’s gentle riffs on their public personas, with the multi-hyphenate, obnoxious art star Franco getting the best material as a lovably irritating version of himself. The apocalyptic special effects aren’t great, but there’s a ramshackle charm to their shoddiness. Like their mentor Apatow, though, the directors don’t know when to cut their losses, bloating a clever one-off idea into nearly two hours of self-referential jokes and clumsy parodies of horror movies. You wish they had the sense to end it all a bit sooner.
Before Midnight
Directed by Richard Linklater
The Royal (608 College Street)
In his wild swings between crowd-pleasers like School of Rock and didactic side projects like Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater has charted an unpredictable career trajectory, with the lone exception of his dependably wonderful Before series. Arriving roughly every 9 years, the films pick up with stars (and, since 2004′s entry Before Sunset, co-screenwriters) Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as they roam through different European cities, engaged in some of the most sustained philosophical discussion in American cinema.
Before Midnight is the third and arguably richest installment in the unlikely franchise, an uncommonly perceptive sequel that finds Hawke’s Jesse and Delpy’s Celine settled into their forties long after the last time we saw them, when Jesse missed a flight back to his wife and child in America to bask in Celine’s Parisian apartment. Though the couple seems more comfortable now, lounging in a Greek summer house in the waning days of Jesse’s apprenticeship with a more-senior novelist, Before Sunset‘s cliffhanger ending, and more specifically its substitution of one family for another, turns out to have set the tone for the intervening years.
Though Before Midnight‘s predecessors go out of their way to make time for the couple’s famously charming conversations—the last installment saw them killing an hour and change between a book signing and a flight—this film is an autumnal variation on the formula, mindful of how parenting and the scheduling realities of both creative and activist jobs make such pockets of reflection scarce. The change adds a new kind of tension: as we watch the stars catch or avert glances from across the room, seeing their younger selves (and future doppelgängers) reflected in other couples at their host’s home, we wonder if they’ll find the time to debrief about what they’ve seen. The anticipatory “Before” of the series has always been a key part of these movies’ success, with Sunrise hinging on the knowledge that the two strangers would eventually have to part ways, and Sunset running up against a non-refundable plane ticket. Before Midnight has the most intense deadline yet: mortality, which is slyly represented by a romantic hotel getaway the pair have been putting off for the whole trip until their hosts (and Linklater) force them to go. It’s coming this time, whether they make their plane or not.