In Revue: Ballerinas, Pâtissiers, and Corporate Shills

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie-obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

Natalie Portman swan dives into madness in Darren Aronofsky’s balletic psychodrama. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

With awards season around the corner and a whole deluge of prestige pictures set to spill into theatres across town, this week is kind of slow. But there are a few releases well worth noting, like Darren Aronofsky’s hotly-anticipated ballet psychodrama Black Swan, Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s doc about pastry chefs, and the riotously fun Malaysian satire Sell Out!

As hallucinatory reimaginings of nineteenth century Russian ballets go, Black Swan is pretty good. Aronofsky invests all the critical goodwill and household-name cachet he accrued with 2008’s The Wrestler in this trippy look at a psychologically fractured New York ballerina (Natalie Portman) who leaps to the head of her company after being cast as the lead in a production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
Unlike The Wrestler—which, despite its flaws, did work rather diligently to unhurriedly develop the audience’s rapport with Mickey Rourke’s conquered king of the ring—Black Swan sees Aronofsky returning to the frantic sensationalism (and out-and-out silliness) of earlier outings like The Fountain and Requiem For a Dream. As Portman’s Nina Sayers is further strained by the demands of her role, she becomes increasingly susceptible to the lecherous advances of her director (Vincent Cassel), the nagging of her overbearing mother (Barbara Hershey), and the imminent threat posed by the arrival of a raven-haired rival (Mila Kunis). All this stress manifests in compulsive skin-picking, Jacob’s Ladder–styled waking nightmares, and fantastic physical transformation sequences evoking Cronenberg’s The Fly.
When all these elements combine in the final act, Black Swan seems to run away from Aronofsky, and is all the better for it. The film never really earns its third-reel dip into unbound batshit craziness, but its dénouement is so manic that it’s hard to mind. Black Swan may lack the delicacy and grace commonly associated with the ballet, but it’s as fun and silly and weirdly satisfying as watching one of those trained Russian circus bears drive around in a little car.
Black Swan opens Friday, December 3 in select cinemas. Click here for showtimes.

Stand-up Patton Oswalt has a bit about how famous chefs are the new rock stars: enigmatic, eccentric, often raving mad. It makes sense, then, that D.A. Pennebaker—the American documentarian who’s granted us behind-the-scenes looks at Dylan, David Bowie, and Depeche Mode, among many others—should team up again with long-time collaborator Chris Hegedus to tackle the white-knuckle world of elite pastry chefs. Kings of Pastry has Pennebaker and Hegedus following competitors in the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France (MOF), a prestigious pastry competition that grinds hopeful pâtissiers through a gruelling contest of baking, glazing, and other sundry confectionary labours.
The release of the doc is timely, given the popularity of pastry-related reality shows profiling the cutthroat world of dessert preparation. However, Kings of Pastry is a considerably more sober affair, a far cry from the dubious Mafioso trappings of TLC’s Cake Boss or the punk rock ‘tude of the tattooed chefs on Food Network’s Ace of Cakes. The artisans in Kings of Pastry regard the MOF with grave solemnity, a seriousness that drains some of the fun out of watching them work. This doc may be interesting for foodies who relish in witnessing the preparation of complicated dome-shaped wedding cakes, but for anyone hoping to have some cake and eat it too, Kings of Pastry is pretty dry.
Kings of Pastry opened Thursday, December 2 for a limited run at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West).

It’s high time somebody took the piss out of Southeast Asian Cinema’s New Wave of filmmakers. Because really, who do all these thoughtful, meditative artists think they are? Skipping around the globe, amassing awards from one-or-another film festival nobody’s heard of (“Cannes”? Is that French or something?) for glacially paced dramas with names titles like Last Life in the Universe and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; what a poncy bunch of pretentious frauds!
Yeo Joon Han’s exceptionally lively Malaysian musical comedy Sell Out! (typeset: $E11 ()u7!) sets Southeast Asia’s vaulted auteurs in its sights from its first frames, with a hopelessly pompous reporter (Jerrica Lai) posing hopelessly pompous questions to a diaper-clad director whose own pomposity is peerless. From there, the film moves into a darkly funny critique of the news media, playing out in the backrooms of international mega-conglomerate FONY Electronics, a company whose official mission statement (lifted from a Taiwanese competitor) stresses originality, but whose real motto is simply: “Make Money.” Sell Out! centres on our plucky reporter, Rafflesia Pong, as well as one of FONY’s upstart designers, Eric Tam (Peter Davis), a soybean processor engineer who longs for her affections.
The humour tends towards the bleak, but is levied by impromptu musical numbers (some presented in sing-a-long karaoke style), boasting lyrics that often prove just as dreary (Rafflesia to Eric: “You’re not my type, don’t get your hopes up high/I’d never sleep with you until the day I die”). The satire’s a bit warmed over (capitalists are voracious and unfeeling? Reality TV is dumb? Really?) but Sell Out! is a striking, genuinely funny, and affecting film. It also manages make Southeast Asian Cinema seem fresh and invigorated, even in an era where all people seem to talk about is how robust it is.
Sell Out! opens Friday, December 3 at The Royal (608 College Street) for a week-long engagement before decamping east to The Carlton (20 Carlton Street).