Rep Cinema This Week: The Coen Brothers in Nayman’s Terms, The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and Tokyo Drifter

By Angelo Muredda

The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.

Still from the Coens’ A Serious Man.

At rep cinemas this week: a class on Joel and Ethan Coen, a festival that spotlights human rights issues, and a pop-art crime movie.

Miles Nadal JCC (750 Spadina Avenue)
Mondays at 7 p.m.

How do you teach an auteurist course about a two-headed auteur? That’s one of the animating questions behind the Grid and Cinema Scope critic Adam Nayman’s newest course at the Miles Nadal JCC. It’s a look at the work of widely celebrated American directors Joel and Ethan Coen, whose filmography spans early larks like Raising Arizona to the multiple-Oscar winning Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men. 

The irony isn’t lost on Nayman, whose last course examined the compulsive double vision of Stanley Kubrick’s cinema. “When I taught Kubrick,” he points out, “what emerged was that you have this one guy who consistently presents two faces in his films, whether it’s actual twins or the twin sensibility of the absolutely comic and the absolutely horrific. I think the comic and the horrific are present in the Coens as well, but there’s two of them.” If Kubrick was the controlling filmmaker who always presented two faces, Nayman adds, “the Coens are two people whose films seem utterly uniform despite the creative input of two of them.”

What draws Nayman to the Coens is their single-mindedness, down to seemingly minor films like Burn After Reading. The Coens, he points out, started reaching audiences after the young lions of American filmmaking in the 1970s had crashed and burned on esoteric passion projects. (Think Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart, the sort of box-office disaster that caused him to turn to wine-making in the Napa Valley.) The Coens have never had that sort of identity crisis. Their shared sensibility remains so pure that Nayman argues it would be fair to speak of their movies as a genre in their own right.

That idea that a Coen brothers film comes with its own visual, tonal, and moral rules is at the heart of the course’s structure. Nayman doesn’t plan to explore the films in a strictly chronological order—though the first week does touch on their debut feature, Blood Simple—but in terms of conceptual overlaps, like Fargo and The Big Lebowski‘s respective glances at crime and punishment. A chronological approach might not be so illuminating anyway, he admits, insofar as the Coens haven’t really changed that much over the years. As Nayman puts it: “They’ve managed to emerge with this fully-formed artistic sensibility and not so much develop or evolve or change or react, but exhibit that sensibility, roughly every two years, on movies they have total control over.”

That control extends to biographical readings of their work, which the Coens are notoriously shy about, but which Nayman hopes to illuminate. Most consider A Serious Man to be the Coens’ most explicit acknowledgement of their Jewish origins, even if, as Nayman points out, the autobiographical portrait rapidly escalates into a cosmic adaptation of the Book of Job. But Nayman also sees the Coens’ Jewish education in doubt and contradiction reflected in the tendency of characters—even in films like Fargo—to exhibit, he says, “the need to know and to question, versus the more relative comfort of not asking those questions in the first place.”

Nayman hopes the course brings out a range of opinions about whether the filmmakers’ almost eerie stability over time is mere stasis, or something more interesting: a steady procession of quality filmmaking that can still accommodate fruitful mutations. Only time and good attendance will tell.

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Showtimes

One of Toronto’s longest-running specialty festivals, The Human Rights Watch Film Festival returns this week to cast a spotlight on issues of political oppression and human rights, both at home and around the world. The programme sheds light on a number of issues, some already in the public eye and others deserving of more attention.

Those who followed the Idle No More movement will want to see Alanis Obomsawin’s The People of the Kattawapiskak River, which originally played on the NFB website at the height of Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike. The film profiles the shockingly poor living conditions of First Nations people in Northern Ontario’s Attawapiskat community, bolstering Spence’s declaration of a state of emergency.

A pair of higher profile titles turn their attentions to other nations. Pablo Larraín’s No, nominated for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Oscars, is a funny and at times heartbreaking look at the televised ad campaign aimed at ousting Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet during a 1988 referendum. Starring Gael García Bernal as the ideologically waffling ad-man behind the campaign, the film’s look is deliberately lo-fi—a visually innovative recreation of the analog film technology of the time.

If No is likely to be the most ecstatically-received selection, the most talked about will surely be The Act of Killing. Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary invites a number of former members of Indonesian death squads to reenact their murders of communists, ethnic Chinese, landless peasants, and intellectuals onscreen. It’s a difficult film to watch, largely because of the men’s continuing ignorance of their own violence and unrepentant self-regard. But it’s also a testament to the power of nonfiction filmmaking to bear witness to crimes that have gone unpunished.

TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Saturday, March 2, 10 p.m.

The French New Wave’s influence on 1960s film culture was felt widely, but few put their spin on Jean-Luc Godard’s radical innovations as indelibly as Seijun Suzuki in Tokyo Drifter, a pop-art crime thriller that’s as much about its own construction as it is about the titular character’s exploits.

The story follows reformed yakuza enforcer Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) as he wanders Japan avoiding hits from rival gangs and turncoats in his own crew. As the film opens, Tetsu’s boss Kurata (Ryuji Kita) has just backed out of the business, but a lucrative real estate deal soon pulls him back. This is unbeknownst to Tetsu, whom Kurata has exiled to Tokyo after a rival boss’s failed attempt to recruit him. A loyal soldier without a team to work for, Tetsu becomes an angel of righteous violence.

That outline is familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a movie about a hitman with a code of ethics, but Suzuki arranges the action like an avant-garde short. He scrambles the timeline, mixes up black-and-white tableaus with Warholesque feasts of primary colours, and intersperses shoot-outs with jazz dance sequences. The goal is to maximize Tetsu’s coolness, even pairing his drifting with a theme song (which he sings along with at one point). Tokyo Drifter might best be thought of as a godparent for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies and Django Unchained, which star the contemporary equivalents of Suzuki’s self-mythologizing hero.