culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Toronto International Deaf Film & Arts Festival, No, Upstream Color
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Deaf Jam.
At rep cinemas this week: a celebration of deaf cinema, a political comedy-drama from Chile, and a sci-fi romance.
Toronto International Deaf Film & Arts Festival
Various directors
Randolph Theatre (736 Bathurst Street)
The Toronto International Deaf Film and Arts Festival gets its fourth edition since 2006 this coming weekend, and will include a wide array of films about the deaf experience. The festival aims in part to raise the profile of deaf cultural production, and also to give a platform to rising artists.
This year’s highlight might be the Canadian premiere of Judy Lief’s Deaf Jam, which has made the rounds at a number of international festivals. The film follows American Sign Language poet Aneta Brodski, an Israeli teen living in Queens, as she prepares for poetry slams for both deaf and hearing audiences. It’s a lively and fascinating profile of ASL poetry as a resistance against efforts to streamline deaf communication with education and cochlear implants. It also forces a deep reflection on the roles of the body and language in performance arts, which should make it appealing to anyone with an interest in spoken-word poetry.
Also compelling is Austin Unbound, Eliza Greenwood’s portrait of a deaf transgendered man who yearns for a surgical procedure to remove his breasts, so that he can stop binding his chest. Though it’s over-reliant on its country score to hit major emotional beats, the film is an accomplished study of an engaging personality, and a smart look at overlaps within transgender and disability issues.
No
Directed by Pablo Larraín
The Royal (608 College Street)
It’s a strange honour, but No surely qualifies as one of the funniest films about the Pinochet regime. The third entry in Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy about the dictatorship—shot entirely with analog technology that visually flattens the difference between archival footage from the ’80s and scripted material, making everything seem like a news dispatch from that era—the film tells the story of the 1988 plebiscite on whether to grant the Chilean general another eight-year term as president. It’s told from the perspective of René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), a young ad man who finds himself in charge of the television campaign for the “No” side of the vote.
René’s portfolio of hyperactive soda ads—which always make time for a mime’s smiling reaction shot—makes him an odd choice for the job, and a seemingly poor fit for the “No” campaign’s brain trust: a broad coalition of leftist politicians, community organizers, and broadcasters, endangered and driven underground by Pinochet’s oppressive rule. The schism between the campaign’s social democratic messaging and René’s tendency to boil things down to buzzwords and jingles—the shades of David Axelrod’s management of the Obama ’08 campaign and its promise of “Hope” and “Change” are surely not accidental—is gripping stuff. It’s also unexpectedly moving, as when the campaign’s banal sloganeering (“Joy Is Coming!”) becomes a populist anthem during a non-violent rally crashed by the police.
Most of all, though, it’s funny, thanks in no small part to Bernal’s buoyant performance as a gentler sort of Don Draper. No is the rare political movie that’s dead serious about its subject without being unduly enamored with itself. Lighthearted but sincere, it strikes roughly the same balance that makes René’s campaign a success.
Upstream Color
Directed by Shane Carruth
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Whatever else he might be—auteur, metaphysicist, haughty intellectual—Shane Carruth is indisputably a major talent, the kind of artist you put your trust in even when he’s at his most baffling. Nine years after the mind-bending time-travel drama Primer was unexpectedly named the Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance, Carruth returns with Upstream Color, an altogether warmer affair that nevertheless bears the same mark of a filmmaker gifted at bringing science-fiction tropes to recognizable worlds.
While the film beggars traditional description, on its most basic level it’s a twisty romance between damaged strangers Kris (Amy Seimetz, terrific) and Jeff (Carruth, less impressive as a performer), who meet on a bus, but who seem to know each other already on a more primal level. Their stuttering love story connects in enigmatic ways to a couple of seemingly tangential plot strands, including the trials of a pig farmer who moonlights as a sound recordist and technological Svengali (Andrew Sensenig), and a low-level thug who trades in a mysterious mind-altering drug brewed from blue orchids.
There will be many who see Upstream Color as a puzzle to solve, and there’s plenty for those types of viewers to do here—especially with the opening montage, which seems destined for the kind of banal hyper-analysis usually reserved for the work of Stanley Kubrick. One wonders, though, how productive this Sherlock Holmes stance is, given that even the most mysterious plot points are explained, sometimes too literally, by the film’s end. A more rewarding approach might be to go along with the associative logic of Carruth’s elusive editing style and bask in its emotional textures.