culture
Rep Cinema This Week: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Ghostbusters, Me, the Bees and Cancer
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
A still from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
At rep cinemas this week: Jacques Demy’s gorgeous pop musical, the quintessential comic blockbuster of the 1980s, and a curious take on cancer.
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Directed by Jacques Demy
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
A pop opera of the highest order, Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is an effortless successor to the genre remixes of the French New Wave. Composed by the prolific Michel Legrand, who went on to fame in America and two Academy Award nominations for his orchestral score, the film might be the most intoxicating of all sung-through musicals, its recitative songs bolstered by Jean Rabier’s vivid colour photography and grounded in Demy’s sympathy for the minor-key tragedies of everyday life.
Much as the film’s chief pleasures are sensory (they come from the meeting of Legrand’s jazzy score and star Catherine Deneuve’s beautiful pastel wardrobe), Demy’s real ace is his marriage of those aesthetic pleasures with an uncommonly warm script. The story deals with a romance between 20-year-old mechanic Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) and his new girlfriend Genevieve (Deneuve), which is interrupted by his conscription to the Algerian War. When he comes back, Genevieve is married and all is strange.
Ostentatious as it might be to convey that story entirely in song—not a line is spoken—what makes the film so moving and, somehow, authentic, is its anchor in the exhaustion of the working-class everyman. Their loves are casually deferred for war and their lives framed under the signs of corporate France, in Guy’s case the melancholy Esso logo that marks his new home. C’est la vie.
Ghostbusters
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Legend has it that after Ghostbusters became the smash hit of 1984, netting over $200 million and spawning all manner of lunch boxes and action figures, Bill Murray took a four-year sabbatical in France, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne to clear his head. Drastic, yes, but you can see why Murray might have wanted to get away. As surely as Pretty Woman made Julia Roberts box-office royalty, Ivan Reitman’s film turned the comic from an admired character actor and supporting player into a star.
Murray’s droll, impeccable line deliveries aside, what impresses most about Ghostbusters now is what a generous ensemble comedy it is, teeming with spirited imagination where contemporary blockbusters are impoverished and bleak. Scripted by co-stars Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, who cut their teeth on SNL and SCTV, respectively, the film is only incidentally a visual-effects bonanza. It derives much of its joy from gentle ribbing between its leads, three parapsychologists who unceremoniously leave their academic gigs to launch a ghost-fighting startup. Ghostbusters is arguably the origin point for most of the sci-fi and horror comedies that have crowded the marketplace since (especially the Men in Black franchise and its own derivatives) but it’s that entrepreneurial spirit that puts it in a richer vein of American storytelling—one filled with yarns about industrious hucksters, from The Great Gatsby to The Social Network.
Me, the Bees and Cancer
Directed by John Board, Hector Centeno, and Jim Donovan
The Royal (608 College Street)
In 2012, Toronto filmmaker Ingrid Veninger and programmer Stacey Donen challenged five local filmmakers to produce one micro-budgeted film each, funded partly with the proceeds from Veninger’s emerging artist award from the Toronto Film Critics Association. The first of the five resulting films to see a formal release, John Board’s autobiographical documentary Me, the Bees and Cancer is a charming if thinly sketched self-portrait. It embodies the improvisatory spirit and personal mandate of the challenge.
When the film opens, the 79-year-old Board is already several years into a peculiar treatment for his Hodgkins lymphoma, a naturopathic approach called apitherapy, which involves applying bee stings directly to the site of the tumor. A fixture in the Toronto film scene from his years as an assistant director for filmmakers like Norman Jewison and David Cronenberg (who makes an appearance), Board divides his time between work—in one moving scene, he shoots a character’s death after a prolonged bout with cancer—and promoting the naturopathic path to cancer treatment. Board’s blustery rants against oncology are not all that illuminating, given their origin in the dubious theories of his doctor, who at one point tells a story about a man in a wheelchair who regained use of his legs after four bee stings. But, quack sidekicks or not, Board is an engaging subject—a gentle eccentric struggling to master a bad situation before it masters him.