culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Person to Person and Sangre, Force Majeure, and Art and Craft
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Person to Person.
At rep cinemas this week: a double bill of rarely screened independent films, Sweden’s wry Oscar contender, and a look at the cat-and-mouse game between an art forger and the archivist hot on his trail.
Person to Person and Sangre
Directed by Dustin Guy Defa and Amat Escalante
Camera Bar (1028 Queen Street West)
Continuing their run of rare screenings of under-seen American and international independent cinema, MDFF and The Seventh Art have paired up for another solid edition this month.
Wednesday’s program kicks off with Dustin Guy Defa’s warm and immaculately crafted short Person to Person, a hit out of Sundance and SXSW. The ‘70s-inspired film, shot on scrappy 16 mm, follows an acerbic record-store owner (played by the very funny Bene Coopersmith) who wakes up after a party to find a sleepy young woman (Toronto actress Deragh Campbell) passed out on his floor. The man then divides his time between holding down the fort at work, making coffee runs back to his place, and valiantly but unsuccessfully striving to oust his visitor from her new digs.
The short is paired with a screening of Amat Escalante’s Sangre, the film’s first showing in Toronto after its debut in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes in 2005. The rigorously framed, deliberately paced film follows a seemingly average Mexican family whose rhythms are thrown off balance by the unexpected arrival of the patriarch’s daughter from a previous marriage. The screening is a good opportunity to catch an early work from one of contemporary Mexican cinema’s luminaries—one fresh off his Best Director win at Cannes (courtesy of jury president Steven Spielberg) for Heli.
Force Majeure
Directed by Ruben Östlund
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Masculinity itself is at stake in Ruben Östlund’s wry, button-pushing Force Majeure, Sweden’s official Oscar submission. The premise is simple enough: during a family ski trip in the French Alps, an avalanche appears to be headed straight for patriarch Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and their darling blond children, parked like sitting ducks at a restaurant with a view. While Ebba holds the children, Tomas flees, only to find moments later that all is well—except for the fact that his family bonds have been severed.
Tomas’s error of self-preservation becomes a kind of curse, poisoning relationships not just with his family, who can’t look at him the same way, but also with the couple’s friends, who inevitably take sides, acting out what seems like a prehistoric conversation about gender essentialism in hunter-gatherer societies. Östlund’s sharp, critical sensibility and minimalist aesthetic keep this material from being too on the nose, even if it feels as if most of what it has to say is delivered in that one deciding minute.
Art and Craft
Directed by Jennifer Grausman and Sam Cullman
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
“Nothing’s original under the sun,” Mark Landis insists early in Art and Craft, a buoyant look at the work of a consummate forger. As the film opens, the wily Virginia native—who has carefully copied hundreds of significant artworks and donated them to dozens of unsuspecting museums under the cover of any number of aliases—is the subject of an art-world manhunt by Cincinnati Art Museum collector Matt Leininger, an obsessive-compulsive sort whose pathological attention to detail rivals Landis’s own.
The tension between the two men—the bluffer and the authenticity hound—gives a nice innate structure to Jennifer Grausman and Sam Cullman’s profile, which increasingly inches toward the men’s moment of reckoning at the first exhibition of Landis’s work, curated by his own nemesis. But it’s the directors’ deft sense of pacing and deep characterization of these men and their relationships to both their crafts and mental illnesses that make Art and Craft so good. Without having to reach for significance, they’ve managed to create a smart and incisive essay on what we mean when we talk about artfulness, craft, and originality in what Walter Benjamin called the age of mechanical reproduction.