culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Zero Motivation, National Gallery, and Mr. Turner
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Zero Motivation.
At rep cinemas this week: a wry comedy about a pair of bored women serving in the IDF, Frederick Wiseman’s enthralling look at the National Gallery, and Mike Leigh’s unorthodox portrait of English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner.
Zero Motivation
Directed by Talya Lavie
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Military satires such as M.A.S.H. and Catch-22 have a worthy new companion in Zero Motivation, the dry, mordantly funny feature debut from Talya Lavie. At once a buddy comedy and a well-observed critique of the banality of office jobs, state-mandated labour, and sexism in the war system, the film follows the misadventures of Zohar (Dana Ivgy) and Daffi (Nelly Tagar), a pair of Israeli soldiers stationed behind desks in a barren desert base. Less than committed to the national cause—Daffi wants only to be transferred to Tel Aviv, on the off chance she might catch a glimpse of a more cosmopolitan life, while Zohar lounges and plots to lose her virginity to a combat troop—the women waste their days on rounds of Minesweeper and humiliating tea runs for their male superiors.
Some will balk at the film’s reluctance to tackle the war Zohar and Daffi’s clerical noodlings are indirectly supporting. But Lavie’s ability to capture the absurdity in the mundane rhythms of conscripted work is no less an accomplishment than a more politically engaged essay film might have been. If the character types are familiar from war comedies past, Zero Motivation still feels like something new, a humane comedy about whether female friendship can survive in a system designed to run it through the paper shredder.
National Gallery
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
Frederick Wiseman delivers another exhaustive but incisive look at an institution with National Gallery, a fine companion piece to last year’s At Berkeley, which considered the fate of the university in an age of youth apathy and diminishing public funding. It’s surely no accident that the direct-cinema pioneer would turn to another unfashionable institution for his follow-up—namely, the art gallery—but what surprises about National Gallery is its unwavering focus on how such cultural bastions engage with vastly different audiences.
For such a languidly paced film, National Gallery is riveting stuff, comprising smart lectures from gallery experts that pitch Vermeer, Rembrandt, Turner, and what have you to spectators as diverse as schoolchildren, academics, and deep-pocketed patrons. Wiseman’s institutional portraits tend to rise and fall on the strengths of the bureaucratic figures who fill their hallowed halls. Here, though, there’s a sly intelligence behind the doc’s design, with the experts’ commentary on how paintings tell stories all at once, without the leisure of time, playfully informing our own awareness that what we’re watching is cinema.
Mr. Turner
Directed by Mike Leigh
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Timothy Spall deservedly nabbed the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his grunting, harrumphing performance as famed English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh’s typically smart but uncharacteristically beautiful Mr. Turner. An underrated character actor, Spall shines in this rare lead turn, which humanizes the artist by representing him as a full-bodied, husky sort, long on vision and short on the words to articulate it.
As strong as Spall is, Leigh’s film seems at times to be doing too much with too little follow-through. Its fleeting insights into the Royal Academy and the politics of the 19th-century landscape art scene, for example, feel a bit undernourished, partly because they are so counter to the film’s naturalistic aesthetic. Instead we’re offered experts’ dull expository accounts of the art we can see perfectly well for ourselves. As with Leigh’s best work, though, the film evokes the physical weight of its subject’s world in a refreshingly candid, tactile sort of way, bringing you as close to Turner the man as you’d want to be.