culture
Rep Cinema This Week: The Theory of Everything, Tu dors Nicole, and Advanced Style
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
At rep cinemas this week: a likeable—if conventional—Stephen Hawking biopic, one of the best titles in TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten festival, and a look at aging fashionistas.
The Theory of Everything
Directed by James Marsh
Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East)
James Marsh hangs up his documentarian hat after his Oscar-winning Man on Wire to take on the life and first love of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, a romantic biopic just inoffensive enough to skate its own way to the Academy Awards. Eddie Redmayne is charming as hell as the unmotivated Cambridge PhD student with a vague interest in cosmology and a desire to find a unifying theory of all things (cue the endearing everything-is-connected montages, somewhat reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind), and so is Felicity Jones as Jane, Hawking’s first wife and a humanities PhD herself. But the movie built around them is a bit dopey, pulling all its punches as it segues into two awfully familiar stories: one of a great man finding himself, the other of a love that is tested by illness.
Marsh deserves some credit for staying on the right side of exploitation in treating Hawking’s disability, and Redmayne admirably resists the kind of tic-addled method performance that has felled so many actors hungry for awards. Still, we’ve seen this movie before.
Tu dors Nicole
Directed by Stéphane Lafleur
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
If you followed the reaction of the mainstream Canadian press to this year’s Cannes Film Festival, you might have been led to think the whole of Canadian cinema was represented internationally by Xavier Dolan, David Cronenberg, and Atom Egoyan, each of whom staked a claim in the festival’s main competition, with wildly varying levels of success. Amidst all that chatter, you might have missed the critical success of Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu dors Nicole in the Directors’ Fortnight programme. A light, nicely observed magic-realist trifle about the titular Nicole (Julianne Côté), a young woman dreaming away her days after graduation in her small-town Quebec home, the film comes with little of the bombast of Canada’s more celebrated trio, and consequently possesses a lot more subtle charm.
If Lafleur’s surrealist blend of reality and dream logic feels a bit strained at times—his off-kilter compositions a little too perfect and cheekily constructed—the film is still a warm portrait of a young woman lounging in a liminal state between late adolescence and adulthood proper. That’s thanks both to the gorgeous black-and-white cinematography of Sara Mishara and Côté’s understated, largely reactive performance, which marks Nicole as a sensitive sort—in no hurry to get anyplace, and all the more likeable for it.
Advanced Style
Directed by Lina Plioplyte
Still from Advanced Style.
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
“Money has nothing to do with it,” a cannily dressed septuagenarian says of her personal image in Advanced Style, Lina Plioplyte’s brisk, charming profile of the stars of New York photographer Ari Seth Cohen’s fashion blog dedicated to the city’s best-dressed women over 50. That might not be true of the women’s vintage chic—their Chanel bags certainly didn’t buy themselves—but it turns out to be an operating principle for the film. Despite its refreshingly positive take on aging as something involving more than staggering illness and loss, the usual staples of docs on the subject, the film has surprisingly little to say about the privileged economic and social circumstances that enable its protagonists to cultivate idiosyncratic personae for themselves during a life stage when women are typically reduced to flat stereotypes.
Still, one doesn’t go to a style documentary for class critique so much as for larger-than-life characters and, of course, fashion. As a character study and an amuse-bouche that manages to advocate a kind of soft feminism, Plioplyte’s film is more than able—though one wishes it had taken a closer look at the realities of maintaining one’s self-image while confronting the onset of illness and disability, which are treated here as uncouth digressions rather than a normal part of life.