culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Winter Sleep, The Overnighters, and Nightcrawler
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Winter Sleep.
At rep cinemas this week: the loquacious Turkish Palme d’Or winner, the Toronto Film Critics Association’s pick for best documentary of 2014, and a pitch-black satire of craven news media.
Winter Sleep
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
A surprise winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes film festival, Turkish master Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep is the kind of film best enjoyed on a lazy weekend, far from the pressure-cooker world of film festivals. Weighing in just shy of a commanding (or, if you prefer, punishing) 200 minutes, the film eases us into the daily routines and discursive boxing matches that make up life for Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), a former actor and cultural heavyweight turned small-time newspaper columnist who’s now running a rustic hotel in central Anatolia.
At once more slackly paced and more demanding than Ceylan’s marvellous previous film, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep can be a tough nut to crack. In one sense, its pleasures are legion: the script is rich and ably delivered by a cadre of fine actors (most notably Demet Akbag as Aydin’s skeptical sister), who serve as worthy sparring partners for Bilginer. Their conversations unfold in typically static long takes that frame each party as an opposing side in an ongoing Socratic dialogue. Rigorous as that structure is, it does tend to grate in the final stretch, which threatens to turn the film into an unsubtle morality play about the sins of the ignorant wealthy in a poor country that runs on the exploitation of the lower classes. That unsteady landing aside, it would be unfair to downplay Winter Sleep’s obvious accomplishments as a work of slow cinema that lets its characters live, breathe, and think at their own pace.
The Overnighters
Directed by Jesse Moss
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Before the financial crisis hit the United States in 2008, few would have predicted Williston, North Dakota was due for a transformation from a sleepy oil town to a mecca for the nation’s downtrodden itinerant workers, who arrived hoping for a second chance in an unlikely boom town. That mass relocation, and the ensuing economic and social problems faced by a community unable or unwilling to house its new residents, is the subject of Jesse Moss’s Sundance hit—and recent Best Documentary pick from the Toronto Film Critics Association— The Overnighters, an emotionally exhausting, sobering look at what it takes to feel pastoral about a flock of strangers. Focusing on Pastor Jay Reinke’s efforts to temporarily house the men in his church—to the dismay of many of his parishioners and neighbours—the film becomes a tough, nervy look at Christian charity in practice, as well as a probing exploration of this new class of migrant workers.
Told largely through furtive onscreen interviews and a plaintive accompanying guitar score, The Overnighters doesn’t rank among the most ambitiously built documentaries we’ve seen this year but, if anything, its unfussy form allows Moss to keep out of the way of the tough story he’s telling. By presenting this complex situation through an increasingly deepening character study of Reinke, who turns out to have his own personal relationship with the question of redemption, Moss allows the film’s earnest moral questions—about what it means to care for others and our responsibility to suffering strangers—to resonate.
Nightcrawler
Directed by Dan Gilroy
The Royal (608 College Street)
Jake Gyllenhaal is an unblinking, bug-eyed creep in Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut and Oscar-aspirant Nightcrawler. It’s the sort of film that will be praised for a supposedly fresh script despite old zingers such as, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Gyllenhaal plays Lou, a freelance Los Angeles crime reporter who turns the vampire shift into his playground, sauntering into crime scenes unfazed, speeding through the city (bathed in nocturnal light by master cinematographer Robert Elswit) to outrun police, and uploading his footage to ratings-mad cable news producer Nina (Rene Russo).
If we found the film’s satire of our prurient, click-baiting, gore-saturated news coverage a bit tame and out-of-date—nothing Lou gathers has the bite of the photojournalism on the scene of the Boston Marathon bombing, for example—we still appreciated its noir pulpiness and corrosive insights into a world where freelancing is the norm and nobody is especially accountable to anyone but him or herself. And Gyllenhaal outdoes himself as a sociopath with real entrepreneurial spirit: a rare creature, but one we’re sure exists.