culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Timbuktu, Point Break, and Citizenfour
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
At rep cinemas this week: a masterful Oscar contender about life in jihadist-occupied Timbuktu, a classic crime caper about bank robbers and surfers, and a tense look at the Edward Snowden case.
Timbuktu
Directed by Abderrahmane Sissako
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
The best film in this year’s Oscar race may just be Timbuktu, Mauritanian director Abderrahmane Sissako’s hopeful in Best Foreign Language Film. A critical darling out of Cannes, despite leaving the competition empty-handed, Sissako’s most accessible film is a masterful humanist drama, finding both wry humour and deep pathos in the story of Kidane (Abel Jafri), a humble shepherd who is drawn into the punishing criminal court of his village’s newly instated jihadist government when a dispute over cattle turns turns violent.
Though Timbuktu is ultimately a minor-key tragedy, its portrait of a community governed by a ragtag group of machine-gun-clad radicals who haven’t quite settled into their roles as moral and cultural gatekeepers reminded us in spots of Robert Altman’s more plainly satirical MASH, particularly in its attention to the irrational quirks of supposedly ordered systems. Sissako’s real coup, though, is his deftness at balancing his rigorous critique of the everyday absurdities and enervating hypocrisies of this sort of draconian occupation with a clear-eyed appreciation for the basic humanity of everyone from oppressor to oppressed. It’s a difficult, sobering film, but a rewarding one—the rare politically engaged drama that’s as formally accomplished as it is affecting.
Point Break
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
The Royal (608 College Street)
While Michael Mann spent the ’90s consolidating his stature as the maestro of the lyrical crime drama about existentialist dudes in designer menswear, fellow American genre director Kathryn Bigelow quietly cornered the market on a more macho strand of action cinema, culminating in her multiple Oscar wins for the adrenaline-charged The Hurt Locker. Though The Hurt Locker ushered Bigelow into her award-courting prestige era, we’re more partial to the goofy charms of 1991’s Point Break, starring Keanu Reeves as undercover FBI agent Johnny Utah and Patrick Swayze as bronzed surfer Zen-master-slash-bank-robber Bodhi.
You could think of Point Break as a crash course in Bigelow’s formal and thematic preoccupations as a filmmaker: all her auteurist inclinations are here, from the laser-precise action set-pieces to the semi-critical, semi-fetishistic approach to male violence and the preoccupation with nihilistic thrill-seekers who can’t help but obliterate themselves—here, by surfing to death—in search of the next contact high. But given the palpable sexual tension between Reeves and Swayze (an obvious point of inspiration for the Vin Diesel-Paul Walker dynamic in the Fast and Furious franchise) we prefer to think of the film as an offbeat homoerotic love story that dare not speak its name.
The screening is presented by the Monthly Underground Female Film Society (or MUFF Society, for short), who’ve appropriately programmed Point Break as their Valentine’s Day offering.
Citizenfour
Directed by Directed by Laura Poitras
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
A rare documentary that also ranks among the scariest movies of the year, Laura Poitras’s alarming Citizenfour is a singular thing, a paranoid thriller about government surveillance in the information age that happens to be about real people in real situations. A Berlin-based journalist whose work on NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures of unprecedented global and domestic surveillance earned her a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year, Poitras documents the lead-up to her initial anxious encounter with the soon-to-be whistleblower in a Hong Kong hotel room, where Snowden shared his information with her, Glenn Greenwald, and additional reporters from the Guardian days before the reporters broke the story and made global headlines. The result is an absorbing, tautly edited, and genuinely tense real-time look at how news gets made. It’s also a portrait of Snowden’s increasingly precarious situation in the days after the news was published, when his previously anonymous face became billboard fodder.
For all its sweaty-palmed thrills and its importance as a behind-the-scenes look at a critical exposé in the making, Citizenfour isn’t perfect. Poitras’s narration is usually restrained, and refreshingly self-effacing for someone involved in breaking such an enormous story, but her decision to relay her ominous encrypted email correspondence with Snowden—which punctures the darkened screen with radioactive green text—feels a bit like grandstanding. The same is true of a late conversation she captures between Greenwald and Snowden, where the former, anxious about being recorded, relegates his most important points to a series of barely hidden Post-it notes, which, when we inevitably see them, read like the stuff of conspiracy theory movies, with lines including “This one goes right up to the top.” Citizenfour is scariest when it lets us do the heavy lifting without such obvious cues, putting ourselves in Snowden’s shoes and taking in the full weight of his disclosure—that our lives are not our own, but part of the ever-expanding consciousness of the cloud.