culture
Rep Cinema This Week: A Separation, The Babadook, and Selma
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from A Separation.
At rep cinemas this week: Asghar Farhadi’s elegant human drama about class and religion in contemporary Iran, Jennifer Kent’s creepy horror debut, and Ava DuVernay’s timely look at the march from Selma to Washington.
A Separation
Directed by Asghar Farhadi
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Best Foreign Language Film has long been one of the Oscars’ most fraught categories, passing over the rich work of some of the luminaries of world cinema for tearjerking pablum, but the Academy got it right for once with Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar winner A Separation, one of the most beautifully calibrated melodramas of the past decade.
Farhadi’s film tells the story of a family pushed to the brink by the decision of bourgeois patriarch Nader (Peyman Moaadi) to carry out his filial responsibilities to his ailing father at the cost of his marriage to Simin (Leila Hatami), who wants to leave Iran with their young daughter, and who files for divorce as a way of forcing him into action. Instead of relocating, the family is more firmly rooted in its place by Nader’s proud decision to stand his ground, only to be doubly threatened by a legal crisis involving Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a devout, pregnant, young, working-class woman charged with caring for his father, who comes forward with allegations of assault that the camera neither corroborates nor denies.
If Farhadi’s dramatic machinations are a bit neat for our tastes—the symmetry between Nader’s filial devotion to the past and Razieh’s obligation to her future child is not so subtle—one still comes away from the film impressed by his elegance at walking the line between realism, class critique, national allegory, and epistemological essay on the nature of perception. This is a complicated but never convoluted film, effortlessly executed so that it works on at least two levels as a human drama about earnest people with messy emotions, and as a statement on contemporary Iranian class strife.
The screening will be introduced by Toronto film critic Tina Hassannia, author of Asghar Farhadi: Life and Cinema, the first English-language book on the filmmaker.
The Babadook
Directed by Jennifer Kent
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
The bond between a high-strung mother and her weird child gets its scariest treatment since The Shining in The Babadook, Jennifer Kent’s auspicious debut. The surprise recipient of a number of best first-feature awards late last year, as well as the kind of glowing reviews that suggest it’s on the fast track to the contemporary horror canon, The Babadook is well worth its salt, even if we’re not so sure it sticks its landing.
Essie Davis stars as Amelia, a widow trying to raise her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) in relative calm, despite her lingering trauma surrounding her husband’s sudden death and her uneasiness about Samuel’s status on the autism spectrum. Things get even more complicated one fateful night when Samuel pulls a grisly pop-up storybook off the shelf and inadvertently unleashes the titular fairytale monster, who can’t be put away once he’s been summoned, burned books be damned.
Kent has a bit of fun with the allegorical implications of this premise—is mean old Mister Babadook just a physical manifestation of the family’s attic full of traumatic memories, which won’t be denied any longer?—but The Babadook works as well as it does because of the earnestness with which it depicts its central relationship, not because of any (barely suppressed) subtext about the monstrousness of motherhood and so on. Horror films tend to be at their best when you fear for the people in them, and on that account, The Babadook is awfully scary.
For her part, Kent is also an accomplished filmmaker, if a bit prone to aesthetic grandstanding: even before the baddie first appears, everything is edited within an inch of its life. One only wishes the tense atmosphere of the first two-thirds didn’t give way to such a tidy ending, which reads more like an academic essay on horror as a way of working through psychological problems than a proper finale in its own right.
Selma
Directed by Ava DuVernay
Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East)
When the Academy Award nominations were announced earlier this year, few results raised as much internet ire as the relative shut-out of Ava DuVernay’s Selma, which only picked up a Best Original Song nod (and later win) to go with its Best Picture nomination. In addition to being one of the best-reviewed prestige pictures of the year, Selma is inarguably topical, as it coincides with the energy in the Black Lives Matter movement to provide a timely portrait of civil rights activism in the 1960s.
Though Selma’s value as a conversation piece about protesting an actively hostile state is unassailable, its merits as a film are more mixed. David Oyelowo gives a rich, star-making performance as Martin Luther King Jr., portraying the civil-rights leader as a pensive man who has to reconcile his privacy with his public importance and the demands that come with it. And DuVernay transitions with ease from a minimalist, finely textured independent work into a large-scale historical drama, showing real directorial chops.
But the film suffers from a patchy script, ostensibly DuVernay’s uncredited page-one rewrite of first-timer Paul Webb’s draft. (Credit for King’s powerful oratory also goes to DuVernay, since his actual speeches were apparently licensed to Steven Spielberg and thus off-limits.) Eager to respect the major figure at the movement’s centre without losing sight of the ground-level organizing that made it happen, the film shifts uneasily at times between a King-centred drama and a hazy 1965 class photo, at one point awkwardly superimposing explanatory captions over closeups of activists who otherwise don’t register in their screen time. The film’s much-discussed depiction of the relationship between King and Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson)—slammed as unfair to the president in a rambling Washington Post editorial from one of his former aides—is also a problem, to be sure. The weakness of that conceit, though, lies not in any historical fibbing but in the unshakeable feeling that it’s a spectre from an earlier draft of the film, structured not as a procedural about a black activist movement rooted in the streets, which is mostly how DuVernay plays it, but as a Frost/Nixon-inspired two-hander about a pair of powerful men shaping civil rights in America right from the Oval Office.
In spite of these rough patches, Selma is an important, frequently powerful film that’s landed at the right time. If it can’t seem to decide whether it’s about a movement or the figureheads who represent it, it’s still an indispensable portrait of what it means to organize.