culture
Rep Cinema This Week: The Duke of Burgundy, Inherent Vice, and The Theory of Everything
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from The Duke of Burgundy.
At rep cinemas this week: a strange S&M relationship dramedy to put Fifty Shades to bed, Paul Thomas Anderson’s richly comic Thomas Pynchon adaptation, and a bland Oscar-winning bio of Stephen Hawking.
The Duke of Burgundy
Directed by Peter Strickland
The Royal (608 College Street)
In all the hubbub surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey, too little attention has been payed to The Duke of Burgundy, Peter Strickland’s morbidly funny and strangely compelling hybrid of cheeky ’70s throwback and earnest S&M love story. Where the E.L. James adaptation does its best to smooth out its source’s kinks in more ways than one, Strickland’s film takes the question of what it means to involve oneself in a nonstandard relationship for the enjoyment of one’s partner seriously, in spite of its arch, Tarantino-riffing postmodern construction.
It’s hard to know what we’re seeing here at first, as Chiara D’Anna plays Eveleyn, a submissive housemaid subject to the cruel whims and domineering instructions of Cynthia, the apparent mistress-of-the-house (Borgen’s Sidse Babett Knudsen). Before long, though, that dynamic is revealed to be a fantasy—a well-honed performance that sustains the women’s otherwise unbalanced relationship, as Evelyn pushes for more sexual experimentation and role-play and Cynthia opts for something a bit more standard.
If you were feeling ungenerous, you could fault Strickland for dressing up this relationship drama in a too-cute formal conceit, such that the film’s cooked-up visual aesthetic and soundscape recall soft-focus ‘70s erotica. But in the end it comes down to the wonderful central performances that ground everything in something like reality despite all the fantasy.
Inherent Vice
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Save for Alex Ross Perry’s unofficial stab at Gravity’s Rainbow with Impolex, Thomas Pynchon’s notoriously complex novels have gone unadapted until Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice. Consider it especially impressive, then, that in addition to coming up with another formally dense, comic look at the history of Los Angeles—his signature theme in films as diverse as Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood—Anderson has also wrought a fine adaptation of a difficult novel by one of the most distinctive prose stylists in American fiction.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Doc Sportello, a perpetually stoned hippie private eye who, in the weird transition between the ‘60s and the ‘70s, accidentally stumbles onto a vast conspiracy involving real estate, cults, and drug smuggling thanks to a fortuitous visit from his much-loved ex, Shasta (Kathleen Waterston). Meanwhile, civil rights–violating LAPD officer Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin) is either on his tail or at his side the whole time, depending on which way the ganja cloud and its attendant paranoia blows.
If that all sounds both complicated and slight, well, it is, but we’re only as confused or bemused as our guide. Though he’s had better critical notices for more serious dramatic work, Phoenix deserves props here for what might be his best performance, an effortlessly funny and ultimately rather sweet turn as a guy who just wants to get back with the girlfriend who reminds him of Neil Young songs. For all its offbeat pacing and its rogues gallery of supporting performances—from the likes of Owen Wilson, Martin Short, and even singer Joanna Newsom, who also narrates in her perfect California drawl—at its heart, this is a melancholy movie about displaced people living in the wrong era, and it’s in Phoenix’s sad eyes as much as Pynchon’s text.
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 that proved 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, now an Academy Award–winner for his efforts, 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.