culture
Rep Cinema This Week: The Look of Silence, Leones, Expedition to the End of the World
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from The Look of Silence.
At rep cinemas this week: a powerful new documentary from the filmmaker behind The Act of Killing, a playful supernatural thriller from Argentina, and a cheerful expedition to the North Pole.
The Look of Silence
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Joshua Oppenheimer follows up on his much-celebrated documentary The Act of Killing with the equally bracing and vital The Look of Silence. Where its predecessor saw members of the Indonesian death squads—the men behind thousands of anti-Communist executions in the 1960s—remorselessly acting out their crimes in garish dramatic recreations (taken in one case to the point of the perpetrator’s own nausea), The Look of Silence focuses on the investigative efforts of Adi, a village optometrist whose brother was murdered in the purge, and who now seeks to confront the right-wing paramilitaries behind it.
Where The Act of Killing sought to compromise its viewer for passively bearing witness to such grotesquely aestheticized representations of atrocity, The Look of Silence is devoted to raising and problematizing the idea that documentary filmmaking can be wielded as a blunt tool of social justice. One senses that if reconciliation is not possible for Adi, Oppenheimer at least believes that exposing such blatant abuses of power by people who still wield unbelievable clout under the harsh light of the camera, and forcing perpetrators to engage in one-on-one conversation with their former victims, might at least be the first steps toward something like conciliation. There are no easy answers here, but this is a critical film in the best sense, constantly engaging with the question of what kind of testimony documentary cinema can offer when a nation’s traumatic wounds are still open.
The film screens as part of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. Oppenheimer will introduce the screening via a video message.
Leones
Directed by Jazmin López
Camera Bar (1028 Queen Street West)
Argentine filmmaker Jazmin López made an impression with her debut Leones, which gets a belated but welcome Toronto premiere this week courtesy of MDFF and The Seventh Art. A mesmerizing, digressive, formally rigorous (read: demanding) film about a group of teens roaming in purgatorial fashion through a forest while playing language games, Leones more than makes up for its narrative paucity in the complexity of López’s filmmaking.
The film is so sparsely constructed that it’s tough to touch on its central conceit without getting into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that one of the teen’s early recitations of the allegedly Hemingway-authored six-word novel “Baby shoes, never worn” proves prophetic, as you might expect. Think of it as a Dantean fairytale about endlessly waking up from a dream to realize you’re in hell.
In its supernatural reveal, Leones turns out to a have a genetic connection with texts as diverse as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and, on the dopier side of things, the later seasons of Lost. Its succession of long takes, tracking behind the characters both separately and together as their paths diverge and re-converge, also gives it a structural similarity to Gus Van Sant’s Gerry, with which it shares an accomplished director of photography in Matías Mesa. But in the end, Leones is its own thing, an understated exercise that’s as playful as the games its characters are so fond of indulging themselves in.
Expedition to the End of the World
Directed by Daniel Dencik
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
The best sea novels feel like roving salons—chatty discussions among a motley crew of experts stuck in a confined space en route to strange new lands. Expedition to the End of the World, a documentary by Danish filmmaker Daniel Dencik, captures some of the inherent excitement of that conceit, sending an interdisciplinary team of artists and scientists to the top of Greenland, where the melting North Pole briefly opens up a channel for them to sail through.
That’s an admittedly contrived setup, and it hurts the film, which is more impressive in concept than in execution. One craves a bit more insight about the Arctic and the extreme experience it results in for both scientists and arts-types, and could do with fewer of the pronouncements we get here—tired nuggets like “The only thing an artist is good at is not knowing something,” and “Who wouldn’t want to be a bird and fly?” Who indeed?
Still, this is a refreshingly quiet and meditative film, especially impressive given its potential to degrade into more standard eco-political commentary on global warming. It’s also beautifully lensed, capturing the sublimity of the surroundings more astutely in its images than in its occasionally charming but a little too familiar narration about the sublime.