culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Fifty Shades of Grey, The Duke of Burgundy, and Force Majeure
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
At rep cinemas this week: a bad kinky romance, a good one, and a sharp satire of masculine pride.
Fifty Shades of Grey
Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Despite its rather inauspicious origins as Twilight fanfiction, E.L. James’s kink-inflected love story Fifty Shades of Grey has carved out quite a niche for itself as the great hope of a new age of erotica since its publication in 2011. All questions of quality aside, the book’s influence among a certain kind of heretofore untapped public-transit romance reader is so great that one can’t help but be disappointed by Sam Taylor-Johnson’s rather polite adaptation, which dispels some of James’s purpler prose, but loses its verve in the process.
The Fall’s Jamie Dornan has the mixed blessing of playing the titular bad lover Christian Grey, a young magnate in something or other who casts a spell on mousy English student Ana (Dakota Johnson) when she lands in his office to interview him for the college paper while subbing for a bedridden friend. Christian’s smitten, too, but things become complicated once he reveals his singular tastes in the bedroom, which tend toward bondage and aloof gazes.
Johnson is surprisingly warm and funny in what might have been a meagre role, but Dornan stumbles badly, his natural Irish accent suppressed for the American part only to uncannily resurface in every strangled line he utters. The sex is surprisingly tame for all the pedigree, and the couple has no chemistry, which is a real problem in a story that is ostensibly about BDSM but really a rather traditional affair about a damaged fellow and the good woman who loves him against all odds and good sense. Still, Taylor-Johnson deserves some credit for delivering one of the few mainstream American blockbusters of the past few years to take pleasure seriously and to not condescend to its heroine’s own singular tastes—that is to say, her penchant for this wooden block in a nice suit, which never quite adds up, but is always treated sincerely.
The film screens as part of The Revue’s Drunk Feminist Films series.
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 paid 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.
Force Majeure
Directed by Ruben Östlund
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Masculinity itself is at stake in Ruben Östlund’s wry, button-pushing Force Majeure, Sweden’s sadly snubbed but not forgotten Oscar submission from 2014. The premise is simple enough: during a family ski trip in the French Alps, an avalanche appears to be headed straight for patriarch Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and their darling blonde children, parked like sitting ducks at a restaurant with a view. While Ebba holds the children, Tomas flees, only to find moments later that all is well—except for the fact that his family bonds have been severed.
Tomas’s error of self-preservation becomes a kind of curse, poisoning relationships not just with his family, who can’t look at him the same way, but also with the couple’s friends, who inevitably take sides, acting out what seems like a prehistoric conversation about gender essentialism in hunter-gatherer societies. Östlund’s sharp, critical sensibility and minimalist aesthetic keep this material from being too on the nose, even if it feels as if most of what it has to say is delivered in that one deciding minute. This is a funny, scathing satire that packs a lot of bite into its modest package.
The film screens as part of TIFF Cinematheque’s retrospective In Case of No Emergency: The Films of Ruben Östlund.