culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Clouds of Sils Maria, The Wonders, and National Gallery
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from The Clouds of Sils Maria.
At rep cinemas this week: a metafictional drama about performance starring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart, an intimate family drama, and a probing look at the National Gallery.
Clouds of Sils Maria
Directed by Olivier Assayas
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Dipping again into the metafictional waters of Irma Vep, Olivier Assayas delivers the ultimate in Kristen Stewart fan appreciation with Clouds of Sils Maria. Stewart plays Valentine, personal assistant to major film and stage actress Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche). When the director behind her first starring role as an ingenue dies, Maria finds herself in talks for a new adaptation of the play, in which she is cast as the older, jilted lover of her former character Sigrid. The change strains her relationship with the young Valentine as the women work through, absorb, and reflect the script.
Binoche and Stewart are terrific as colleagues and sparring partners, even if parallels between actress and character can seem rather on-the-nose. Stewart is particularly magnetic in a tricky role that doubles as an essay on her own celebrity. She makes great hay out of Valentine’s defence of the vulnerable performances the new Sigrid (Chloë Grace Moretz) gives in trashy blockbusters with werewolves, to which Maria howls in derision—a nice touch from Binoche. If Assayas’s script is guilty of clumsily over-annotating its themes, one still marvels at his poise in shifting between its many textual levels: it takes a master to make material this heady go down so easily.
The Wonders
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Alice Rohrwacher’s The Wonders caused a bit of a stir at last year’s Cannes Film Festival when it snagged the coveted Grand Prix—the competition’s runner-up prize—after flying under the radar in a slate that included more bombastic efforts like Xavier Dolan’s Mommy. A warm, delicately observed affair about a family of rural Italian beekeepers whose static lives are interrupted by modernity in the form of a garish reality-TV show, you can see how the film might have appealed to jury president Jane Campion, whose own work similarly focuses on tactile gestures and minute human exchanges at the expense of painting on a broader canvas.
Contrary to its bullish title, The Wonders is a rather modest film, at its best when it focuses on the repetitive but not unfulfilling field work that occupies so much of the lives of domineering patriarch Wolfgang (Sam Louwyck) and the family’s eldest tween daughter, Gelsomina (Maria Alexandra Lungu). As European coming-of-age narratives go, Gelsomina’s rebellion is fairly standard stuff, and the reality-TV plot, featuring Monica Bellucci as a seemingly celestial host beamed into the family’s rural digs, seems like an unnecessary contrivance meant to pitch the film to international markets as something wackier than it is. But Rohrwacher proves herself an accomplished filmmaker in just her second feature through the way she captures the family’s easy rhythms in her beautiful, languorous compositions, which make the most out of the gorgeous surroundings.
National Gallery
Directed by Frederick Wiseman
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Frederick Wiseman delivers another exhaustive but incisive look at an institution with National Gallery, a fine companion piece to his previous film At Berkeley, which considered the fate of the university in an age of youth apathy and diminishing public funding for higher education. It’s surely no accident that the direct-cinema pioneer would turn to another unfashionable institution for his follow-up—namely, the art gallery—but what surprises about National Gallery is its focus not on the gallery’s inner workings, as per Wiseman tradition, but on how such cultural bastions engage with vastly different audiences.
For a languidly paced film, National Gallery is riveting stuff, with smart lectures from gallery experts that pitch Vermeer, Rembrandt, Turner, to spectators as diverse as schoolchildren, academics, and deep-pocketed patrons. Wiseman’s institutional portraits tend to rise and fall on the strength of the bureaucratic figures who fill their hallowed halls. Here, though, there’s a sly intelligence behind the doc’s design, with the experts’ commentary on how paintings tell stories all at once, without the leisure of time, playfully informing our own awareness that what we’re watching is cinema.