culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter; Clouds of Sils Maria; and Mr. Turner
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter.
At rep cinemas this week: a magic-realist riff on the Coen brothers’ Fargo, a meta-drama about actors starring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart, and a naturalistic portrait of the late years of British painter J.M.W. Turner.
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter
Directed by David Zellner
The Royal (608 College Street)
A VHS copy of Fargo turns into a magical way-finder in Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, the beguiling yet frustrating new project from Texas filmmaker David Zellner. Rinko Kikuchi bests her own Academy Award-nominated work in Babel with an even more arresting (and also near-silent) turn as the titular character, an eccentric late-twentysomething Japanese woman who sloughs off her dissatisfying life as an office girl in Tokyo to pursue the blood money famously buried by Steve Buscemi in the wilds of North Dakota in the Coen brothers film.
Depicting the distorted perspective of a damaged soul with any number of unspoken mental health issues is challenging stuff. As might be expected, Zellner and his brother Nathan (his screenwriting and producing partner) don’t always clear the ethical bar, concluding the film with a sweet but troubling magic realist coda that waves away real questions about what it might mean to help someone like Kumiko get where she is going, despite the impossibility of her quest. If the whole thing doesn’t quite hang together as well as you’d hope, Zellner nevertheless deserves credit for sustaining a gentle, meditative tone as Kumiko undergoes her own Coen-like odyssey into the American midwest, thanks largely to some subtly gorgeous lensing from cinematographer Sean Porter and Kikuchi’s quietly commanding performance.
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.
Mr. Turner
Directed by Mike Leigh
Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East)
Timothy Spall deservedly nabbed the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his grunting, harrumphing performance as famed English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner in Mike Leigh’s typically smart but uncharacteristically beautiful Mr. Turner. An underrated character actor, Spall shines in this rare lead turn, which humanizes the artist by representing him as a full-bodied, husky sort, long on vision and short on the words to articulate it.
As strong as Spall is, Leigh’s film seems at times to be doing too much with too little follow-through. Its fleeting insights into the Royal Academy and the politics of the 19th-century landscape art scene, for example, feel a bit undernourished, partly because they are so counter to the film’s naturalistic aesthetic. Instead we’re offered experts’ dull expository accounts of the art we can see perfectly well for ourselves. As with Leigh’s best work, though, the film evokes the physical weight of its subject’s world in a refreshingly candid, tactile sort of way, bringing you as close to Turner the man as you’d want to be.