culture
Rep Cinema This Week: L for Leisure, The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear, and Raiders of the Lost Ark
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from L for Leisure.
At rep cinemas this week: a dry ’90s comedy about vacationing grad students, an experimental docudrama about Georgian life, and a Steven Spielberg pulp classic.
L for Leisure
Directed by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn
Camera Bar (1028 Queen Street West)
A jet-setting dark comedy about a group of developmentally arrested graduate students ambling their way through a half-dozen vacations in the early ’90s, Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s L for Leisure is nearly unclassifiable. Despite its debts to hyper-literate American humorists like Whit Stillman and Hal Hartley, L For Leisure is a certifiable original, a strange generic hybrid of 16mm home movie, arch satire of a class of alienated forever-youths up to no good (and not much bad) away from home, and 1990s jukebox.
For all its formal innovations and sharp punchlines—“I thought the challenge would be in finding, even talking to a tree spirit,” admits one ethnographer who finds herself with more tree spirits than she knows what to do with—L for Leisure can be a tough nut to crack, alternating as it does between cynicism and fleeting traces of sincerity. Kalman and Horn’s habit of letting their unmoored heroes blend together, save for their arcanely singular fields of study, can make this feel like an ironic riff on Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line, where a very different sort of sprawling cast similarly shares one stilted language. But there’s something fresh and appealing about the experiment that makes the sojourn well worth taking.
The screening is co-presented by MDFF and The Seventh Art. Kalman will be in attendance.
The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
Directed by Tinatin Gurchiani
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
In 2011, Tinatin Gurchiani put out a casting call for Georgian citizens between the ages of 15 and 25, asking specifically for people who felt their life stories were worthy of being put on film. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear, an award winner at Sundance in 2012, is the odd and intermittently enchanting fruit of that labour. It’s a set of interviews with the would-be stars, conducted by the director and spliced with a docudrama about hardscrabble Georgian life starring the newly deputized actors.
Gurchiani’s bifurcated structure is an interesting approach, insofar as it invites viewers to think about the staged reality of well-known neorealist films, such as Vittorio de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief, which make similar dramatic use of local faces and settings. The fictionalized passages yield some stunning images of the Georgian countryside, as well as nicely realized snapshots of families in crisis and prayer. The interviews, with the subjects centred against various dilapidated backgrounds, are good-natured, if occasionally prone to a predictable strain of miserablism. One wishes that Gurchiani delved a little deeper into his subjects’ stories than he does in both sets of vignettes, but this is nevertheless a fascinating exercise carried to a rewarding conclusion.
The film screens as part of TIFF Cinematheque’s Discovering Georgian Cinema program.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East)
As Star Wars is to George Lucas, so Raiders of the Lost Ark is to Steven Spielberg: the blueprint for cracking modern blockbusters to come. Though Star Wars was the bigger hit, the start of the Indiana Jones franchise, likewise born of screenwriter and producer Lucas’s childhood obsession with pulp serials, was nevertheless the more impressively executed, directed to perfection by a young Spielberg at the top of his game.
Before the good Doctor Jones became the petulant child from The Last Crusade and the avuncular figure from Crystal Skull, he had his day as Raiders’ stoic archaeologist with the cocky grin. In his first mission, Jones is tasked with keeping the Ark of the Covenant from falling into the hands of some wily Nazis fronted by rival archaeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman). After Spielberg’s sympathetic portrayal of the French scientist (played by François Truffaut) in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you have to wonder whether his characterization of Belloq as a lily-livered French dandy, eager to steal the fruit of his competitor’s labour, was the result of some kind of change of heart: he comes off as a greater threat to American values than the Nazis.
Thorny international relations aside, the film thrives on the strength of Ford’s manic physicality and expansive comic range. He’s just as convincing as a Nazi-punching brute as he is a dreamy egghead professor in tweed, giving chalkboard tutorials on ancient Egyptian history. (One of Spielberg’s most rewarding visual gags is still the love note written on the eyelids of Jones’s student, which gets revealed in a series of casual winks.)
Spielberg and Lucas co-conceived Jones as a James Bond throwback without all the gadgets. Arguably, the best case for the character’s endurance over time is his modesty, a trace carried over from Ford’s rich characterization of the scruffy-but-secretly-nice Han Solo in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. If his Jones is a Bond stand-in, it isn’t the hard-hitting Daniel Craig sort we’re now accustomed to, but rather Sean Connery’s chronic bumbler from Goldfinger—at least insofar as both heroes spend most of their respective adventures knocked flat on their backs, their genitals perpetually endangered. A beta-male’s dream of growing up cool, Jones is the greatest boy-hero surrogate this side of, well, Luke Skywalker.