culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Roar, Iris, and It Follows
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
At rep cinemas this week: a mind-boggling cult film about a modern Swiss Family Robinson besieged by lions, tigers, and elephants; a charming profile of a 93-year-old New York style maven; and a smart new thriller about a sexually transmitted curse.
Roar
Directed by Noel Marshall
The Royal (608 College Street)
What is there to say about Roar, whose reputation for being one of the most dangerous and foolish productions of all time precedes it? Somewhere between a nature film, a behind-the-scenes documentary about animal wrangling, and a wildly inept thriller, Roar is the goofy handiwork of director, star, and objectively bad husband Noel Marshall. Marshall plays Hank, a naturalist who, at the outset, has ditched his family for a few years to set up a preservation on the African plains (played here by a ranch in California) for a host of duelling lions, tigers, elephants, and more, all of whom are played by, well, a host of real live lions, tigers, elephants, and more. Occasional head wounds aside, all is fine until his wife (Marshall’s real-life spouse Tippi Hedren) and children (including real-life daughter Melanie Griffith) decide to visit and things get very real indeed for characters and actors alike.
Roar more than lives up to its renown as the sort of hybrid fiction-nonfiction curio you have to see in a theatre, in part because you’re never quite sure how to watch it. Over 70 members of the cast and crew, including Marshall, Hedren, and Griffith, were wounded in the process of making the film, and a number of the injuries are captured onscreen in what increasingly unfolds as an accidental snuff film—this despite Hank’s unconvincing onscreen protestations that everything is fine, and his big cat friends are just playing. That makes the work of watching Roar—and it certainly feels like work—an absorbing process of sifting through the tedious semi-scripted folly that is Marshall’s apparent vision for the film and the completely uncontrolled, breathtaking acts of God that animate it into something compelling.
Iris
Directed by Albert Maysles
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
The late Albert Maysles goes out on a high note with Iris, a charming and characteristically fleet look at the life of Iris Apfel, the droll 93-year-old style maven and New York fashion fixture. The direct cinema pioneer follows Iris and her husband of over 70 years, Carl, as they go about their daily routines and coolly reminisce over their shared life of love and work, including a very long stint as interior designers for the White House.
A fashion icon famous for her ability to find and incorporate different accessories on the fly, Iris is a perfect subject for Maysles, whose style has always favoured the improvisatory over the controlled. Where a less knowing, respectful filmmaker might have emphasized Iris’s gumption for keeping up such a full dance card into her 90s—including a visiting professorship in the fashion department at the University of Texas—Maysles simply portrays it as part of her Depression-era work ethic and no-nonsense, forward-charging personality. The result is a mutually respectful dance between filmmaker and subject, a pair of unsentimental workhorses with distinctive styles that have endured for the better part of a century.
It Follows
Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Though the signs were there in the film’s sensitivity to aimless suburban American teens, nothing in David Robert Mitchell’s tender debut, The Myth of the American Sleepover, quite prepared us for It Follows, a clever, scary, button-pushing thriller that pays homage to inspirations such as John Carpenter’s Halloween and David Cronenberg’s Shivers. Maika Monroe stars as Jay, a 19-year-old college freshman whose burgeoning romance with the new kid in town heads south when, after they have sex, he reveals that he has just passed on a sexually transmitted ghost—one that stalks its victims in the form of slow-moving apparitions that only they can see, never stopping until they die or pass the curse on themselves.
Mitchell toys with a lot of exploitative possibilities here, framing Jay’s initial traumatized state as a rape allegory and flirting with the moralistic suggestion that a young woman’s sexuality is dangerous. He’s wise to downplay that reading, dialling up the intensity largely by identifying with Jay and playing her dilemma straight. If its ideas are a bit inchoate, It Follows is still strong, pulse-pounding stuff with a warm beating heart at the centre—the work of a skillful new genre talent.