culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Heaven Knows What, The Nightmare, and The Emperor Visits the Hell
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Heaven Knows What.
At rep cinemas this week: a blistering tour through the night life of a homeless New York teen, a spooky recreation of your worst nightmares, and a deadpan Chinese comedy.
Heaven Knows What
Directed by Josh and Benny Safdie
The Royal (608 College Street)
For all the buzz that Oscar-aspirants like Whiplash and The Imitation Game generated at TIFF last fall, few films at the festival packed as much of a punch as Josh and Benny Safdie’s Heaven Knows What. The independent sibling filmmaking team behind 2009’s critically acclaimed Daddy Longlegs centre their fiction-nonfiction hybrid on the life of Harley, played in a loosely autobiographical performance by Arielle Holmes, a homeless teenager from the streets of New York. The film follows Harley through an infernal cycle of nights and days as she cycles between trying to score some heroin and trying to break free from her no-less-intense and toxic addiction to on-and-off lover Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones).
Heaven Knows What is a tough film to categorize, alternating recklessly between the beautiful and the wretched. Its uncompromisingly raw aesthetic, from the frenzied, direct photography to the blistering score by Isao Tomita (based, as improbable as it sounds, on his arrangements of Debussy compositions), makes it a difficult sit, and likely a triggering one for anyone with a history of addiction. But there are moments of grace here that cut through the gloom, however briefly. Through it all, you can’t help but empathize with Holmes, a magnetic screen presence to rival the down-on-their-luck nonprofessional stars of the Dardenne brothers’ best work. You feel for her in the throes of her epically bad love, you want her to break the cycle, and you can’t take your eyes off her.
The Nightmare
Directed by Rodney Ascher
The Royal (608 College Street)
Having thoroughly plumbed the world of Stanley Kubrick obsessives and fanboy conspiracy theorists with the savvy Room 237, Rodney Ascher turns to even more fraught interpretive territory in The Nightmare. A spooky look at sleep paralysis as experienced by eight far-flung Americans who have been tortured by the condition for years—in a few cases, since early childhood—The Nightmare is a formally adventurous documentary that tries to get into its talking heads’, well, heads, through a series of creepy minimalist recreations, making us see what they see.
Ascher’s experiential approach to the subject admittedly has its limitations. Putting virtually all his stock in his subjects’ personal accounts of their worst recurring dreams of top-hat-sporting shadows sauntering into their bedrooms means downplaying more thorough scientific, medical, or cultural explanations for this condition—save for a cutesy recurring animation of firing synapses and a map-hopping CGI montage that pitches sleep paralysis as a transhistorical anthropological phenomenon. It also makes for a lot of repetition, especially as one subject, apparently flattered by his starring role, becomes that guy at the party who tells you his dream ad nauseum until someone relieves you from his presence. All the same, this is a lively and sometimes genuinely scary film, tapping into that eerie primordial place from which our deepest fear of boogeymen comes.
The Emperor Visits the Hell
Directed by Luo Li
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Based in the loosest way possible on a 16-century Chinese novel about the emperor Li Shimin, who finds himself dogged by the spirit of the Dragon King and dragged into the underworld, Luo Li’s The Emperor Visits the Hell is some sort of watershed for ironic literary adaptations. Rather than set his version of the story in the era of the Ming Dynasty and consequently recycle any number of costume drama tropes, Li bluntly relocates it to contemporary China, where the Emperor is a sleepy bureaucrat and the Dragon King a tough-looking pool shark.
This is a smart, deadpan comedy, but mileage will vary depending on one’s familiarity with the sacred cows Li is tipping. Those with fluency in contemporary Chinese politics and an intimate knowledge of the source text—recreated here via superimposed captions that never seem to match the onscreen visuals, two timelines, and tonal registers overlaid on top of each other in anarchic fashion—will certainly profit more from Li’s reserved satire than total neophytes. Others may still marvel at the film’s delicate construction, its unhurried long takes, keenly observed frontal shots of the Emperor going about his daily calligraphy routine—and most of all, its stunning photography. One low-lit sequence set entirely in a car as the Emperor’s journey is scored to a tape of an opera might be the key to Li’s approach, the interplay between the live and the recorded nicely bringing out the film’s playful response to the problem of how to reanimate classical stories for the present.
The Emperor Visits the Hell screens as part of TIFF Cinematheque’s retrospective, You Can’t Go Home Again: The Films of Luo Li.