culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Slow West, Singin’ in the Rain, and The Nightmare
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Slow West.
At rep cinemas this week: a revisionist western with Michael Fassbender, a technicolor musical classic, and a spooky documentary on sleep paralysis.
Slow West
Directed by John Maclean
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
The western gets demystified again in Slow West, the formally accomplished feature debut from John Maclean who, up until now, has been best known as a member of the now-departed Scottish alternative act the Beta Band. A meditative, talky slow-burner, Slow West makes expert use of its 19th-century Colorado environment—cheekily described in the opening voice-over as the “baking heart of America”—to tell the story of an aristocratic Scottish teen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) in search of his long lost and now criminally pursued love and the no-good drifter (Michael Fassbender) by his side, who’s either there to chaperone him or claim the bounty on the girl for himself.
Maclean is a talent with a good sense of pacing and a keen eye for dramatic set pieces—best realized in the climactic shootout that makes clever use of its minimal surroundings—but Slow West has some structural kinks that need ironing, not least a tendency to drift into overwritten tangents about minor characters with long backstories. While Maclean hasn’t quite figured out how to kill his darlings, making this feel like a loose album rather than a tight LP, he’s a natural with actors, coaxing warm, honest performances out of Smit-McPhee and Fassbender, who can coast on his Germanic chilliness in lesser films. The western doesn’t exactly need another ironic takedown that emphasizes the randomness and brutality of old American violence over the heroism, but Maclean’s distinctive voice and visual sensibility make it worth easing into Slow West’s modest charms and genre savviness just the same.
Singin’ in the Rain
Directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
When The Artist became a critical darling in 2011, many saw its rapturous reception as part of a larger wave of nostalgia for the silent-film era. (The same yearning had also cropped up in Hugo’s fawning tributes to the homemade sci-fi of Georges Méliès and in Midnight in Paris’s fond tip of the hat to Luis Buñuel.) Less attention was paid to how The Artist, about an outsized vaudeville performer’s awkward transition to the talkies, fit into an old Hollywood tradition of movies in love with the spectacle of moviemaking, the reigning example being Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain, arguably the best-regarded American musical.
Kelly’s dance to the titular song gets most of the attention nowadays, thanks to the fluid choreography, expert long takes, and inventive art direction. The sequence’s reputation is deserved, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to call Kelly’s puddle-hopping, umbrella-twirling, and wall-walking routine a forerunner to parkour. More than that centrepiece, or even the charming if formulaic star-is-born story, it’s the borderline surrealist set pieces (especially a ballet rendition of “Broadway Melody”) that put the film in another league. Though some of these extended song-and-dance numbers stray from the plot, they do so in a joyous fashion, reminding us that one of the key innovations of the sound era, dubbing, gave performers the freedom to stray from the mechanical limitations of sound recording equipment. Freed from the dark age of early talkies that tethered performers to microphones hidden in bushes—satirized in one of the movie’s most iconic scenes—Singin’ in the Rain can wander wherever Kelly’s artistry will take it.
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.