culture
Rep Cinema This Week: What Now? Remind Me, Ex Machina, and When Marnie Was There
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from What Now? Remind Me.
At rep cinemas this week: a filmmaker’s powerful chronicle about a year living with HIV, a cult classic in the making about artificial intelligence, and a coming-of-age almost-love-story from Studio Ghibli.
What Now? Remind Me
Directed by Joaquim Pinto
The Royal (608 College Street)
Illness becomes the occasion for memory and self-reflection in What Now? Remind Me, Joaquim Pinto’s powerful account of his year spent undergoing clinical trials for an experimental drug to treat his HIV and Hepatitis C infections. A mainstay in Portuguese filmmaking for over 30 years as a sound recordist and then a director, Pinto serves here as a laconic tour guide through his personal notebook, which spans fragments as disparate as his memories of childhood and the cinema, his philosophical education, his relationship with his husband Nuno (who resists participating in the film except as a shadowy presence at the margins), as well as his experience of the early days of the AIDS crisis and the LGBT response.
What Now? Remind Me is an absorbing, stylistically varied experiment, overlong but filled with enough startling insights to compensate. Pinto’s erudite narration and DJ-like mixed-media survey of both his present moment and his personal and political pasts make this as singular an autobiography as you’re likely to see. Mileage will nevertheless vary: much of the material (of Pinto’s life as well as the documentary record of it) is predictably tedious, repetitive stuff, and some will find the nearly three-hour running time quite trying. For those who can walk the distance, though, this is a worthwhile marathon—essential viewing for anyone interested either in life narratives or in filmic representations of HIV.
Tuesday’s Toronto premiere is presented by MDFF. The film will be preceded by a screening of Toronto filmmaker Martin Edralin’s short film Hole.
Ex Machina
Directed by Alex Garland
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
Cult screenwriter and novelist Alex Garland (28 Days Later, The Beach) tries his hand at directing with Ex Machina, a striking if muddled first feature debut that is sure to net its auteur some happy returns and a cushy spot as one of Hollywood’s top sci-fi prospects. Future Star Wars: The Force Awakens leading men Domnhall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac star as Caleb and Nathan, respectively, the former a budding young computer programmer recruited to the mountain retreat of the latter, an impossibly wealthy search engine impresario and misunderstood genius with a secret. Nathan has made a new toy: a svelte, artificially intelligent android named Ava (Alicia Vikander), and to his mind, sweet, naive Caleb is just the right person to test her out, making sure that she can pass for human.
As original sci-fi properties go, Ex Machina is pretty solid, if derivative of everything from Paradise Lost to Frankenstein (itself derivative of the former) to Ghost in the Shell. In its ambition to tackle and tidily resolve big-picture questions about ethics, it also plays out like an advanced standalone episode of Star Trek, and that isn’t such a bad thing. If it stumbles in its coda—a twisty series of reveals and clunky speeches on the nature of man’s cruelty to woman and woman’s fundamental unknowability to man that suggests Garland is a bit self-satisfied—the film is still one of the most handsomely designed, and, thanks to Isaac and Vikander especially, beautifully acted genre debuts we’ve seen in a while.
When Marnie Was There
Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
The famed Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli’s extended swan song continues with When Marnie Was There, Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s gorgeous but curiously plotted coming-of-age story. Based on Joan G. Robinson’s novel, the film follows Anna, a timid young artist who is driven out of her foster home in the city and into the countryside when her asthma proves too much for her. While staying at her aunt and uncle’s more natural digs away from the smog and din, Anna catches the eye of Marnie, a blonde-haired beauty occupying a swanky vacation home. The girls become fast friends, and Anna’s afternoons fly by, until she realizes Marnie may not be what she seems.
Anna’s blue eyes give us an early hint that this is a family heritage drama in disguise, but that doesn’t quite prepare us for the strange, stilted ending, which resolves the film’s supernatural intimations and almost-love-story by bending the central relationship between Anna and Marnie well out of shape. To explain more would spoil it, but it’s probably safe to say that When Marnie Was There will be appropriated some day as a covert queer classic that loses its way in the last act but is no less tender for it. Until then, we still recommend taking the film in as another solid if wayward Studio Ghibli melodrama for children, as beautiful in its minimalist design as it is convoluted in its construction.