culture
Rep Cinema This Week: While We’re Young, Iris, and Roar
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
At rep cinemas this week: A Noah Baumbach satire of bohemian New Yorkers and the fortysomethings who love and loathe them, a loving profile of a nonagenarian fashionista, and the most dangerous movie ever made.
While We’re Young
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East)
Age looks at youth with equal parts scorn and desire in Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young, a frothy and ultimately inconsequential follow-up to the filmmaker’s already uncharacteristically light Frances Ha. If the premise—a young bohemian couple (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried’s Jamie and Darby) energizes a middle-aged couple (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts’s Josh and Cornelia) before driving them apart—sounds a bit like an extended riff on Judd Apatow’s recent This Is 40, in practice Baumbach’s film plays more like a remake of What About Bob with Stiller in place of Richard Dreyfuss’s increasingly unhinged nebbish sort and Driver as a surrogate Bill Murray, a charismatic vampire feeding on the energy of everyone around him.
While We’re Young is entertaining enough as an intergenerational comedy, scoring some mild points on a certain type of aging hipster who tries to reinvent himself by wearing a hat. It’s also relatively savvy about the New York film scene it gently ribs, sparing neither Josh the elder documentarian, who loves the work of Pennebaker and Maysles yet makes endless Marxist bores that they’d find insufferable, nor Jamie the wolfish, unethical upstart with an eye for exploitative material. But so little of the film’s satire sticks that you wonder if Baumbach might be better off sticking to the lower concept, character-based material he plumbed so aptly in less accessible but more honest films like Greenberg.
Iris
Directed by Albert Maysles
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
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.
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 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.