We review Philippe Falardeau’s hilarious political satire My Internship in Canada, which was selected as one of Canada’s Top Ten Films of 2015. Read our interview with director Falardeau here.
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Promoting and spotlighting Canadian Cinema is one of the goals of The Seventh Row. Here you'll find reviews of Canadian films and interviews with Canadian directors.
88:88 is a formal and ideological marvel **** 1/2
One of the best films to premiere at TIFF15, 88:88 is an emphatic statement on poverty and debuts an exciting, radical new voice in cinema: Winnipeg-based Isiah Medina.
TIFF15 shorts showcase emerging female directors
According to the Data Visualization firm Silk, only 27% of the films screening at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival — 69 of the 400+ films — were directed by women. The numbers get worse if you exclude short films entirely. Worse, only 9% of the films in TIFF’s Discovery section, a program dedicated to showcasing works my new filmmakers, were directed by women. One of the first steps to making these numbers better is supporting short films by women, as shorts tend to be a stepping stone to larger, more costly projects. And if you take a look at this year’s short film program, there’s plenty of great female directorial talent waiting to be given a chance. We took a look at some of these films and filmmakers that have been flying under-the-radar with no or next to no coverage.
Mia
Adding to this year’s stock of Canadian films about First Nations characters — the feature Fire Song was one of the greats among these — is Amanda Strong and Bracken Hanuse Corlett’s short Mia, a mixed media animated film about an aboriginal woman in an urban environment who paints images of her ancestral past and her dreams. Mixing stop motion animation with more traditional drawn animation, the film is full of glorious colours and images in an entirely inventive and unique style. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it’s beautiful to behold. The narrative through line is sometimes hard to follow, but the film announces a serious talent in Strong and Hanuse Corlett.
World Famous Gopher Hole Museum
Whereas Mia was part documentary and part narrative film, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum is a much more traditional documentary by Canadian filmmakers Chelsea McMullan and Douglas Nayler. This twenty-minute short takes an inside look at a quirky little museum of curiosities in Torrington, Alberta: it’s filled with gopher hole dioramas, each made and maintained by the museum’s owners and operators.
Aside from saving you the trip to Nowheresville, Alberta, it’s a loving look at a hobbyist and a small town attraction that pays tribute to its subject. There’s a melancholic tinge to the film, as the owners of the museum grow old and the proprietor finds that her age is slowing her down, preventing her from working, even as our view of the museum is of a largely empty space with few visitors. It’s not as popular as it once was, but it still means a great deal to her. McMullan and Nayler show a great deal of empathy in their filmmaking, allowing the film to be not just informative, but an engaging character study, too.
7 Sheep and A New Year
Two films directed by women — 7 Sheep and A New Year — explore black and white film in a contemporary context. In 7 Sheep, Polish director Wictoria Szymanska follows a young girl seemingly living alone on a farm with a strange and lonely old man. Szymanska keeps the camera at the girl’s eye level or below, always staying in her perspective, and often following her from behind. The gestural images create a dreamscape, where the black-and-white hearkens back to a simpler, innocent time.
But colours break through now and then, whether it’s the blue paint the young girl smears on her sheep or the way she herself can flash quickly into colour and back to black and white repeatedly and almost imperceptibly. Though the film lacks narrative cohesion and lasts a bit longer than is needed to establish the tone and ideas, it is full of inventive visual ideas, where each frame brims with emotion even as little story or character development occurs. If given a more concrete script, I’d expect Szymanska to work wonders.
Québécois filmmaker Marie-Ève Juste’s A New Year begins on New Year’s Eve on a black screen as the protagonist belts out a song. Eventually, she appears, her back to the camera, in an empty house with a Christmas tree at the edge of the frame. It’s not until her song about being with friends end that the camera reveals her body, and her pregnant belly, just before her friends arrive. It’s a celebration, but she’s detached.
Before long, we only see her friends looking into lens with confusion and annoyance as she cancels plans post-birth, pre-occupied with her newborn. It’s a story about change and new beginnings, and the black-and-white images give it a nostalgic tinge, frozen in time even as everything around our protagonist is changing. Juste’s framing is exquisite: even a moment of the protagonist sitting alone in quiet reflection on the couch is inventive.
NINA
One of the best narrative shorts I saw was NINA because of how Elkhatabi withholds information to maintain tension. Directed by Montreal-based filmmaker Halima Elkhatabi, the film opens on Nina, sitting on a couch, looking into lens, as she’s questioned by an off-camera voice. Eventually, it becomes clear that she’s a young mother though her baby is off-screen and silent. In the next scene, she’s alone on her couch, resting when her baby starts crying and she slowly, painstakingly, and somewhat frustratedly heads into the kitchen to prepare formula. We watch her in the kitchen while the baby’s offscreen screams can be heard, and we sense Nina’s ambivalence about parenting.
Each image and each frame has a purpose, further developing what we know about Nina and her relationship to motherhood. Elkhatabi opts for long takes, allowing us to spend time with and live with Nina in her troubles, preventing us from judging her. Every sound, from the screams to Nina’s breath, is meaningful. Elizabeth Tremblay Gagnon stars and holds our attention in every frame because of all the emotion she shows on her face. The film is a terrific showcase for Elkhatabi’s ability to work with actors and her minimalist approach to telling the story: nothing is over-complicated, but every visual choice is reasoned.
TIFF15: Masterful 3D is vital to the domestic drama in Every Thing Will Be Fine
Whether it’s making you feel like you’re gazing at the Chauvet caves in Southern France in Cave of Forgotten Dreams or making you aware of how small a boy is in a big, scary, Dickensian adult world in Hugo, 3D can be an essential tool for storytelling. Ever since Wim Wenders started using the technology, to great effect in his dance film Pina, he’s used it to tell stories where the story of space itself is integral. In Pina, he replicated the stage as close as possible on film, by putting the 3D behind the cinema screen. He gave us dance numbers in the three dimensions for which they were designed. Last year’s Cathedrals of Culture, his short about the Berlin Philharmonic, brought you into the building and made you very aware of the space: where the walls are, what the auditorium was like from different seats, and how the building felt.
With Every Thing Will Be Fine, Wenders has proved that using 3D need not be confined to documentary filmmaking, but that it can be absolutely vital to drama. As a story about a man, Tomas (James Franco), who frequently seems to be sleepwalking through his life, the juxtaposition with his three-dimensional surroundings, which are so alive and vivid, is powerful. As Tomas walks around without real purpose, we watch the the three-dimensional snow flakes falling, and we notice the spaces he inhabits. The first shot of the film is of his writer’s notebook that he’s struggling to fill, and its very three-dimensionality makes it feel important and his paralysis all the more palpable.
Through more fault of the screenplay by Bjørn Olaf Johannessen than Franco’s, Tomas rarely has any expression other than one of severity and seriousness. When we meet him, he’s having trouble connecting to his girlfriend Sara (Rachel McAdams with a tragic Québécois accent), from whom he’s about to split. As they sit on opposite sides of their dining room table, his inability to reach across and touch her hand feels like an inability to cross a giant chasm because it’s unfolding in three dimensions. The space between people in this film can feel like an un-crossable gulf.
Near the beginning of the film, Tomas gets into a driving accident on a country road, where he worries he may have accidentally killed a boy. When he finds a boy alive and well in front of his car, he decides to walk him home down the street. Their walk is slow and calm, and that short distance to the house feels long — enough time for them to bond. When he gets to the house and realises the boy’s brother is missing, he and the boy’s mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) run back down the road at full speed. Because we’ve walked that road in three dimensions, our awareness of the distance, and just how quickly they’re traversing it this time, heightens the drama. It helps us understand the degree of the mother’s panic and the seriousness of the emergency.
That accident will haunt Tomas throughout the film, even as he tries to move on, finding a new girlfriend Ann (Marie-Josee Croze) and even a step-daughter Mina (Julia Sarah Stone), who is close in age to the boy he almost killed. Even as his domestic life seems to be becoming idyllic, he’s still unable to fully connect with his loved ones. Here, as before in the film, walls start to seem like barriers, and we’re aware of just how closed off he is because of the spaces he inhabits.
We spend time with Tomas in his station wagon, where Wenders makes us aware of exactly how small it is. When he ends up in the hospital and Sara comes to visit, and she closes the curtains around him to create a room, we feel how it’s a temporary makeshift space, which is what their relationship together has become. In Tomas’ beautiful house, Wenders pulls back to a wide shot to let us see Tomas in one room while Ann and Mina spend time together in the adjacent room. They’re in such separate spaces that we feel the emotional schism.
What Wenders does here is effectively turn the screen into a stage: that sense of well-defined space, of distances having meaning, is something inherent to live theatre. Here, Wenders creates that same immediacy and intimacy on film. It’s something that only a master of blocking could pull off — I’d have liked to see what Kurosawa could do with the technology. It’s literally a new dimension to explore and to emphasize spacial relationships.
It’s wasted on this script though, which takes itself far too seriously for the limited insight and obvious plot points it provides. Most problematic, though, is Tomas who is so dull it’s hard to care about his emotional problems let alone believe he’d be capable of penning a successful novel. He comes alive when with children — curious for a man who claims not to want them early in the film — but he’s standoffish and cold, occasionally inscrutable when among other adults. Wenders scores the film with such self-serious strings that they serve to undermine rather than underline the drama.
TIFF15: Our Loved Ones depicts cycles of family grief
In Our Loved Ones, Québécois director Anne Émond makes the physical closeness of loved ones tangible. There’s intimacy in every moment shared between family members here, often expressed through the sound design that highlights barely perceptible noises. Whether it’s the breath of a partner lying in bed next to you or the thump of a tight hug, Émond has a gift for making you feel like you’re there in that moment, where being near someone is a form of comfort.
This is essential for a film that is about a family caught in cycles of grief. It begins when the patriarch commits suicide, twenty years in the past. From here, we follow his son David (Maxim Gaudette). He visits his sister while grieving, which leads him to his wife. We skip to years later as he’s becoming the patriarch of a new family, as scared and confused as we imagine his father must have been.
Decades pass, but emotional scars left behind from the event remain visible — especially for David’s younger brother (Mikael Gouin), who was the one to find his father dead and spends years in a tailspin because of it. Grief unites the family, who only really feel solid, whole, and connected when physically close to one another. Even the way they stand together in a room, preparing a meal, speaks of years of shared space and intimacy.
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Émond plays with time, jumping ahead several years at a time without notice, as David grows into a father of two. As his daughter Laurence (Karelle Tremblay) ages, the film shifts focus to her life, starting around age 16, while her father fades into the background, both literally — Émond blurs his figure in the frame — and figuratively. He feels his increasing irrelevance even as they share a close relationship, but he also marvels at her with pride. It eventually becomes clear that Émond’s real interest is in Laurence, how she copes with growing up and her changing relationship with her father. But having followed David’s trajectory allows us to see him as a flawed, young person, like Laurence is. It draws attention to the cycle of life.
The teenaged Laurence falls head-over-heels in love. She’s forced to deal with unexpected left turns and find her way in the world. Although every scene between David and his wife, Laurence’s mother, seems tender and sweet, the central relationship of the film is between father and daughter. We wait to see how Laurence grows out of him and replaces him, while also watching for the ways he’ll always be essential and present.
Because the film spans decades, any small detail introduced early in the film accumulates greater resonance by the end. The song David plays on his guitar to woo his wife soon becomes a part of family history, an inside joke to be pulled out and smiled at from time to time, remembering what it has meant even as each performance gives it new meaning. The red notebook that Laurence had used as a diary and David read without permission becomes a reminder of the boundaries he broke and the ease with which she would forgive him when she needed him.
Watch our directing masterclass with Anne Émond and Madeleine Olnek
Set largely in the beautiful small town in Bas-Saint-Laurent, Québec, the specificity of the locations is crucial. Each place is tangled up with events we witness on screen and recall when the characters return to the sites in later years. The long shots of the landscape full of colour add a romanticism to the setting, making the place feel so idyllic that the memory and nostalgia that Laurence acquires feel earned.
Although the deaths in the film are a useful device to bring the family together and show the passage of time, the suicide is under-motivated. Just because it may seem baffling to family members when a suicide happens doesn’t mean it’s entirely unexplained. We’d expect to see signs of depression or other mental health issues. The end result may be a surprise, but there are usually signs. For a family that seems mostly harmonious, the fact that suicide looms large even as Émond suggests this is not the result of a genetic chemical instability (why isn’t anyone in therapy anyway?), becomes increasingly implausible and shoehorned in as a plot device.
Yet it hardly matters. Even as her mother and father recede into the distance, Laurence becomes more and more intriguing and complicated. She’s wrestling with adulthood, memory, family obligation, and confusion. We experience things viscerally with Laurence, as alive to sound and touch as she is. When she goes for a swim, we hear the light movement of water around her and we watch her face in tight closeup. When she goes in for a hug with her brother from her mother, Émond hones in on how her mother brushes away the hair on Laurence’s face, providing comfort with her touch. For its interest in memory and family dynamics, Our Loved Ones would make for a great pairing with Joachim Trier’s Louder Than Bombs. It’s instinctive where Bombs is intellectual. Together, they almost complete each other.
Read about other films in Canada’s Top Ten.
Read our interview with Director Anne Émond.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-0eZz4g9oA]
TIFF15: The Rainbow Kid respectfully depicts disability
The Rainbow Kid addresses both the ways in which disability can be a limitation and a difficulty without presenting it as utterly debilitating.
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