A fine Gemma Arterton battles for Britain REVIEWS

PERFUME WAR

Starring Sally Hawkins. Rated PG

It’s hard enough to capture the 2

motives and drives of a dedicated fine artist, and folk arts are, in some ways, even harder to parse. How do people make songs and poems and paintings without knowing what the rest of the world has already done? On the other hand, the simplicity of mixing creative crafts with everyday chores recalls the village life that dominated the planet for thousands of years, and the straightforward Maudie, an Irish-canadian coproduction, pretty much sticks to that approach.

The neatly shot two-hour movie outlines the high and low points of Maud Lewis, a Nova Scotian who achieved minor celebrity for her cheerful watercolours in the 1950s and ’60s. The story of her self-taught expressionism is especially poignant, since she was born poor in a remote area, frequently abandoned, and had a condition that sent arthritis through most of her small, frail body.

Both parents died in the 1930s, and Maudie picks up the story when the would-be painter, played wonderfully by Mike Leigh veteran Sally Hawkins, finds herself living in smalltown Digby with few options. When her brother sells the family home, giving her nothing, she bridles at the strictures of her stern maiden aunt

Directed by Terrence Malick. Rated PG

Less a movie than a year’s subscription 2 to Architectural Digest crammed into a 130-minute montage, Song to Song is ostensibly set in the festival-heavy music world of Austin, Texas. But few songs are performed in the latest exercise in luxuriant shoegazing from Terrence Malick.

The imagistic flow here, again courtesy of resourceful cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, centres on Rooney Mara as a woman caught between Michael Fassbender’s powerful music producer and Ryan Gosling’s up-andcoming songwriter. Talk about your First World problems! There’s more than a whiff of white privilege to this voyeuristic tour of mansions, hotels, and private-jet Mexican vacations, hosted by young Caucasians who never need to work. Wealth is the cause of endless misery, but please don’t look away. That swimming-pool party is even more decadent than the other five!

Mara’s character—called Faye; the rest go unnamed—slept with the unlikable Fassbender dude to advance her music career, while actually digging the Gosling guy more. Despite briefly fondling a Fender, though, she never sings or plays a note. There is more live dialogue heard here than in Malick’s recent snoozers To the Wonder and Knight of Cups. But what’s uttered is improvised and uniformly banal. The usual offscreen murmuring allows the director to endlessly reshape his thin narrative—most of it shot around five years ago—in the editing booth. The difference between joy and sorrow, apparently, is mostly the product of voice-over explanation.

If I’m reading the Osterizer-on-high narrative right, the stubbly producer eventually drops Faye for a hot waitress (Natalie Portman), the stubbly songwriter meets another musician (Lykke Li) and then a ritzy Austinite (Cate Blanchett), and Faye changes things up with a glam Parisian lesbian

A documentary by Nick de Pencier. In English, Portuguese, and Tibetan, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

The Internet has been a fluid 2

place since a start, recalled in Werner Herzog’s recent Lo and Behold, that came from the gleam in just a few programmers’ eyes. The potential to do good and harm was built into something that enabled at first hundreds and then millions to communicate, often anonymously.

Made before the U.S. Congress used its power to do harm (for profit) by agreeing to remove privacy protections, Black Code is mostly concerned with the dark side, although it’s amazing how often the bad shit piggybacks on top of the good stuff. Case in point is the Arab Spring, in which countless young people saw a way out from under autocratic, often theocratic regimes through the flashmob capabilities of Facebook and other social media. A few years later and those same regimes are using the Net to track down, trick, and/or entrap potential dissidents.

Based on a book of the same name by computer specialist Ronald Deibert, the 90-minute doc follows the unassuming University of Toronto professor as he travels to some hot spots where the Internet has provided both hope and horror. Back in 2009, Deibert and his crew at the Citizen Lab uncovered the Ghostnet, a Chinese enterprise that hacked citizens and governments in more than a hundred countries. Hence an emphasis here, from Canadian director Nick de Pencier (known for producing and lensing docs like Watermark and The Ghosts in Our Machine), on Tibetan exiles in India.

He also looks at, among others, an Ethiopian expat who thought he’d be safe from surveillance in the U.K. (guess what?) and Brazilian activists who find themselves beaten and arrested for perfectly legal activity, documenting the seemingly random use of violence, detention, and intimidation that is increasingly the first strategy of corporate security forces everywhere. The director’s approach is scattershot, to be sure, but it’s hard to picture a more coherent response to threats that keep evolving even faster than we can identify them.

> KEN EISNER

It’s fitting that self-made Canadian 2 entrepreneur Barb Stegemann should bring the same DIY attitude that’s helped her build a socially minded fragrance empire to a film about her own life.

The 7 Virtues maven and her husband, Mike Velemirovich, have formed a new movie company, and its first breezily inspiring documentary is about, well, Stegemann. It’s directed by an old King’s College friend, Mike Melski.

That means the film is as earnestly passionate about the world causes its brand supports as it is about her genuinely motivating rags-to-riches story. But it also gives the film an inescapable promotional scent.

Stegemann’s own story of overcoming unbelievable odds gives Perfume War its heart, tracing her life from poverty and bullying as a child in Nova Scotia through university to single motherhood.

From the outset, the movie weaves her story tightly together with that of her best friend, Trevor Greene, the Canadian soldier who was attacked with an axe in Afghanistan and is still fighting to recover from the brain injury. It’s an admittedly odd alignment—the wounded soldier and the perfume dealer—but Greene was the one who inspired Stegemann to turn toward Afghanistan and try to spark peace there through business. Stegemann found an Afghan activist who was organizing farmers to grow orange blossoms and roses as an alternative to the poppy trade fuelling unrest and terror in the region. With no financial backing or experience in the industry, she launched the first two 7 Virtues scents using their oils.

From there, we watch her “crazy journey”—including pitching on Dragons’ Den (and surviving an epic ripping from a skeptical Kevin O’leary), winning over corporate giants like Hudson’s Bay, defying the sexual branding of perfumes, and developing a career as a speaker. The film is full of the motivational talk that peppers Stegemann’s engagements and her best-selling book 7 Virtues of a Philosopher Queen, including countless intertitles quoting Roman philosopher-king and Stoic Marcus Aurelius. What we don’t see or hear enough from are the farmers in Afghanistan, though cameras do join Stegemann on a trip to Rwanda, where she sources patchouli oil.

Stegemann’s triumphs are huge, and her role-modelling for women important. She’s honest and likable, a whirlwind of energy, and a passionate subject who can hold the screen. Interestingly, she doesn’t believe in charity; socially conscious venture capitalism is the driving force here. Perfume War is a compelling success story; still, you’re left wondering what a more arm’slength documentary team might have sniffed out of all this.

> JANET SMITH