MOVIES
There are fireworks but there’s no Hollywood flash in the absorbing First Nations drama Before the Streets
Before the Streets breaks all the right rules; Germany and France go dancing in Frantz; Colossal does monster battle with itself; hearts of darkness enter The Lost City of Z.
BEFORE THE STREETS
Starring Rykko Bellemare. In Atikamekw, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable
How’s this for timing? While we’re still cleaning 2 up the bunting from National Canadian Film Day, Chloé Leriche’s stringently authentic and unsentimental slice of First Nations life settles into a well-deserved weeklong run at the Cinematheque. Crafted mostly with nonactors and performed entirely in the Atikamekw language, Leriche’s film is surely some kind of landmark, not least of all because it’s so absorbing. Rykko Bellemare takes much of the credit for that as Shawnouk, a young man suspended between boredom and aimlessness in northern Quebec’s Manawan reserve. Judging from the misdirected energy that seems to quiver beneath his surface (a fireworks battle in a desolate quarry has a pleasingly surreal sense of abandon), we expect something to go terribly wrong for the guy. And it does, when a stranger (Félix et Meira’s Martin Dubreuil) cajoles the surly, if soulful, youth into a burglary spree.
Somebody ends up dead thanks to that caper, and the terrified Shawnouk disappears into the woods with the cops on his back. It’s here that Before the Streets asserts itself as something other than a routine narrative. Shawnouk will eventually find a kind of redemption in traditional healing practices, depicted in blunt and unromantic fashion by Leriche and cinematographer Glauco Bermudez. But first, as a fugitive, he has to cycle through a few deadend jobs (including a brief and depressing stint as a dogcatcher) and negotiate a tense détente with his mom’s boyfriend (Jacques Newashish)—also a cop, but one determined to put kin first.
All of this is delivered at a notably unstressed pace, with none of the beats that would be hammered into a screenplay if it were tendered at film school. The emphasis here is on a soul’s journey, and the closest thing to a climax consists of an intense close-up on Shawnouk’s face as he sings and hits a drum. Considering the source (and notwithstanding its crisp photography and attractive cast), this repudiation of conventional filmmaking is as exciting as anything out there right now. > ADRIAN MACK
FRANTZ
Starring Paula Beer. In German and French, with English subtitles. Rated PG
French writer-director François Ozon’s latest 2
genre study wears its history proudly. Set just after the First World War, the film draws on All Quiet on the Western Front, Carl Dreyer’s silent films, and, most overtly, François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, which placed skittish Frenchwoman Jeanne Moreau between best friends and former wartime enemies Henri Serre and Oskar Werner.
In Frantz, the woman is a levelheaded German, and the domestic side of her love triangle is already kaput. Still dressed in black, the lovely Anna (Paula Beer) is so devoted to her titular fiancé that she lives with his parents in a remote Saxon village. The locals don’t exactly welcome a lone French visitor, regardless of his intentions.
Tall, narrow-faced Pierre Niney played the blond fashion icon in 2014’s Yves Saint Laurent, but as the mysterious Adrien Rivoire, he resembles Truffaut’s Jim, down to the wavy dark hair and pencil mustache. It seems he knew Frantz before the war, when both were music students in Paris. The dead soldier’s stern doctor father (cast standout Ernst Stötzner) is furious, but his mother (Marie Gruber) invites Adrien into their home, where the Frenchman’s story unfolds gradually. You don’t have to be a German nationalist (like those heel-clickers in the local beer hall) to wonder where he’s really coming from.
The film’s starkly beautiful black-and-white compositions occasionally bloom into muted period colour, especially when amour is suggested. Its archaic qualities are well-earned, and Frantz is itself a loose remake of Broken Lullaby, Ernst Lubitsch’s antiwar drama from 1932, just before Hitler’s rise and the director’s move to Hollywood, where he concentrated on notably antitotalitarian comedies like Ninotchka and To Be or Not to Be. Little in this update lends itself to comedy, and despite the richness of imagery and influences, the almost two-hour movie is certainly dampened by its unvaried tone. Even after the stately action shifts to Paris, everyone’s feelings are so cautiously deliberated, it’s hard to get excited about their remaining options, romantic or otherwise. This is a movie to admire, not love. > KEN EISNER
COLOSSAL
Starring Anne Hathaway. Rated PG
The first hour of Colossal is packed with clever 2 metaphors that use horror-movie tropes to explore the mysteries of human interactions. Some of this stuff is cleared up partway in, only to be replaced by a bigger question: why couldn’t the filmmakers come up with anything funny, smart, or thoughtful for the second half?
Anne Hathaway stars as Gloria (no last name given), a hard-partying Manhattanite just getting by on the largesse of booze-buying pals and her hardworking boyfriend (Dan Stevens). He’s finally had it when she comes home from yet another all-nighter, and she hightails it back to her old home in upstate New York—actually rural B.c.—to her spookily empty family abode (no explanation given). Help arrives in the form of an old grade-school chum called Oscar (Jason Sudeikis). Good news: he owns a bar and can give her a job. Bad news: he owns a bar!
A few nights after carousing with Oscar and his own readymade crew (Tim Blake Nelson and Austin Stowell, both underused), their drunken reverie is interrupted by news that a giant, Godzilla-like monster has surfaced in Seoul, South Korea. (Tokyo was already taken, as a suit from lawyers at Toho averred.)
This is enjoyably jarring, especially for something played as a routine indie dramedy until Koreans start getting crushed. The connection, as trailers tell you, comes when Gloria notices that her own personal tics are mimicked by that faraway gorgon. What this is supposed to mean—the collateral damage created by our own destructive traits or maybe the monumental size of our First World self-absorption—is left to our imaginations. That’s because the hard work of thinking it through wasn’t really done by writer-director Nacho Vigalondo, who gives us frustrating snack portions where the main meal should be.
As the only female character in the story, Gloria simply isn’t substantial or interesting enough to represent what the movie might or might not be saying about gender roles, violence against (or from) women, alcoholism, or the best use of Downton Abbey veterans. The worst thing about Colossal is that it feels so small. > KEN EISNER
THE LOST CITY OF Z
Starring Charlie Hunnam. Rated 14A
From its title to its dashing, mustachioed 2
lead, The Lost City of Z harks back to the classic explorer movies of the last century. But it also comments on the downfall of that era, when allmale geographic societies talked about savages.
Basing his extended tale on the nonfiction book of the same name by David Grann, director James Gray tells the story of Percy Fawcett, a stiffupper-lip Brit explorer who became obsessed with finding a lost city hidden in the thick Amazonian jungle of Bolivia and Brazil. Early in the last century, he left behind a wife and children he adored to spend years roughing it in the remote and dangerous “green desert”, a place where teeming piranhas and poison-arrow-shooting cannibals were just a few of the welcoming parties.
Not that The Lost City of Z is an Indiana Jones–
The stairs of the title here, while 2
also literal, refer to both the aspirations and the virtual Mt. Sisyphus facing all addicts once they lock into the use-rinse-repeat cycle.
The 90-minute doc, shot in several
A documentary by Matt Tyrnauer. Rated G
A documentary that should be 2
seen by anyone interested in the future of cities—especially those as fraught with housing problems as Vancouver—citizen Jane is a fascinating call to arms for urban dwellers who don’t mind fighting city hall.
Matt Tyrnauer’s movie is somewhat light on personal background— unexpectedly, since his previous flick was the bio-heavy Valentino: The Last Emperor, about the ancient fashion designer. Instead, it crams in as much as it can about Jane Jacobs’s battles, not her bio. Born in Pennsylvania and trained as a journalist, she worked for the State Department in World War II but became best known for urban activism in New York City and, later, Toronto.
Politics was always personal to Jacobs, and she smelled trouble even before her own Greenwich Village neighbourhood was threatened by the brutalizing redevelopment projects of Robert Moses, the czar of New York City planning in the postwar period. While writing for Architectural Forum, she balked at the received notion that cities could be instantly improved by bulldozing entire “slums”, with their organically accumulated patterns of vibrant street activity, and replacing them with faceless towers that actively degraded the lives of poor people.
Jacobs’s study of the before-andafter effects of these grandiose—and coincidentally lucrative—projects, and her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, created a sensation. This was just before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, about creeping environmental degradation, and although the movie doesn’t dwell on it, there was an unspoken sense at the time that these little ladies shouldn’t be poking their noses into the business of big, strong, science-minded men.
Moses certainly reacted that way; once defeated by the action group she led, he lost his aura of invincibility and soon folded like a cheap tent. Jacobs then moved to Toronto and did the same kind of work there, where she died just short of 90, in 2006. I mention all this because Jane moves so quickly, with neat graphics and archival snippets, it’s worth getting some feel for this particular citizen before going in.
> KEN EISNER