Out with the old, to hell with the new
TO LIVE TO SING
Starring Zhao Xiaoli. In Mandarin, with English subtitles. Rated PG
SOMETIME VANCOUVERITE
Johnny Ma, who made the prizewinning Old Stone, about gaps in the Chinese health-care system (and much more), changes gears here, following a Sichuan-opera troupe on the verge of collapse.
The picaresque story centres on tough-as-nails Zhao Li (Zhao Xiaoli), struggling to keep her company going as times and tastes keep changing. Currently, her pretty niece Dan Dan (Gan Guidan) is bringing some new customers to add to the doddering oldsters who make up most of the base for this more dancebased variation on the better-known Beijing opera style. But Dan Dan is using her noodle to start a parallel career as nightclub performer— something her aunt, who essentially raised her, sees as the road to perdition. Some of the other performers are sneaking off to do the “mask dance” at popular restaurants, illustrating how archaic forms carry on in vestigial fashion.
The demolitions facing their home theatre (and just about everything else in fast-changing China) are real and so are the performers, who do their own music and dancing here. It’s essentially a “let’s put on a show to save our beloved roller rink” story, given fresh life in a classical setting. Mainly, it gives us a chance to observe the quirky relationships between the players, recalling the better moments of Yasujiro Ozu’s
A Story of Floating Weeds, about a struggling kabuki troupe.
The awkwardly titled movie’s episodic structure, which veers from spooky magic realism to bureaucratic entropy, is not always so engaging. The pileup of set pieces near the end is almost too much of a good thing; they feel like they were shot at a different time and place, and Ma didn’t want to waste them. But this talented young filmmaker makes an entertaining case for not throwing out the cornerstones of your culture to build a shiny new skyscraper that, one day, will also fall. by Ken Eisner
RED SNOW
Starring Asivak Koostachin. Rated PG
THE POETIC, MYSTICAL touches that have made B.C. Métis artist Marie Clements’s plays so striking find vivid new expression on film. As writer and director for Red
Snow, she brings deliriously atmospheric storytelling and imagery to a tale that splits its time between two unlikely locations: the Arctic and Afghanistan (the arid B.C. Interior standing in for the latter). That she achieves this kind of resonant lyricism on an almost impossibly ambitious shoot says something about Clements’s abilities.
When Gwich’in soldier Dylan (Asivak Koostachin) is kidnapped by the Taliban in Kandahar, haunting memories of doomed love and death in the Canadian North start to resurface. But he begins to connect with a Pashtun family, and as they flee together, he discovers the similarities between their cultures—oppression, loss, and survival skills, especially in the film’s blizzarding climax.
Clements cuts back and forth in time to tell the story, showing memories in dreamlike fragments. One of her more creative devices is a play on the myth that the Inuit have hundreds of words for “snow”. At symbolic moments in Red Snow, words are handwritten in Inuvialuktun across shots of falling flakes, with their English translations—like “snow that brings a new beginning”. (Inuvialuktun is the language of Dylan’s cousin, whom he’s forbidden to love.)
Adding to the atmosphere are Inuk throat singing and Wayne Lavallee’s haunting soundtrack, not to mention the indelible imagery—a close-up of mukluks crunching through snow as blood spills from an unseen wound, wide shots of snowmobiles racing over white plains, or an ice-blue burqa rippling in slo-mo as it’s raised by its wearer.
Koostachin holds the centre with a compelling, nuanced performance as the soft-spoken but tormented Dylan. Tantoo Cardinal is a strong presence as his empathetic grandmother, and Shafin Karim and death-threat-braving Afghan talk-show host Mozhdah Jamalzadah give impassioned performances as an Afghan translator and his defiant daughter.
Clements manages to sew together diffuse ideas, touching on subjects as far-flung as the plague of suicide in Canada’s northern communities, Gwich’in spirituality, the education ban on Afghan women, and the rise of the Taliban. When a Taliban warrior asks Dylan, “You are on my land protecting your country?” it triggers a head-spinning array of issues around territory and its ownership, here and abroad.
At times, the film is more adept at fusing those concepts than it is at melding genres, struggling to adrenalize the action sequences, and working a bit too earnestly on the bond between Dylan and Afghan boy Tahir (Ishaan Vasdev).
But those flaws are easily excused when you consider the momentous challenges of Clements’s shoot. Principal photography on the film was limited to just under three weeks, between the subzero Northwest Territories and the Kamloops area. Clements not only required three cultural adviser/translators on the film—Gwich’in, Inuvialuktun, and
Pashtun—but Koostachin had to learn Gwich’in from scratch to perform half of his lines (which he does convincingly).
Clements, as she’s done with plays from the First World War–inspired Iron Peggy to the ancient Greek Indigenous tale Age of Iron, manages to make grand associations between First Nations stories and the outside world. With Red Snow, the visual storytelling lives up to those epic ambitions. by Janet Smith
THE WHISTLERS
Starring Vlad Ivanov. In English, Romanian, and Spanish, with English subtitles. Rated 18A
➧ THIS CLEVER LITTLE item never meta noir it didn’t like. That is, this chilled-out thriller is so packed with homages to movie tropes, new and old, it scarcely has time for the story in the foreground. And that doesn’t matter one bit.
The Whistlers is a nifty change of pace for Romanian writer-director Corneliu Porumboiu, whose name sounds like an ancient Latin puzzle game—which is not that far off. He usually makes grittier social studies (like 12:08 East of Bucharest), not without humour, but more sobersided than anything in this geography-hopping fun ride.
Porumboiu forges a link with earlier efforts by casting frequent collaborator Vlad Ivanov—who looks something like Michael Keaton after too many beers—as a Bucharest cop named Cristi. In Police, Adjective, the deceptively bland Ivanov played a doctrinaire detective who harried a morally ambivalent narc, also named Cristi.
This particular Mr. Cristi has few good cookies, so he’s amenable to taking side dough from a mobbed-up launderer (Ludwig II star Sabin Tambrea) who runs a mattress factory. When the abject policeman’s even more crooked boss (a sly Rodica Lazar) stings the mattress king anyway, Spanish mobsters pull Cristi into a plan to free him, knowing that he has stashed millions away. Anyone want to guess where?
Somehow, our flatfoot-in-themiddle has ended up in the Canary Islands, specifically on one (the original title is La Gomera) where locals developed a weird whistling language over centuries, to communicate across steep mountains, and undetected by, say, European colonizers and cops.
Also aboard is the mattress guy’s romantic partner, Gilda, played by former swimsuit model Catrinel Marlon, now based in Italy. She initially seems more glamorous than the story even needs, but the director clearly wants to hit all the femme fatale marks suggested by the name Gilda. (Check IMDb for relevance.) And his TCM obsession extends to including clips of John Ford’s The Searchers and other classics.
Beyond all that, the breezily paced film offers a sweet orange-tinged palette and a cool collection of found songs, ranging from Italian opera to “Mack the Knife”, making this a delightful mixtape of a movie you’ll want to whistle along with more than once. by Ken Eisner
HOPE GAP
Starring Annette Bening. Rated PG
➧ SOME TERRIFIC ACTING brings needed flavour to an undercooked story in Hope Gap, named for a real place on the south coast of England, where three sad-sack characters need all the metaphorical help they can get.
Annette Bening steals the show as ironically named Grace, a bulldozer of a woman whose intellectual skills have seemingly justified her total command over slump-shouldered husband Edward (Bill Nighy, nicely playing against quick-witted type). A history teacher near retirement, Edward has summoned Londonbased son Jamie (Emma.’s Josh O’Connor) to their oceanside cottage—bright but cluttered with books and curios—to help soften the blow that will be delivered when he announces that he will leave his wife of almost 30 years. Thanks, Dad!
Grace thought everyone was happy because she was having fun, and doesn’t take such a sudden rupture well. “Just because there’s no blood,” she seethes, “doesn’t mean it isn’t murder.” Bening’s accent is good scene by scene, but takes a wide tour of the British Isles throughout the film, which is packed with enough references to English poetry and literature to suggest more profundity than is actually delivered in this second directorial effort from veteran writer William Nicholson, who scripted such grandiose period pieces as Gladiator, Unbroken, and Les Misérables.
He adapted this from his play The Retreat From Moscow, named after the Wikipedia entry Edward is currently writing, and the movie remains stagebound, despite much furious walking along the white cliffs of Seaford. There’s considerable wit on display, but little in the way of character detail and background that would distinguish this marital breakdown from countless others.
Jamie’s urban subplot, which consists entirely of him complaining to techie coworkers about his poor romantic skills, is so feeble it could easily have been cut out altogether. The son’s a stand-in for the director himself, so you’d think he’d want more presence out of O’Connor, even mopier here than he was as Prince Charles in this season of The Crown. If the movie is Nicholson’s revenge, or resolution, for his own parental crackup a half-century ago, the dish has long since grown cold.