A FAKE PAINTER, AND A PAINTED LAND
Ontario documentary goes on the hunt for the locations that were captured so indelibly by the Group of Seven
A French Forger: Guy Ribes is a remarkably accomplished artist with a keen eye, sharp sense of colour and form and an astonishingly varied range of abilities. Unfortunately, he’s also a convicted forger who has caused immeasurable havoc in the art world. Why? Because hundreds of works currently being passed off as originals by the likes of Picasso, Chagall, Leger and Modigliani may actually be his handiwork.
He’s not exactly repentant about it all, judging by the 65-year-old’s statements in A French Forger, a fascinating film that makes its local debut this weekend in the Doc Soup Sundays series at the Bloor. Serving as a tour guide for a murky underworld where art and crime intersect, the rumpled, pipe-smoking painter reminisces about the scams and schemes that he and his associates used to game the system.
One reason Ribes was so successful was that he didn’t copy any existing works outright — instead, he took advantage of the unruly nature of most artists’ oeuvres by creating plausible variations on genuine paintings and drawings that could be passed off as “newly discovered.” The fact that Ribes’ works were often just as impressive as the genuine articles made the ruse all the more ingenious, at least until the wild chain of events that led to his conviction in 2010.
Renouncing his previous activities after serving a three-year prison term, he put his talents to better use by supplying some phony impressionist masterpieces for the French biopic Renoir.
Director Jean-Luc Leon participates in a Skype Q&A after the screening of A French Forger on Sunday.
Discover Ontario doc showcase
It wasn’t so long ago when documentaries made in Ontario were federally mandated to feature Niagara Falls, the Big Nickel and/or the snowy owl. Things are different now, of course. For proof, moviegoers can investigate the six examples in Discover Ontario, a monthly series of films funded by the Ontario Media Development Corporation that begins at the Bloor this week.
The program launches with Painted Land: In Search of the Group of Seven, which depicts a hunt for the Northern Ontario locations that were captured so indelibly by the nation’s most famous posse of painters. The filmmaking team attends a Q&A after the screening on Thursday. The series continues with such fundamentally Ontarian experiences as Beauty Day (April 19), an engrossing character study of St. Catharines’ greatest contribution to the history of cable-access television, and Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (July 19), Banger Films’ tribute to this province’s preeminent rock gods (sorry, Max Webster).
Happily Ever After
Two young women who used to be BFFs encounter a cornucopia of complications in Happily Ever After, a Canadian comedy-drama that opens at the Carlton and the Kingsway this weekend. Written and directed by Joan Carr-Wiggin, the movie stars Janet Montgomery as a documentary filmmaker who comes back home to do a wedding video for Sara Paxton as her former bestie. Happily Ever After opens Friday.
New Canadian Animation at Short Cuts
A two-fisted tale that just won the best animated short at the Canadian Screen Awards, Hector Herrera and Pazit Cahlon’s The Ballad of Immortal
Joe plays a special edition of TIFF’s Short Cuts program on new Canadian animation. The lineup also includes Auto Por
traits (Carface), a wildly imaginative musical satire by Claude Cloutier that recently made the Oscars’ animated shorts shortlist. They all play Lightbox on Saturday.
Richard Linklater
The Texan director behind such critical faves as Boyhood as well as hits including The School of Rock, Richard Linklater returns to Toronto to present his latest at Lightbox.
Everybody Wants Some!!!, a “spiritual successor” to his 1993 cult fave Dazed & Confused, follows the misadventures of a group of young baseball players at a fictional Texas university in the early 1980s.
Linklater will reflect on the new movie and the whole of his career in an onstage conversation that follows the screening on Thursday.
Everybody Wants Some!!! is out in April.
In brief:
The great outdoors hit the Bloor’s big screen when the best of the Banff Mountain Film Festival arrives in Toronto Friday to Sunday.
Always so kind to movie nerds, the Royal has a busy week with a Kung Fu Fridays presentation of Jet Li’s Kung Fu Cult Master on Friday plus special retro screenings of Drop Dead Gorgeous (Sunday) and Star Trek IV: The Journey Home (Tuesday).
John Frankenheimer’s 1966 thriller starring Rock Hudson as a man who overhauls his identity with chilling results, Seconds plays the Lightbox on Friday.
A comic book superhero-movie knock-off from a nation with a surprisingly rich history of exploitation cinema, Turkish Spider-Man vs. Turkish Captain America plays the Carlton on Saturday.
The Carlton’s Little Terrors program presents its latest slate of new genre short films on Wednesday. jandersonesque@gmail.com