Here are NOW’s reviews of the fest’s 10 feature films – all of them very positive, a strong indication of the health of our homegrown scene. Canada’s Top Ten Film Fest kicks off January 8.
THE DEMONS D: Philippe Lesage. 118 minutes. Tuesday (January 12), 8:45 pm Wednesday (January) 13, 2:15 pm. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Taking a page from the ice-cold observations of Michael Haneke, writer/director Philippe Lesage charts a young boy’s coming of age in a Montreal suburb sometime in the late 80s – when the world was a lot smaller, and sex was a lot scarier.
The youngest of three siblings, Félix (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier) is 11 or 12 and uncertain of everything. His parents (Pascale Bussières, Laurent Lucas) are going through a rough patch, he’s struggling with a crush on his gym teacher (Victoria Diamond), and the older kids are sharing scary stories of a murderer preying on children.
With precise camera framing and a menacing soundtrack, Lesage creates a placid world seething with potential danger. The film’s formal rigour matches Félix’s internal turmoil: his innocence, and our sense of security, is always a moment away from shattering. Norman Wilner
CLOSET MONSTER D: Stephen Dunn. 90 minutes. Saturday (January 9), 5 pm January 16, 1 pm. Rating: NNN
There are many things to like about this Newfoundland-set coming-of-age/coming out/quasi-body-horror picture, not the least of which are Bobby Shore’s low-key, obstacle-laden camerawork and a carefully graded performance by Connor Jessup as Oscar, an aspiring monster makeup artist terrorized by his own homosexuality.
But writer/director Stephen Dunn’s feature debut is marred by story editing. The heavy emphasis on events from Oscar’s childhood – his parents’ divorce, his witnessing of a bloody hate crime – implies a troubling causality between these early traumas and his sexual identity and professional ambitions.
Closet Monster features a compelling protagonist, but it would have been wiser to explain a lot less about his psychological formation. José Teodoro
Behold the wonder that is The Forbidden Room!
THE FORBIDDEN ROOM D: Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson. 119 minutes. January 16, 6 pm January 17, 3:30 pm. Rating: NNNN
Trying to summarize the plot of The Forbidden Room would sound like the rantings of a madman. Like most of Guy Maddin’s previous work, it’s less a narrative than a fugue state of half-remembered images from 1920s and 30s cinema amped up with feverish desire.
Diving into and out of dozens of nested stories (seriously, Inception has nothing on this picture), Maddin and co-director Evan Johnson craft a shifting, unstable landscape of thrilling adventures performed by a massive international cast that includes Roy Dupuis, Mathieu Amalric, Charlotte Rampling, Jacques Nolot, Geraldine Chaplin, Karine Vanasse, Clara Furey, Caroline Dhavernas, Ariane Labed and the inevitable Udo Kier.
Coherent? Almost. Demented? Pretty much. But once the undead banana monsters show up, resistance is futile. NW
Omar Khadr in a scene from Guantanamo’s Child.
GUANTANAMO’S CHILD: OMAR KHADR D: Patrick Reed, Michelle Shephard. Canada. 80 min. Monday (January 11), 9:15 pm January 14, noon. Rating: NNNN
You know the name, and a version of the story now meet the real human being.
Shot and captured during a firefight with U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2002, Toronto-born Khadr – then 15 – was classified as an enemy combatant and shipped to the U.S. prison facility in Guantánamo Bay, where he spent more than a decade before lawyer Dennis Edney got him repatriated to Canada and ultimately released into his custody.
Patrick Reed and Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard don’t shy away from Khadr’s activities in Afghanistan, where he may or may not have thrown a lethal grenade during the battle that ended in his capture. But they also demonstrate his status as a minor and a child soldier.
And they show us today’s traumatized man doing his best to adjust to a world he barely recognizes, and hoping people give him the chance to prove he isn’t the monster the Harper government insisted he was.
The result is a complex, nuanced and surprisingly affecting documentary that’s bound to be denounced as propaganda by people who haven’t watched it. NW
Hurt, about one-legged athlete Steve Fonyo, is harrowing and heartbreaking.
HURT D: Alan Zweig. 84 minutes. Friday (January 8), 7 pm Saturday (January 9), 2:30 pm. Rating: NNNN
Homegrown filmmaker Alan Zweig’s documentary is a powerful portrait of fascinating subject Steve Fonyo. He’s the one-legged athlete who became a national hero when he ran across Canada – accomplishing what Terry Fox could never finish. His life then spiralled downward when he turned to drugs and crime.
This is by far Zweig’s best film, proving he doesn’t have to put himself front and centre in a movie to make it work. Instead, he shows exceptional skill in asking Fonyo tough questions and allowing the camera to catch him making bad decisions and losing his shit again and again. A scene where Fonyo can’t bring himself to visit the BC beach named after him is heartbreaking.
Actually, the entire film is. Susan G. Cole
INTO THE FOREST D: Patricia Rozema. 101 minutes. Saturday (January 9), 9 pm Sunday (January 10), 5:30 pm. Rating: NNNN
Patricia Rozema proves herself a master of mood in this story of sisters Nell and Eva (Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood respectively) who try to survive at their home in a remote forest after a vaguely defined eco-disaster that’s caused a power outage.
Page and Wood are excellent as the siblings, whose personality differences – dancer Eva is the creative type, Nell has a much more practical streak – give rise to various conflicts. You can sense, though, their powerful bond.
Rozema ratchets up the tension, never allowing the audience to relax entirely – a shocking violent incident is superbly shot – but credit, too, goes to cinematographer Daniel Grant, who has a short resumé but immense talent and makes this movie look drop-dead gorgeous. SGC
LES ÊTRES CHERS D: Anne Émond. 102 minutes. Monday (January 11), 6 pm Tuesday (January 12), 2:45 pm. Rating: NNNN
Anne Émond follows her economical debut, Nuit #1, with an equally intimate but narratively sprawling generational drama about a Quebec family over the course of a quarter-century or so, focusing primarily on sensitive David Leblanc (Maxim Gaudette) and his daughter Laurence (played from her teen years onward by the terrific Karelle Tremblay), whose lives are shadowed by the mental illnesses of the people closest to them.
Émond brings a light touch to profound material, and though she occasionally drifts into territory covered in Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. and Marco Tullio Giordana’s The Best Of Youth, that was probably unavoidable. Only a handful of films have even attempted this kind of storytelling. They’re bound to echo one another. NW
MY INTERSHIP IN CANADA D: Philippe Falardeau. 108 minutes. Sunday (January 10), 8 pm January 14, 7 pm. Rating: NNNN
After the relatively serious Monsieur Lazhar and The Good Lie, Philippe Falardeau returns to the antic, slightly goofy tone of It’s Not Me, I Swear! (C’est Pas Moi, Je Le Jure!) with this comedy about (fictional) Quebec MP Steve Guibord (Patrick Huard), who ends up having the deciding vote on whether Canada should enter an unspecified war on the other side of the world.
To buy time, he announces he’ll consult his constituents, but they’re easily swayed by jingoism and pandering. It’s all seen through the eyes of his idealistic Haitian intern (Irdens Exantus), who tries to understand Steve’s hawkish wife (Suzanne Clément) and dovish daughter (Clémence Dufresne-Deslières) as well.
It’s a sly comic farce with a great deal to say about retail politics, personal moral codes and – sadly – the ridiculous horse-trading required for someone in Steve’s position to even think about doing the right thing. NW
NINTH FLOOR D: Mina Shum. 82 min. Tuesday (January 12), 6 pm Wednesday (January 13), 6 pm. Rating: NNNN
Mina Shum’s moving NFB-produced documentary probes how, in 1969, institutional intransigence at Sir George Williams University and the Montreal police’s fundamental fear of black people conspired to turn a small sit-in protesting one prof’s racism into a full-scale riot involving hundreds of students.
Interviews with participants – Rodney John and Bukka Rennie are among the most potent – and some recreations and archival footage reveal black students’ shock at the university’s casual bigotry. One former student recalls the terror in the eyes of police sent in to clear out the computer centre on the ninth floor where students had gathered.
Another great doc, more proof of the value of the National Film Board. SGC
SLEEPING GIANT D: Andrew Cividino. 90 minutes. January 16, 9 pm January 17, 6:30 pm. Rating: NNNN
Writer/director Andrew Cividino expanded his short film into this study of three teenage boys (Jackson Martin, Reece Moffett, Nick Serino) bonding and fighting in cottage country, and the padding occasionally shows. But Sleeping Giant is still an assured and beautiful first feature, observing the ugly awkwardness of male adolescence against the gorgeous, indifferent backdrop of Lake Superior.
Much credit should go to Chris Thornborrow and Bruce Peninsula, who wrote and performed the music, and cinematographer James Klopko. If the plotting is a little on the obvious side, the details are painfully specific and smartly observed, and all three leads are solid. NW
Get more info on Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival here.
