TIFF Round-Up #1: LEVERS, COPPER, & MĀRAMA

This year at TIFF, my fourth time attending in person and my fifth time covering the festival, I decided to set aside almost all of the mainstream and major high-profile auteur releases and concentrate on more films by up-and-coming artists. I did this not only because I think that the oversaturation of covering and talking about the same filmmakers over and over again has become a slog that has grinded film criticism down, but I also think that this year in particular TIFF has featured some of the least-interesting offerings from big names – Lav Diaz’s Magellan, Pietro Marcello’s Duse, and Jafar Panahi’s It was Just and Accident being key exceptions. It’s been no small secret that TIFF’s programming under Cameron Bailey has been wanting at best and Blake Williams called out his many “fireable offenses” including his unilateral decision to program a movie of pure Zionist propaganda this year during an opening remark of one of the Wavelengths programs.

In this roundup, I’m highlighting three releases that I actually thought were pretty flawed overall, but are worth watching and are from filmmakers who show themselves to be unique artists who think about their cinema in a unique way.

Levers (dir. Rhayne Vermette)

source: TIFF

I wish I liked Rhayne Vermette’s films more, mainly because I think that she uses 16mm, has a conscious, clear, and personable vision, and experiments with visual grammar and her process in exciting ways. The unfortunate reality however is that I just don’t find the films in their finished state to be memorable or evoking any strong emotions. One thing I have allowed myself to do in seeing experimental works like Levers is to really give myself up to be taken in by its entrancing qualities. Even for films that I don’t quite “get”, like Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men or for example, I was enraptured by the way the sound and images were in constant war with each other, the way that even a door swinging open felt like a gunshot to the chest. Or in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s Earwig, the feeling of being in a deserted European city at night feeling like you’re on another planet but the moment you walk into a bar feeling like you landed on Earth again. Sensations of horror and mystique created from the arrangement of objects – women in coats chanting a hymn atop a cliff while a corpse on rocks lay near some flowers, or a girl with large braces having to have her teeth replaced because they keep melting. Really evocative stuff like that.

Levers gave me déjà vu to Ste. Anne, Vermette’s debut feature, which I definitely remember seeing back in 2022 but remember almost nothing about. If there is a plot to Levers, it’s that the sun goes away for a single day and humanity comes to somewhat appreciate the event realizing what they had been taking for granted for so long. Much of the movie is in hard-to-decipher images cloaked in darkness, something that is a result of the broken Bolex cameras used for the film. The shots of the horizon with the sun peeking out, painting bars of light at the top half of the frame with the bottom half shrouded in shades of black and gray, like a Rothko painting, are highlights of the movie. What I can’t quite grab onto is the doomed sensation of the sun going away. It felt uneventful, and the random bangs and cracks and thumps that explode from time to time amid silence play more as cheap snaps to attention than something genuinely startling. The tarot card motifs and the candles feel stuffed in as symbolic markers for a mythos being built, but I found them cliché. Like St. Anne, this is a film of good visual concept but the execution of these images and sounds into a film don’t amount to an experience I can imagine keeping in my memory for long. Even as they played on a huge screen, they washed over me and I was still completely unchanged and wondering what feeling they were trying to get at.

Copper (dir. Nicolás Pereda)

source: TIFF

Nicolás Pereda is a filmmaker with a visual style so sparse and adverse to sensation that it lends even the more serious moments in his film an air of comedic nonchalance. I’ll be upfront and say this isn’t really my kind of cinema because it’s just too obsessed with minutia of moment to moment mundanity that I find it a bit difficult to get into even at just 90 minutes. It’s not like Roy Andersson, who at least supplants the drabness with an amusing (if irritating) absurdity and irony. Pereda plays his characters off as people who argue for the sake of arguing. Every conversation is a series of back-and-forths despite the characters being completely clear from the get go, like they’re purposefully trying to irk the other person by pretending to not understand what the situation actually is. This is definitely funny in some situations, like when Lazaro keeps going to different doctors telling them that he has chest pain.

Pereda’s colors are drab, flat, and unassuming just like his characters and it recalls to me the idea of authorial “intent”. I have to obviously  Copper starts with Lazaro discovering a dead body and having a robotic perplexed reaction to it. When several family members and friends ask why he didn’t do anything about her merely shrugs and eats various fruit. That’s what Pereda comedy again – a different fruit Lazaro sucks on while having the same exact conversation about a dead body with three different people and all of which don’t really go anywhere. It’s easy to ding Copper as a movie with no story or conclusion or ‘point’ but that would be lazy. It’s a movie that, like Fauna or Lazaro at Night, treats conflict and plot as a means to traverse its character rather than the other way around.

Mārama (dir. Taratoa Stappard)

source: Watermelon Pictures

Mārama is a cold-looking film, that uses contrasting color schemes between its steely blues and burning orange flames and red-hot blood to stoke its unnerving feeling. A lot of movies of mid-to-low budget (especially horror) do this lately and while much of Mārama is fairly conventional and predictable, it is handsomely staged and delivers and energetic bloodlust that more haughty prestige films may have shied away from.

Starring Māori actress Ariāna Osborne as a young Māori woman named Mary (and whose real name is Mārama) who travels back to Yorkshire, England to find out the truth of her family’s roots, the film immediately dives headfirst into gothic brooding atmosphere. There are many pretty shots here and the very particular lighting obscuring a lot of the frame in the night sequences actually works to heighten the mood rather than just be indecipherable. But what holds Mārama back a bit is that it relies heavily on overused dream/nightmare sequences and the mild (and frankly un-scary) jump scares to snap you to attention that this is supposed to be a horror movie when most of it is basically a family drama. The decades of generational of violence is in and of itself scary and angering but the film wants to literalize it in imagery so as to make no mistake. Maybe that’s just the selling point you need to get something like this produced. The movie reaches its heights in the scenes between Mary and Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens) and the continuous unraveling mystery between them that erupts into absolute fury.