ARTS & CULTURE
18 Obiter Dicta
TIFF
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her husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) doesn’t recognize her. Standing to inherit a large fortune in a
Swiss bank, she gets roped into a scheme to impersonate herself so that Johnny can collect the money.
Ingeniously plotted and downright heartbreaking,
Phoenix is a Hitchcockian tale of mistaken identity,
a powerful allegory for post-war regeneration, and a
high-concept premise executed as a character piece.
Writer-director Christian Petzold relies on a few set
pieces to convey Germany’s destitution and underplays the pulpiness of his premise, instead focusing
on its complex psychological and emotional undercurrents. Hoss communicates through painstaking
gestures like a deer caught in the headlights again
and again, transforming into the woman who existed
prior to the concentration camps. The explosive final
scene is as perfect as they come, as if Petzold had built
the film around one moment. This quietly devastating
work, veiled in vibrant, cohesive, sensitively stimulating power, deserves to be seen by the widest arthouse audience possible.
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
(2014) 3/4
The Bottom Line: L’Age d’Or + 8 1/2
Like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, two travelling
salesmen peddling vampire fangs and rubber masks
shuffle through a kaleidoscope of human destinies,
while Charles XII, Sweden’s most bellicose king, reappears in the present to continue his series of disastrous defeats. Artfully funny, beautifully filmed, and
oddly poignant, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting
on Existence is a master class in comic timing, employing pacing and repetition with the skill of a concert pianist. For good reason, Roy Andersson (Songs
from the Second Floor, You the Living) has been compared to Fellini and called a slapstick Bergman or the
heir of Luis Buñuel: he’s bold, beguiling, and unclassifiable. His static, meticulously arranged long takes,
shot in deep focus to use background and foreground
space, is jarringly unique, and each scene is somewhere between a contemporary art installation and
a Far Side cartoon. A deadpan deadlock, a muse on
man’s perpetual inhumanity to man, a cat’s cradle
of mysteries, and a glorious metaphysical burlesque,
it abounds in the kind of sardonic humour intrinsic
to life’s absurdities. Shifting between fantasy, reverie, and an impromptu musical number, Pigeon culminates with a blistering indictment of our lack of
empathy that audiences won’t soon forget.
Pride (2014) 3/4
The Bottom Line: Milk + The Full Monty
The Riot Club (2014) 2.5/4
The Bottom Line: The Wolf of Wall Street +
Tyrannosaur
Two first-year students at Oxford join the infamous
Riot Club, a drunken bunch of well-off, hell-raising
undergraduates destined for Establishment greatness, who smash, dash, and ruin lives, convinced
that money is the answer to all problems. Adapted by
Laura Hade from her own play and directed by Lone
Scherfig, The Riot Club is a glimpse into the dark
side of privilege; a salacious bashing with a thunderous