Has the front page of Netflix got you feeling blah? Looking for a more adventurous cinematic experience?
In RepWatch, film critic and podcaster Will Sloan talks to programmers who bring their personal stamps to Toronto’s thriving repertory cinemas.
—
Programmed by Toronto-based critic Saffron Maeve, Contours is a film screening series that showcases movies that feature art and artists.
Since launching at the Paradise Theatre in late 2023, the series’ broad mandate has encompassed canon classics like Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966); documentaries like Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956); and cult films like Downtown 81 (2000), starring Jean-Michel Basquiat as a version of himself.
Screening at the Paradise on March 9 is a lesser-known but no-less-striking selection: Yumeji (1991), an unconventional quasi-biopic of Japanese painter and poet Yumeji Takehisa.
In this heavily fictionalized telling, Takehisa becomes obsessed with a mysterious widow who he believes may be a perfect model, but their burgeoning relationship is interrupted by her dead husband, who casually strolls into the narrative.
The genre-bending, tonally unclassifiable Yumeji was a late-career triumph for the innovative director Seijun Suzuki, whose kinetic crime thrillers like Branded to Kill (1967) were so stylistically unusual that they led to a decade-long blacklisting.
We met with Maeve to discuss the art of cinema and the cinema of art.
I watched Yumeji this morning. I know Seijun Suzuki only for his crime films, so this one caught me by surprise, both thematically and stylistically.
It reminded me of the discourses that were swirling about Picasso a few years ago, specifically the dynamic between an artist and muse — the possessive relationship, and the inherent power dynamics. What made this a movie that you wanted to highlight?
I'll speak to the artist-muse dynamic, which I find really interesting. It's something I was thinking a lot about when I was conceived [the Contours series] because there are so many films where that materializes.
La Belle Noiseuse has the same very discursive artist-muse dynamic, and I didn't want to shy away from showing those films. I do feel like there has been this sort of contentious thing about endorsement through programming — but also, these are really beautiful films, and they're saying an incredible amount about the subject.
I actually wanted to show Yumeji second. I started this series in December 2023, and I did Downtown 81, and then after that I did Dreams.
I had wanted to screen Yumeji because it had been on my mind at that time, but then I did the more commercial thing.
As I'm sure you saw, it's very formally audacious, but in a way that is familiar. A lot of the compositions call to mind Schrader's Mishima, and with Kenji Sawada being in both films, and also through the [theme music] by Shigeru Umabayashi, which later featured prominently in In the Mood for Love.
Forgive me, I don’t quite know what I’m asking, but the movie has a fascinating relationship with art as a tool that spans time and planes of reality. The idea that her husband comes back to life, and the movie treats it as the most natural thing in the world…
I was thinking of it because I've been writing about [director] Stanley Kwan, and I've been thinking of that as like the anti-Rouge!
I don't know if that's stupid, but there is something about the weird naturalism of it. There’s not much writing on the film, but all of the writing I’ve read has cited how faithful it is. I find that so bizarre.
Faithful to the real Yujemi’s life, you mean?
Faithful to his life, or faithful to his image, or the way that he carried himself. I find that very strange. Someone sent me a screenshot of the Wikipedia page, and I think it says “faithful” in the first line. I remember thinking… that's not correct! But maybe it is.
Maybe this is what I was trying to get at. Art is a space where what is factually real and what is sort of spiritually real converge.
I think that’s part of the appeal for me of cinema that is also dealing very seriously in visual art.
I'm very drawn to films about artists that are really keen on teasing out their artistic style or practices through the film's visual language, which is surprisingly uncommon in films about painters.
As I've worked my way through this canon, I've realized most films about artists don't actually take a real interest in conceiving their art practice into the schema of the film, and I think that Yumeji does that in pretty interesting ways.
Yumeji’s art was so playful, and there is a real sense of play to the narrative and to the characters. But there's also this enormous gap of loss and ghostliness that is felt throughout.
I think that what's interesting is seeing a figure who is both a poet and a painter, and there's that ghostliness, and that sort of like void that is represented through the character being revived.
That seems to represent his poetry, and then the jovial opening and the play that happens throughout is very indicative of his art. I think it's interesting when films sort of draw those lines or make those distinctions, whether intentionally or not intentionally.
Seijun Suzuki was a very distinctive visual stylist in his own right. I’m not familiar with Yumeji Takehisa’s art, so I could be wrong, but I sense Suzuki working to synthesize their styles.
I've been wading through old auctions of Yumeji’s art from like 10 years ago to see how much some of it was selling for. I just remember thinking this is shockingly low!
Do you remember what they were going for?
I think it was in pounds or euros, but I saw one that went for under 2,000, which I feel like in the art world is very absurd.
Geez, I should have bought one.
There were some that were understandably going for much more, but I think that he produced so many sketches, so there was just a wealth of work there — but a lot of them aren't very well preserved.
So that's the difficult thing I've been finding — trying to find names for particular art pieces and drawing those together. They feel very disparate. So it's interesting, because then the film starts to feel like this object to tell me about the kind of artist that he was, rather than the actual remnants of the art.
At the Contours screenings, have common themes or moods been emerging from the films?
I think there's been an accidental high-brow sensibility that sort of happened just for the last several screenings. I had an idea of the series being much more playful in terms of scope.
I started it with Downtown 81 and I knew that I wanted to do a collection of graffiti films, and I did Wild Style not too far into the series. But then the last six months have kind of felt like just consecutive bangers, like F for Fake and Andrei Rublev, because people love that and people show up for that.
Is there a film you’ve shown that best embodies the spirit of the series? Or at least a film that is closest to your heart?
The one closest to my heart was probably F for Fake. I have a real appreciation for that film as an art documentary, because there are so many subsets of documentaries about art that have a very particular narrative that never really seems to honor the gaps in what art is trying to achieve. And also just… it's Orson Welles, so obviously.
But my secondary answer, if I can give one, is William Wyler's How to Steal a Million because that was the only thing that I programmed that was child appropriate. I have a 10-year-old sister, so I deliberately showed that so that she and my family could come see it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
__
Yumeji plays at Paradise Theatre on Sunday, March 9 at 6:30pm.
Will Sloan is a Toronto-based writer and man-about-town. His two — count ‘em — two podcasts are The Important Cinema Club and Michael & Us.
