Directed by: Rhayne Vermette
Distributed by: TBA
Written by Eric Zhu
60/100
One fateful day in 1982, the sun fails to rise. Plunged into what feels like a perpetual night, a community in Ste. Anne, Manitoba is forced to reconfigure their lives around this cosmic event. Unfolding as an ambient, oneiric community portrait, Rhayne Vermette’s “Levers” considers the possibilities of the night, and its effect on human relations. The film unfolds as a series of loosely connected happenings, mysterious events that refuse coherence but nonetheless impress upon each other. It’s to the film’s benefit that what’s happening is often hard to describe. A mysterious statue is erected in the town square, with special attention paid to an imposing red fabric. A tracking shot observes countless suburbanites watching the sun rise on the other side of the globe from the privacy of their homes. A woman drives into an unidentified object. Demarcated by tarot title cards, the film is eerie and becalmed.
While “Levers” is indeed radically different from Vermette’s single-frame animation shorts, what it shares is a playful, improvisatory movement and an interest in the a-representational. Shot on broken Bolex cameras, what’s most striking about “Levers” is that much of the film is adamantly obscurant. In addition to the darkness, bodies are shrouded in grain, and shots are often veiled by layers of iridescent snow. It’s a singularly beautiful film of attenuated gradations of shadow, and swaths of burnished color. In particular, a flashback which reveals the cause of the solar disruption is transcendent, a sequence of twilit bodies against hazy sunsets and nuclear pinks and oranges exploding onto the film strip that puts “Oppenheimer” to shame.
My reservations with “Levers” feel like my problem rather than the film’s (the folk-inflected mysticism Vermette invokes isn’t really my sensibility). I otherwise find “Levers” an inspiring project in its broad strokes. The disruption of daily routine that the darkness inspires, and the corresponding subversion of cinematic legibility, are what enable the film’s expansive sprawl. Perhaps the intimate nocturnal atmosphere is also the origin of “Levers’” remarkable generosity, which comes through the subtitling of both French and English, as well as the even handling of European and Metis spirituality. The rupture is a recalibration of the senses, and by forcing everyone to re-engage with their surroundings, “Levers” asks its characters to consider what they owe to each other. In a year where numerous major films are challenging the texture of contemporary digital images (“Dry Leaf,” “The Shrouds,” “With Hasan in Gaza,” “Invention,” “Caught by the Tides”), “Levers” feels like a key text.
You can follow more of Eric’s thoughts on film on Letterboxd, X, and The Insert