James Y. Lee
There are few independent experimental filmmakers who’ve made their mark on the festival scene in as fascinating of a way as Rhayne Vermette. Four years ago, in 2021, Vermette’s debut feature, Ste. Anne demonstrated itself as an object of fascination—a piece of Manitoban indigenous cinema whose chronicling of a long-missing young woman’s return to her village operates on a frequency of grainy, tactile abstraction, more in service of a sensory means of immersion into how a community gets disoriented than a tangible narrative direction. In between then and now, Vermette’s been putting out short films on her own merit; and with her return to feature-length filmmaking with Levers, it’s become incredibly clear just how much her penchant for immersive, alternative forms of cinematic storytelling has been amplified since.
Much like Ste. Anne, Levers is also very much about the ways through which a community gets thrown off-balance—but if her previous film posited that disorientation through an unexpected return, Levers does so through an unexpected disappearance, that of the literal sun in the sky for the a single day. And while it seems Vermette has maintained her lack of interest in traditional narrative structure, portions of Levers are so charged with a stunning craft of image-making, even within very particular technical limitations, that at points, it almost becomes a convincing replacement. It represents a very particular horizon of excitement for filmmakers on this level of underground artistry; one where Vermette’s participation in a well-trodden tradition of experimental filmmaking is bringing to the fore well-established influences, and an emphasis on something more formally expressive.
Split into several chapters resembling the tarot cards of the Major Arcana (along with some character-specific variations), Vermette’s introduction to the village at the center of Levers is through the unveiling of a new statue—in the very town of Ste. Anne, no less. From the jump, it becomes immediately clear how impressionism remains at the aesthetic center of Levers, as the film imparts a strong first impression by pivoting its attention more towards the red cloth covering the statue being unfurled in spectacular fashion rather than the statue itself. That kind of direction becomes indicative of the elliptical, almost dissociative form the narrative takes, where the focus is not on the material construction, but rather the device designed to serve as its cover.
Filmed almost entirely on broken Bolex cameras, Levers takes Vermette’s established tendency towards analog, low-res film and amplifies it to unsettling, even wildly entrancing effect. Given the significant presence of darkness in this film, one might think the general look and feel of the cinematography on display would be just as “broken” as Vermette’s usage of faulty equipment might seem. But the most genuinely astonishing facet of Levers‘ technical proficiency is just how much this darkness and obscurity is used to the film’s advantage.
Sparing uses of light from man-made sources come to strange and curious life amid the grain of the Bolex camera’s use; and that sparsity makes moments of even more pronounced radiance that much more impactful to witness. A single scene found early on in the film, in which the sun briefly reemerges within the film’s seemingly nonlinear narrative, makes for a wildly potent demonstration of the sun’s power and necessity, throwing you straight into its overwhelming sound and fury for a sustained amount of time, before simmering back into the languid rhythms left behind by its absence.
That said, there aren’t many characters to follow in terms of Levers‘ narrative progression. Outside of a Security Guard, Civil Servant, and the Sculptor of the statue—who get their own respective tarot-title cards in the film—we don’t get a very pronounced sense of who is worth following through a traditional narrative structure. We also don’t get a very firm sense of what era the film’s exactly set in—antiquated technology makes frequent appearances, suggesting a town that exists, in one form or another, outside the range and norms of modern time.
But there’s also perhaps a sense of intentionality there, however elliptical and even frustrating it may be for viewers seeking more conventional modes of cinematic storytelling. Given the quantity of images that are bathed in darkness, the firmer details of their frames being obscured in no small part by an overabundance of lively film grain, it begs the question of just how much Vermette is inviting us to see or not see, and how much of our unfulfilled curiosity for many of these details plays into the chaos that this community feels at the absence of the sun.
Levers seems to have inherited something particular from the long tradition of Manitoban filmmakers leaving an idiosyncratic streak of stylistic intrigue; Guy Maddin is among the first who comes to mind, his roots from Winnipeg lending a level of authenticity to his deconstructions of style and memory. In that same sort of vein, Vermette’s indigeneity and her sincere affection for the town of Ste. Anne seems to be a crucial driving force for much of her work, a sort of reclaiming gesture where the town itself becomes the center of a new kind of artistic expression that’s much more sensorially rooted. To that end, Levers becomes an object of fascination, rendering the ways through which even something so seemingly apocalyptic can leave behind profound disorientation even in a short span of time, while ensuring that its audience is similarly searching for a different kind of answer and anchor than its characters.
Mileage will significantly vary on this one; films this unapologetically experimental and so flagrantly disinterested in traditional narrative convention will undoubtedly alienate some looking for a specifically committed experience. With Levers, we get whiffs of genre and tonal convention—horror, mystery, something rooted in the supernatural while leaving us consistently unsettled—before the rug is pulled out from under us, leaving us wanting for anything to attach ourselves to. It’s the closest we get to perhaps perfectly identifying with its characters, unmoored in their own ways, searching for something that will never find a full answer—in a parable with an unusual, yet curiously poignant impact in a world that seems like it has less answers than ever.
