Pinned to the wall by his landlord, Lock O’Hara, the protagonist of the new film “Toronto Apartment,” flinches from one repeated question: “You respect the Ontario Tenants Act, don’t you? Don’t you?!”
For anyone without a rich benefactor or a trust fund who has any desire to make a living as an artist in Toronto, the cost of housing is an issue that undergirds much of daily life — social, romantic, creative and otherwise. Recent reports indicate that an increased housing supply is dropping monthly rents, but they’d have to plummet significantly before becoming affordable: an average one-bedroom apartment in the city goes for more than $2,200.
It’s only fitting then for films at the margins to bring this subject to the fore. Two new Toronto features and one upcoming short do just that.
Christopher Beaulieu was inspired to make “Otium” after working as a freelance photographer for Airbnb before the pandemic, coming into town from his parents’ house in the suburbs for scheduled shoots.
“It was a real experience,” he told the Star, “struggling to find a place of my own while spending all day in these beautiful empty buildings.”
“Otium,” which had its Canadian premiere at Toronto’s Future of Film Showcase in July, stars Eliza Martin as Hanna, an Airbnb photographer, who commutes into the city for gigs while studying film and searching for her own place. She navigates under-the-table offers from building owners, tenants threatening to call security, as well as an overarching loneliness and lack of direction, but Beaulieu’s camera stays trained on the desolate urban environment surrounding her. In these empty high-ceilinged flats, her presence seems almost secondary to the tasteful Nordic furniture.
“I was interested in this idea of the indifferent camera, almost like ‘Taxi Driver,’ with the focus moving away from the character to try to convey this sense of alienation,” said Beaulieu.
In Toronto real estate, “Otium” shows us, space for life comes second to profit extraction. A house is less a home than a (hopefully) accumulating asset.
“Otium” doesn’t manufacture any narrative resolution to this problem; instead it undertakes a visual investigation into the esthetics of alienation in a changing Toronto. Beaulieu registers this shift in “Otium”‘s collage of formats — mashing together warm 16-mm cinematography with the harsh digital lines of Hanna’s photos, as well as home movies on Hi8 video and Super 8-mm film from the Beaulieu family collection.
“The choice to shoot on an older image-making technology gives me some comfort to retreat into the past,” he said. “On the other hand, young people are trying to live in a world owned by older generations, so I wanted to inhabit that perspective esthetically as well.”
Though meditative and melancholic in his pacing, Beaulieu ruthlessly pits these nostalgic images against the empty surfaces of condo living in Toronto. He plundered his savings to buy the 16-mm camera used to shoot “Otium,” and this desperation leaks into the film, lending well-earned horror to the question of living and working as an artist in the city.
‘Where am I going to live?’
The spacious voids of “Otium” seem a fond memory while watching “Toronto Apartment,” which made played the Bleeding Edge screening series at the Paradise Theatre on July 15. Tristan Wheeler’s feature debut hails from similarly autobiographical source material, when a breakup prompted him to confront the dismal realities of living solo as a filmmaker in the city.
“There’s an emotional side to the breakup,” Wheeler told the Star, “but then there’s also a very real, logistical, financial question that’s introduced: Where am I going to live?”
In the film, to make ends meet after his split, Lock O’Hara (played by Wheeler himself) alights on a scheme to sublease his apartment by the hour without his landlord’s knowledge. Before too long, the down-and-out O’Hara is raking it in from all manner of space-desperate Torontonians: an asexual platonic dating group, a balaclava’d cohort plotting to bomb the CN Tower, a magician giving lessons.
On a shoestring budget of $10,000, Wheeler stuffs this thin setup with cringe-inducing gags and surrealities. Despite the social stigma sometimes attached to being a landlord, the aptly named Lock uses this new power to ingratiate himself socially with his community of subletters.
“In Toronto, you’ll sometimes see landlords and business owners try to truss up their practices with coded language,” Wheeler said. “Being a landlord is sometimes vilified, but what if that person, instead, called themself a ‘community space provider’? I wanted to take that contradiction to its extreme conclusion.”
Taking things one step further, Lock finds romance through his new role, unfortunately coinciding with his landlord (and his thugs) catching onto the scheme.
‘A shabby movie about a shabby guy’
If “Otium” crafts an esthetic distance between layers of nostalgia, “Toronto Apartment” is mired in an ugly present. Wheeler makes no effort to conceal the impoverished origins of his production. As the director freely admits, little about “Toronto Apartment” looks professional. It’s not a film about housing insecurity made from above — one emerges from the film with little doubt that almost no one involved in the production owns their residence.
“It creates a sense of honesty with the audience,” Wheeler said. “It’s a shabby movie about a shabby guy. I just hope it’s charming.”
In the months to come, Wheeler and Beaulieu hope to continue screening their features at festivals and cinematheques, with more local screenings to be announced.
Films about the housing crisis will likely continue until rents improve. Late last year, Cam Thomson’s short film “Condominium,” a horror-comedy about a below-market condo that comes with a ghostly landlord, was crowdfunded to the tune of $4,340. He hopes to finish post-production this summer.
Though it might not be the sexiest subject for a film, the cost of rent in Toronto has become impossible to ignore. And before answering the eternal indie-film question “How does one live?” the new crop of filmmakers, quite literally, must start with “Where does one live?”
