Crocodile Eyes
(Canada, 75 min.)
Dir. Ingrid Veninger
What makes a memory? Moreover, what makes a movie?
Ingrid Veninger (El Mundo O Nada) asks the first question directly in the introduction to her eight feature Crocodile Eyes. The second query arises implicitly during a conversation with a psychic partway through the film. It also serves as the underlying quest for Veninger’s experimental work. The camera serves not merely as a window in Crocodile Eyes, but almost as another member of a family exploring the balance between art and life.
Crocodile Eyes initiates this dance between reality and storytelling as Veninger fusses with 100 pink Post-It notes. She slaps the tools on her wall while sipping a foamy latte. Talking both to herself and to the camera behind her, the dread-locked auteur explains her latest project. Veninger aims to shoot from the hip and capture moments from her family’s life. 100 of those instances will make the final cut. With no other outline and no real defined arc or endpoint, she’ll know those moments when she sees then, either during the shoot or after when those Post-It notes are full.
The film marks Veninger’s most idiosyncratic work yet, which says a lot in a career that says to heck with labels and boundaries. Crocodile Eyes is her most challenging film to date, but it’s also one of her more rewarding works, one that feels refreshingly in dialogue with the guidance she gives her students throughout the film and the consideration of what it really means to construct a movie that arises throughout the film. Toronto’s reigning queen of the indies proves that she hasn’t lost her mojo as she explores new terrain in deeply personal filmmaking.
It’s the kind of exercise that could also prove disastrous. Watching home movies offers a different experience when they’re your own versus when they’re someone else’s. Similarly, in the age of Instagram and consumer video, people are inundated with random memories on their social feeds: moments that may seem significant for some people, but have little value without context for the watcher. However, the memories connect here with a natural design, unfolding as an intimate yet completely relatable arc within the family’s orbit.
What follows are moments both life-altering and completely banal. Veninger plays with her granddaughter Freya (Laska Veninger) who really loves the camera and inherits the family gene. Freya’s a bit of a rebel, though, and doesn’t follow Veninger’s sense for realism: She’s a real ham actor with big, broad gestures commanding the frame.
Scenes of play, moreover, let a certain gravitas casually infiltrate the picture. One day at the beach, Veninger and Freya wet their toes by the water, but the young girl asks curiously and cautiously if that’s a crocodile peeking its eyes out of the Ontario waters. Her grandma laughs from behind the camera and reassures her that it’s just a rock. Freya, however, can’t be moved, so the director gently hands the camera off to the young girl, who gets her first taste as cinematographer while her grandma braves the croc. It turns out that it’s indeed a rock. It’s also a great example of what makes both a movie and a memory as Freya’s sense of wonder inadvertently defines the film.
Other moments are more obvious choices. The filmmaker’s daughter (Hallie Switzer) delivers her second baby and gives birth after a process more laborious than The Brutalist. Meanwhile, Veninger readies to say goodbye to her father as he rests on his deathbed. The camera observes his final breaths, which are peaceful, calm, and void of any real “drama.” His death plays out with the naturalism of other events—it’s just something that happens naturally. But the camera’s presence here also affords the filmmaker and her mother a sense of preparedness. It’s a meaningful send-off, worthy of respect, attention, and just the right mood lighting to respectfully evoke and preserve emotions. It’s pretty brave of the family to share these moments that become doubly vulnerable as a work of art.
Some scenes do have an air of self-consciousness, as life does in any non-fiction(ish) work that breaks the fourth wall. Others look back on elements of cinema and spectatorship to consider the untold stories that people overlook daily. In one scene, for example, Veninger visits her son (Jacob Switzer) as he works at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema. They explore the cavernous theatre, hidden nooks, and observe his footage of a “ghost” roaming the lobby. It’s spooky enough for anyone to reconsider loitering too long after the next show.
In perhaps the most thematically significant moment, Veninger visits a psychic. She explains that she’s making two movies: one scripted and another that harnesses the free-flowing nature of life. What results here is obviously the latter. In the age of superhero movies and outsized narratives, Crocodile Eyes offers a poetic reminder: The best drama resides in daily life.
