The Archivists: sometimes a short film packs the same wallop as a three minute song

REVIEW by Drew Rowsome

12 Sep 2019

And as hard as they would try they'd hurt to make you cry
But you never cried to them, just to your soul
No, you never cried to them, just to your soul

TIFF is different in this year of the pandemic, but the lack of glamour (and the subsequent lack of hype) may actually put the focus back on the films. After all that was the original impetus of the festival. One stunner of a film is The Archivists which, being a short, can use all the attention it can get. It begins with an ominous dystopian warning: 

Society has collapsed. Art from the past is viewed as decadent, and its consumption is illegal. Some see things differently . . .

Set in 2033, which, not surprisingly, feels horrifically like 2020 plus 13, three people travel through the gorgeously shot and verdantly lush Canadian countryside in a covered wagon. We never learn their destination (and the title is an allusion not their occupation) or why they decide to explore an abandoned farmhouse. What they find is a diary, remnants of a family's home, some '80s vinyl records and (conveniently) a wind-up gramophone. 

What results is a jam session to Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" that is charming, heartbreaking and ultimately, stirringly hopeful. Their reaction to that wistfully powerful gay anthem is as immediate and intense as it was/is for every queer person hearing it for the first time. Or for the thousandth time. It is just in a different context with the very specific becoming universal (ie: including the hets). There is a subtext, linked to the diary, that does give a magical gay glow to the proceedings, but it is a bonus, an enhancement, not the central emotion. 

The jam session is sweet, comical and familiar to anyone who has tried to master a cover tune with a group of musicians, no matter how intimately intertwined. Noah Reid adds another incandescent musical moment to his resumé, not quite eclipsing his Schitt's Creek rendition of "Simply the Best" but rivalling his Hamlet. Reid's boy-next-door emotional openness benefits from musical numbers slathered with context. Bahai Watson (The Virgin Trial, Star Trek: Discovery) has a voice as luminous as that remarkable face and, who knew?, can at least fake the chops of a drummer. Maxwell McCabe-Lokos rounds out the trio as the keyboardist who, as in the music world, defers to the others.

Director/writer Igor Drljaca has created a fusion between a music video and a scifi parable, offering more clues and room for interpretation than a Bonnie Tyler epic or a Netflixian unravelling serial. But most importantly The Archivists offers hope, something we are seriously short of in our current dystopia-to-be. Just as Jimmy Somerville's deceptively fragile voice has the balls to still be echoing in 2033 and beyond, The Archivists posits that glimmer of a future we can survive and still be singing. Sometimes a short film packs the same wallop as a three minute song.

But the answers you seek will never be found at home
The love that you need will never be found at home