The images in Levers seem to belong to a narrative film, but you’d be hard pressed to discern the narrative. There are vital bits of context: the sun has not risen for a day, and on the previous day a new sculpture was unveiled in the small Manitoban town of Ste. Anne. But this context informs not so much event or character as feeling. We’re invited to make meaning of what little we can see in this darkened world, but not to consider meaning as something settled or determined.

The film was made with a structure partially determined by tarot cards, with no traditional script, in a collaborative process where the crew themselves seem to discover the work along with the audience. The filmmaking may be stochastic but it’s not sloppy or arbitrary. In the first place, it’s gorgeous. Minimal lighting and broken Bolex cameras are a virtue here, allowing the artists to construct a canvas that feels as much like fabric as film. Draperies as beautiful as a Renaissance painting are a constant motif, and often blur the distinction between living figure and artistic ones, or life and death. Splashes of colored light have a life of their own. It plays with genre, too, not just the ominous tones of horror or a secret society conspiracy thriller, but at times also comedy (civil servants rush around in the dark, spilling papers in comic strip mishaps).

Just as importantly for me, though, Levers exemplifies a sort of quasi-narrative filmmaking that is laden with significance, which develops its images of sun and moon and stone at length, but which has no interest in ever deciding what it’s “about” in some legible or transparent way. You can interpret the vanishing sun as a symbol of our world’s political darkness, the unveiled (but not actually seen) sculpture as a stand in for the work of art in a compromised public space; you can note the colonizing presence of Christianity in the mayor’s speech and a Virgin Mary perfume bottle, and then the more ambiguous theology of a blindfolded indigenous woman who cries the virgin’s tears in a tarot reading, filling that bottle; the connection between a character’s death and the sun’s, the flowers seen early in the darkness and later at a wake, and so on.

That’s all there, but none of it is pushed beyond where it organically appears, or shaped into greater sense than it organically makes. It’s not a film that wants to be spelled out through careful analysis, but one that celebrates the power of ambiguity. Here’s an artist who has clearly seen the works of Snow and Ito, not to mention Wim Wenders and David Lynch, but isn’t trying to make any of those sorts of films, but something new. One of the greatest functions of art is to show us how little we understand about it, and about life and where its meaning comes from. Too few filmmakers embrace that task. Here’s to more enchantment, more beauty, more mystery, more films like Levers.

P.S. After seeing Vermette praise Hopi filmmaker Victor Masayesva, Jr. in connection to her work, I watched his film Itam Hakim, Hopiit. I recommend you do the same! It recently screened as a double feature with Vermette’s earlier film Ste. Anne (also very good) but it would make an equally good double feature with Levers, not just because of their shared interest in solar bodies and weather and plant life and other imagery in common, but because it does much of what I’m arguing for here in terms of the amicable divorce of story and image, but in a documentary form, and on analog video instead of broken bolex.