Filmmaker Vera Drew—along with 100 other artists—has melded the Batman villain’s story with her own journey of processing her trans identity in a new movie premiering at TIFF.
, melding rudimentary green-screen effects, wildly divergent animation and absurdist TV commercial spoofs for an off-kilter saga about the bumpy path to self-discovery. Made with the help of over 100 artists who crafted their pieces of this scattershot puzzle independently during the COVID-19 quarantine, it’s a freewheeling and loopy affair that will feel familiar to fans of, albeit if that influential series had been consumed with all things superheroic.
“As far back as I could remember, I always wanted to be a Joker,” says Drew’s Joker the Harlequin in a studio dressing room, thereby simultaneously referencing Martin Scorsese’s.
version of the Joker, and while their romance is toxic, it proves a necessary step on our heroine’s journey toward figuring out who she is and what she wants. The guise she eventually settles on is Joker the Harlequin, a cross between the clownish baddie and his co-dependent girlfriend that comes across as a manifestation of Drew’s ongoing inner struggle.
Joker the Harlequin’s odyssey leads to conflict with Batman , here imagined as a fascistic corporate overlord, aspiring political candidate , and pedophilic groomer with a taste for young trans wards. None of those critical characterizations are particularly novel, butthrives less on singular originality than on melding various aspects of the Batman and Joker legends into an idiosyncratic funhouse mirror-esque saga about self-definition.