Black Gate

Thursday, July 23, was the first day of the Fantasia Festival I chose not to see any movies. Wandering down to the screening room was a very real temptation, but I desperately needed to do laundry and other household chores — as well as to write about the films I was seeing. In fact as I made my plans it seemed that I was entering a relatively light stretch of the schedule, before what looked like a killer weekend.

On Friday the 24th I returned to the De Sève Theatre for two films. The first was an animated Korean science-fantasy called On the White Planet. The second was The Blue Hour, a gay romance from Thailand with elements of horror. Both were interesting to watch and ponder, though I can’t say I found either perfectly satisfying.

On the White Planet, or Chang-baek-han eol-gul-deul, was written and directed by Hur Bum-wook, and comes from the same animation school as Park Hye-mi’s Crimson Whale. It’s an extremely bleak but startlingly beautiful movie. It takes place on another planet (or some other time period of this planet) where there is no colour — everything’s white. Except for the sky and the lead character, Choi Min-je. Min-je’s flesh marks him out as an outcast, in what seems a very direct metaphor. Isolated at the start of the movie, he falls in with a gang, and things go from bad to worse. Murder and rape and all sorts of pain follow, and eventually the movie becomes a sort of extended chase as Min-je seeks sanctuary with two fellow escapees from the gang, and then goes on to try to find a way off the white planet.

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On Wednesday, July 22, I saw three movies at the Fantasia Festival — which made it an average day, to the extent I had an average day at Fantasia. It began at 1 PM, with a documentary called Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made. After that was a Japanese comedy-drama called 100 Yen Love. Then I made a difficult decision to pass on both the New Zealand horror-suspense film Observance and the American science-fiction film Synchronicity in favour of the Korean historical epic The Royal Tailor. I figured I could watch a later showing of Synchronicity, while Observance was available in the screening room. But this looked like my only chance to catch Tailor on the big screen, and I had an idea it was the sort of film that would take full advantage of the Hall Theatre’s scale.

The day’s earlier films were at the smaller De Sève Theatre, and at 1 I was ready for Raiders! — the saga of some kids in the 1980s who tried to make a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was preceded by a short film called “Villain,” an excellent partially-animated subversive take on superheroes. Directed and starring Ivan Bergerman from a script by Jolene Bergerman, it’s essentially a monologue by a villain called Munition Man. We see him and his equipment (vintage jet pack and gas mask) as he tells his story and talks about the defeat of his friend the Harquebus by the heroic Captain Valour. Except Captain Valour isn’t that heroic, to hear Munition Man tell it.

On the one hand, there’s nothing especially new in the movie’s bleak take on super-heroes and violence, but on the other it’s cleverly done and its general approach to heroism is dramatically effective — you legitimately wonder whether a villain can be a hero. The animated sequences show what would be effects-intensive sequences in an affordable way, but more importantly use the visual approach to deepen the theme: Golden Age designs and bright Silver Age colours contrast with a 1980s-esque cynicism. There seemed to me to be a Mignola-esque feel to the art, or perhaps a better comparison might be to Tony Harris’s Starman work — there’s the same love of super-heroes mixed with a knowing take on the genre, invention co-existing with a deep knowledge of hero history. More importantly, though, the film tells a story, using the background of a super-hero universe to build a character and set up that character’s crucial dramatic choice. It’s one of the better short films I’ve seen at Fantasia.

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