Black Gate

Monday July 16 was an odd day, beginning with the neorealist neo-noir Neomanila and going off in different directions from there. First would come a time-travel comedy from New Zealand, Mega Time Squad. Then a movie that was a kind of pre-apocalyptic film, I Have a Date With Spring, from South Korea. The directors of both the two later movies would be present to take questions.

The director and writer of Mega Time Squad is Tim Van Dammen. His movie’s about Johnny (Anton Tennet), a loutish but somewhat good-hearted drug dealer in the small New Zealand town of Thames. Alongside his best friend Gaz (Arlo Gibson), Johnny works for the nearest equivalent to a crime lord around, a self-important short-tempered kingpin named Shelton (Jonny Brugh, from What We Do in the Shadows). Ambition leads Johnny to make a try for money being held by a Chinese antique shop owner, which in turn leads to him stealing a Mysterious Item from the shop. The Item turns out to be a limited time machine — once activated, it causes Johnny to return to the same place and time on every subsequent use. Johnny, now on the outs with Shelton, makes a series of bad choices and uses to the Item to bail him out each time, eventually gathering a group of temporal duplicates of himself: the Mega Time Squad. But can he settle things with Shelton, and the Chinese man now hunting him down? And is there any truth to the legend that a vengeful demon will strike down whoever wields the Item?

This is an amiable (if profane) film, clever yet not over-complicated in its temporal mechanics. There’s nothing epic about it at all, and in this case that’s to the good. You don’t feel the stakes are overblown at all, or even especially high — technically Johnny’s life is at stake, but the guys in Shelton’s gang don’t feel like killers; legbreakers, maybe, but not killers. Shelton himself, as played perfectly by Brugh, doesn’t seem the sort to take responsibility for a murder. This is fine, as the result is that the level of danger’s enough to keep things moving but not enough to outweigh the humour.

The time-travel element’s explored in reasonable depth, but doesn’t feel exhaustive. It’s a driver of action, not a thing to be developed for its own sake, and that’s about right. There are a couple of spots (notably in terms of how some of Johnny’s duplicates show up in a particular place) that are a bit confusing to me, but this is a time-travel film, and it’s possible a second viewing would clarify the plot mechanics — which anyway are less important than the general drift of the action. And that’s always clear.

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You can tell a bit about an audience at Fantasia just from how they react to what goes on screen before the movie starts. You don’t get trailers before a movie, though sometimes you see a trailer for that year’s festival, using brief clips of several of the films playing that edition of Fantasia; this year’s trailer often drew cheers. You get a couple commercials, from a very limited selection; there’s one particular commercial for Nongshim noodles that’s played for several years and often draws warm applause for its earnestness. And of course there’s the meowing, an audience tradition — after the light goes down and before the movie starts, people in the audience meow, others shush them, still others make other animal noises. How much of any of this you get depends on how playful the audience is, and how excited they are for a crowd-pleasing thrill-ride. Which means, from the noise an audience makes before a film begins, you can tell what kind of a film you’re about to see.

The first film I saw on Monday, July 16, was a neo-noir movie from the Philippines called Neomanila, and there was no meowing and no applause for the Nongshim commercial at all. This was a serious crowd that had come to the J.A. De Sève Theatre to see a serious and dark movie. Which is what they got, and a good one, too.

Neomanila was directed by Manila-based Mikhail Red, and written by Red with Rae Red and Zig Dulay. Toto (Timothy Castillo) is a kid in Manila whose brother’s been arrested, and the police are leaning on him to give up a drug dealer in exchange for his brother’s freedom. Toto’s gang is leaning on him not to flip. Toto finds the dealer’s dead, anyway, killed by Irma (Eula Vades), who offers Toto a job to pay his brother’s bail. Toto gets drawn deeper into the world Irma and her partner Raul (Rocky Salumbides) inhabit, where behind the facade of a pest control shop they run deadly missions against alleged drug dealers. Things build, but only grow darker, more despairing. This is a downbeat film, and the ending doesn’t shy away from the logic the story builds.

This is very definitely a crime movie, with a highly realistic approach to depicting Manila’s underworld. Note that I don’t just mean that it’s trying to be mimetic, but that in the fullest sense it’s trying to be realistic — echoing Italian neorealism, a politically aware film shot on location and focussing on the lives of the urban poor, telling stories of desperation that dive deep into the characters’ psyches. On the other hand, Red’s talked about the filmic language of the movie, noting devices he consciously uses to build narrative tension as well as similarities to Leon: The Professional and Blade Runner, and saying it has a “very comic book feel to it.” I’d say that may be overstating things a little, but to say that the movie’s an experimental neo-noir is quite fair.

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My last movie of Sunday, July 15, was a film I knew little about going in. It was The Scythian (Skif, Скиф), a Russian film directed by Rustam Mosafir from a script he wrote with Vadim Golovanov. It started late, and for most of the day I’d been unsure whether I’d stick around to watch it; in the 11 hours between leaving my house and the time it started, I’d ingested a few handfuls of peanuts, one (1) tin of off-brand cola, and a few mouthfuls of water. Still, I took my seat, the movie started, and then I quit paying attention to my physical body for one hour and forty-seven minutes. The Scythian is one of the best action films I’ve seen in years. It’s engagingly violent, and the violence is done well — but more than that, it’s filled with cleverness and unexpected twists. If you’re a fan of sword-and-sorcery or sword-and-sandal movies, you owe it to yourself to see this movie, and as soon as possible. (And I note it’s being released August 14 under the title The Last Warrior on VOD, Blu-Ray, and DVD.)

The story’s set in Russia in the Middle Ages, as the Russian Lord Oleg (Yuriy Tsurilo) is conniving to gain control of Kiev. Among his most trusted warriors is a man named Lutobor (Aleksey Faddeev), whose wife Tatyana (Izmaylova Vasilisa) has just given birth to a son. But then Tatyana and the baby are kidnapped by Scythians, specifically by a clan of elite assassins who’re the last remnants of their people. But one of the Scythians, a man named Marten (Alexander Kuznetsov), is betrayed by his own people and captured by Lutobor. Lutobor now intends to take Marten as his guide, trek into Scythian lands, face down the clan of trained killers, and recover his wife and son — not to mention find out who hired the Scythians in the first place.

It’s hard to know where to begin in talking about this movie. It’s not especially deep, though it is conscious of itself as a piece of heroic fiction — it begins by talking about its era as “a time for new heroes brave at heart and strong in spirit.” The key is that everything it does, it does very well. Most crucial, I suppose, is that it tells a ferocious story with some surprising character choices, presents a strong relationship between the two male leads that deepens over the course of the film, and evokes a sense of a whole world beyond the specific plot to hand. This is nominally historical adventure, but in fact it pushes “historicity” to the edge and beyond, incorporating magic potions, omens from the gods, and surreal costumes and props. To me, this is absolutely sword-and-sorcery, a classic pulplike fantasy set in (or in this case near) Central Asia, something out of Robert E. Howard or Harold Lamb or Arthur Howden Smith’s Grey Maiden tales.

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My third movie on Sunday, July 15, was a France-UK co-production called Cold Skin. It was scheduled to start at 5:10 in the Hall Theatre, and ran 107 minutes. At 7:15, across the street at the De Sève, there’d be a showing of the 1911 Italian film L’Inferno, an adaptation of the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Musical accompaniment to the silent film would be provided by Maurizio Guarini of Italian prog band Goblin, well-known for providing the soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria among many other films. I figured I had a shot at getting in to see L’Inferno, but it’d depend on the length of the line-up. In the meanwhile, I was quite looking forward to Cold Skin.

Directed by Xavier Gens, the screenplay by Jesús Olmo and Eron Sheehan was based on the Catalan novel La Pell Freda by Albert Sánchez Piñol. It follows an unnamed man (David Oakes), presumably English, eventually to be known as Friend, as he travels by ship to an isolated island in the far south where he will take detailed meteorological readings. It is September 1914, and elsewhere the First World War’s begun; on the island Friend finds, there is no other human inhabitant but a surly lighthouse-keeper named Gruner (Ray Stevenson, perhaps best known for his role as Volstagg in the Thor movies). As Friend soon finds out, though, there are humanoid but non-human inhabitants: fish-creatures that come out at night and attack. Friend finds Gruner keeps a fish-woman (Aura Garrido) as a slave, but must live with him and the creature he names Aneris as, night after night, the other humanoids attack Gruner’s fortified lighthouse.

The first thing that must be said about this film is that it looks spectacular. The landscape of the island is harsh, craggy, barren, and beautiful. Friend’s cabin and Gruner’s lighthouse look lived-in and, crammed with detail, fit their period perfectly. There’s a kind of tactile 1914 that comes out of this movie, particularly the early scenes, before that external world is as it were stripped away from the humans. It’s a realisation of the era that seems to owe nothing to Merchant-Ivory or traditional period films; it’s harder-edged, unyielding. The lighting and cinematography are haunting and perfect: there’s a sense of place to the island built by the quality of sunlight, and a character to the interior scenes (and rare underwater scenes) as the light shifts.

The next thing that has to be said is that the acting in no way takes a back seat to the images. Oakes, Stevenson, and Garrido build complex characters and establish complex relationships among them — relationships that build and change over the course of the film. Garrido’s worth particular mention here, as her character is functionally mute yet always comprehensible. But all three capably bring out the dynamics among the characters that drive the plot, notably the tense not-quite adversarial relationship between Friend and Gruner.

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Sunday, July 15, was going to be my first really busy day of the Fantasia Film Festival. There were four movies I planned to see, with a chance of a fifth, depending on how things worked out. The day’d begin at the Hall Theatre; first, I’d see Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura, a lighthearted Japanese urban fantasy. Then would come Aragne: Sign of Vermillion, also from Japan, a horror anime.

Destiny (Kamakura Monogatari, DESTINY 鎌倉ものがたり) is directed by Takashi Yamazaki, helmer of the Parasyte movies, from a screenplay Yamazaki wrote based on the manga by Ryôhei Saigan. The movie follows Masakazu and Akiko Isshiki (Masato Sakai and Mitsuki Takahata), newlyweds, as they move to Masakazu’s home in the small-but-historic city of Kamakura. Masakazu’s a writer, but Akiko’s plans for their household meet a slight obstacle when she discovers that Kamakura, by dint of being “a magnet of mystical energy for millennia,” is home to any number of supernatural creatures: water imps, death gods, ghosts, bad luck gods, the list goes on. A series of episodic adventures show us different facets of the city and its inhabitants while also deftly advancing the Isshikis’ relationship, finally culminating in an extended otherworldly adventure that brings together subplots unobtrusively introduced over the course of the movie.

This is one of the most purely delightful movies I’d see at Fantasia, and indeed one of the most delightful I’ve come across in a long time. Tonally it’s somewhat similar to the Harry Potter films, in the particular kind of cartooniness of the CGI, in the conscious quaintness of the setting’s historicity, in the way the orchestral soundtrack is consciously lush yet awe-inspiring, and above all in the way that minor details turn out to be pieces of a larger puzzle: the way everything sets up everything else, the way the world feels both expansive and interconnected, perfectly machined in retrospect but almost overwhelming with implications as you live in it. There’s a deeper sense of the folkloric here than in Potter, though. I’ve heard some people mention a feel like a live-action Miyazaki film, and in terms of the creative visual design of the many creatures of Kamakura I can see that. But there’s a clearer bad guy here than is usual in a Miyazaki tale (although that doesn’t become obvious until late in the story).

Still, there’s a similar thrill in storytelling, and an equally unusual sense of structure. For example, Masakazu’s not just a writer but an adviser to the police, and a case he’s called on to solve turns out to have a very close solution to one of the stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But this is not a problem, because the mystery is in fact solved very soon after it’s introduced; yet if it turns out to be an episode with its own quick satisfaction, it’s also a vehicle to set up other plot elements with their own pleasures. Here as elsewhere the film packs any number of sub-stories into its overall tale, creating a world full of incident that miraculously never feels rushed or underexplored, a world full of ideas with just the right emotional heft.

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Weekend days are busy days at the Fantasia film festival. Weekends are when most people are most often free to see movies, so the programmers obligingly schedule a lot of films for Saturdays and Sundays. Last Saturday I had three movies I wanted to see. On the Sunday, I had five. Which meant that Fantasia was well and truly underway.

The first film on the Saturday was an anime from Japan called Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana o Kazaro, which according to Wikipedia translates directly as “Let’s Decorate the Promised Flowers in the Morning of Farewells”). Written by veteran anime screenwriter Mari Okada, it’s also her first feature as a director. Opening this weekend in a limited release across North America, and next weekend in the UK, it’s an elaborate secondary-world fantasy story that mixes the epic and the domestic startlingly well. Not only is it an early contender for my favourite film of this year’s festival, it’s immediately become one of the best high fantasy films I’ve ever seen.

In an idyllic forest live the Iorph, an immortal people who weave long cloths called the hibiol, which are symbols of their lives and destinies: “the work of a loom is like the flow of time,” we’re told early on, and this is a movie that is deeply concerned with time. For while the Iorph’s society is timeless, their world’s shattered by the invasion of a human army from the kingdom of Mezarte. The Mezartians ride dragonlike creatures called Renatos, and easily destroy the Iorph. Only one youthful Iorph escapes, Maquia (voiced by Manaka Iwami). In doing so she stumbles across a human infant, whose parents have been killed by bandits. She decides to save the child.

There are a lot of ways for the story to go at this point. Most of the standard ways would involve Maquia trying to overthrow the Mezarte, or maybe the baby growing up to fight them. Absolutely nothing like that happens. Instead the film follows Maquia as she wanders deeper into Mezarte, away from the ruin of her homeland, and tries to learn how to raise the child she’s now acquired. The concern of the movie is with how she lives over time, over the years as she raises her son, who she names Ariel (also Erial, according to the IMDB, in either case voiced by veteran voice actor Miyu Irino, who among other films had a role in Miss Hokusai and was the male lead in Spirited Away). The politics of Mezarte are important, but only insofar as they shape Maquia’s everyday life. We have to understand them to understand what’s happening to Mezarte society, and have to understand Mezarte society to understand what options there are for Maquia and Ariel and the other people they come to live with.

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Fantasy’s described by fantasy: consider John Crowley’s Little, Big, a novel about a faerieland where the further in you go the bigger the land becomes. A powerful image, it echoes the way fascinations gain in depth and scope the more you explore them. How familiar experiences can become strange the more you dig deeper into them, birthing mystery, growing weird. Art and story perhaps most of all. So I am about to begin my coverage of the Fantasia International Film Festival for the fifth year here at Black Gate, and I feel I have less of an idea of what I will see than ever. It is a place, a time, a state of mind, where anything can be seen; it is one of those notorious worlds whose only boundaries are that of imagination. And so the more you explore the more you learn how much more there is to explore.

This will be the twenty-second edition of the festival, North America’s largest genre film festival, featuring over 130 feature films from around the world. Last year more than 100,000 spectators saw a film at Fantasia, which is impressive in a time of declining theatrical attendance on this continent. But what’s most impressive is the range of offerings at Fantasia. Action-adventure films, experimental and underground films, rediscovered classic films — these things are only the beginning. I argued after last year’s festival that this is a new golden age of science fiction and fantasy film; spend time going through this year’s festival listings and you can see why. Modern genre film is in a complex dialogue with itself across languages and film industries, across years and filmmaking traditions. It is fluid, unpredictable, and international.

I write these posts in a diary format because I think that the experience of attending the festival is worth recording. Over the course of three weeks you see the same people in the media line, you talk with them, you get to know them. And then you see them again the next year. More than that, these are people you talk about films with, agreeing, disagreeing, asking questions, sharing information. I have a number of friends I only see at Fantasia. It’s a community that grows over twenty-one days or so, a little like a science-fiction convention — there’s even a bar where a lot of the festival community hangs out — but instead of (mainly) discussing works of art, we experience the art and then talk about it informally as opposed to attending a panel.

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