Black Gate

This guest post by Julie Czerneda is part of the #futurespasttour, taking place from Aug 22nd to Sept 6th. Enter for a chance to win one of two sets of Julie Czerneda’s books: a mass market paperback edition of A Gulf of Time and Stars plus a hardcover edition of The Gates of Futures Past. US/Canada residents only, please. Enter here for the Rafflecopter giveaway.

At Fantasy Café earlier in this blog tour, I regaled you with the story of how we came to move to the country in the midst of my writing The Gate to Futures Past. If you haven’t read that post yet, by all means nip over and do so, because this one?

Is about what happened next.

Pretty much immediately next, in fact. While we waited for the moving truck, next. We stood inside our new, for-the-time, home, tired but triumphant, and reached for our cell phones to let the family know we’d arrived because we’d promised.

No signal.

Many houses have low-signal spots. In our previous domicile it had been, appropriately enough, beside the shelves with the Pratchetts. Walk a step away, and you were reconnected. L-Space.

Here? In short order we discovered every room and hallway, both floors, of our new house to be a dead zone. No signal at all, anywhere.

How… odd.

Outside we went, phones held high — a little giddy, truth be told, to be doing our own LARP of Mulder and Scully. Were we not, when said and done, in the middle of no-one-knew-where? (Literally. No one else knew exactly where we were, hence the promise to call. Not even a mailing address. More on that later.)

We followed our rising little bars as ardently as if chasing a Pokémon. Up the hill. Finally!

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Sometimes the movies I get to see on a given day at Fantasia have an obvious common theme. Sometimes not. Sometimes there’s a commonality binding two otherwise different movies, but it’s tenuous. So it was that on Tuesday, July 19, I watched a Korean historical drama called The Throne (originally Sado), and followed it with a Polish musical-fantasy-tragicomedy called The Lure (originally Córki dancingu). They’re both films based on older stories, in the first case recorded history from the eighteenth century, and in the second Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid.” As you might imagine from those two very different source materials, these are very different movies in very different genres. But it also seemed to me that the process of retelling the stories was very different as well.

Let’s begin with The Throne, which reinterprets history in high style. Directed by Lee Joon-ik from a script by Cho Chul-hyun, Lee Song-won, and Oh Sung-hyeon, it begins one rainy night with a rebellion led by Prince Sado (Yoo Ah-in) against his old father, King Yeongjo (Song Kang-ho). It fails, and Sado’s condemned to death. The precise crime and precise punishment are determined by legalistic rules that Yeongju must follow or risk his throne; the result is that Sado’s condemned to a slow death, imprisoned in a small box without food and water. We see Sado slowly waste away, but most of the film takes place in flashback, as we learn about his life and his relationship with his father, and why he led the rebellion and why he failed.

The structure of the movie is masterful, unveiling events bit by bit. It’s not quite a mystery structure, as there’s no central investigator revealing the truth, no doubt in anyone’s mind about what’s happened or why. Instead Sado’s slow death triggers a series of memories, both Sado’s own and those of his family. As the memories accrue, we start being able to draw connections between symbols and between repeated phrases and repeated choices. Things acquire different meanings at different times. Something as simple as the choice of a gate through which the king walks, or the presence of Sado at a certain point in his father’s ritualised washing ceremony, comes to have terrible significance. We get to understand Sado, and then Yeongjo, and then Sado through Yeongjo and the way Yeongjo had to raise him.

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