Black Gate

One of the lovely things about covering Fantasia is the chance to see genre classics I missed the first time around, often brought back to the screen in a restored version. Again in 2020, notwithstanding its streaming-only nature, Fantasia revived a number of great films from prior years. While my own inefficiency with scheduling meant I ended up missing Johnnie To’s A Hero Never Dies, I saw many of the others, including Wilson Yip’s 2005 movie SPL: Kill Zone (also just Kill Zone, originally SPL: Sha Po Lang, 殺破狼).

Written by Yip with Szeto Kam-Yuen and Jack Ng, it follows Hong Kong cop Detective Chan (Simon Yam), who’s trying to settle a personal score by taking down mobster Wong Po before Chan retires. Unfortunately for Chan, Wong’s played by Sammo Hung. Unfortunately for Wong, the man about to take over from Chan, Ma, is played by Donnie Yen. Mayhem ensues.

Although, in truth, there’s a little less mayhem than you might expect. Yip leans strongly into the melodrama of the story, holding most of the fight scenes for later in the film. Chan’s our main character for the first part of the movie, building up our sympathy for him as we see Wong’s ruthlessness — but then after the introduction of Ma, we come to see things from Ma’s perspective, and we see how Chan’s obsession with Wong leads him not just to push boundaries but to shatter them entirely.

Chan leads a small unit of cops trying to get the goods on Wong; they get their hands on video tape that seems to incriminate him in a murder, but doesn’t tell quite the story they need it to tell. So they cheat, trying to use the tape to frame Wong, even if that means taking out witnesses who know the truth. The cops are dirty, and you understand why they’re dirty, but you’re not allowed to forget that they’re dirty.

This gives the story enough heft, enough moral complexity, that the melodrama becomes more interesting and the story becomes far more than a collection of set-pieces. Add to that some strong performances: Sammo Hung’s alternately sinister and sympathetic, while Donnie Yen gives a convincing portrayal as a basically decent man trying to decide what to do in a compromised world. Watching Yen, in fact, I found it hard not to think what it would have been like to see him as Superman at around that time — a forceful but good man, one who the audience is drawn to emphasise with due to a mixture of warmth and strength. On the other hand, Hung’s playing a fat crimelord who’s actually both a mass of muscle and a skilled martial artist, a man the cops can’t legally touch but whose weakness is the wife he truly loves, and who keeps a psychopathic-but-supremely-skilled assassin as his enforcer. Which is to say I no longer need to wonder what it’d be like to see him play Wilson Fisk.

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There is, or was, or might have been according to some, a movement in Greek cinema that started and flourished in the first half of the second decade of the twenty-first century called the Greek Weird Wave. This movement, if it existed — and Lanthimos himself is skeptical, while others say it’s a thing of the past — was perceived to be anchored by the films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, and characterised by surreal plot situations, precise cinematography and alienated, emotionally muted characters. (It’s quite far from prose weird fiction or even the New Weird, often lacking any element of the fantastic.) Were the Weird Wave is a thing to have ever existed, it would be very tempting to place Rinio Dragasaki’s debut feature Cosmic Candy within it.

Written by Dragasaki with Katerina Kaklamani, it follows Anna (Maria Kitsou), a youngish woman who works at a convenience store and is addicted to Cosmic Candy, a sugary substance the store’s decided to no longer carry. Anna suffers from OCD and, apparently, at least mild depression, ordering fitness equpiment online that she never opens. Then she comes home one evening to find a young girl, her neighbour Persa (Pipera Maya), hanging around her front door. Persa’s father has vanished, and despite herself Anna takes in the extroverted high-energy Persa. Anna’s own father, we learn, vanished some time ago, and the main part of the film is the bonding between Anna and Persa as Anna investigates Persa’s life. She tries to understand what’s happened to Persa’s father and where the girl can live long-term, while at the same time trying not to get fired from her job, and helping Persa prepare for her school pageant.

You can see the outline of some very familiar story structures in the foregoing, and one of the interesting aspects of Cosmic Candy is the way it uses those structures while also occasionally pushing back against them. There is overall a straightforwardness to the film, but it’s pulled into some unusual shapes by Anna’s mental and emotional states, and a mounting tendency to the surreal. Some elements of it struck me as possibly referring to cultural knowledge I did not have (specifically the significance Persa’s school play, in which she plays a figure from the 19th-century struggle for Greek Independence). But the story’s always clear, and told with a distinctive gentleness, a sympathy for all its characters. As it goes on it becomes more surreal, anchored always by subtly powerful cinematography and the alienated Anna’s muted emotional reaction: thus, perhaps, part of the Weird Wave, if such a thing exists.

Technically Cosmic Candy can be said to be a genre story in that there’s a mystery, and a tale of crime seen edge-on. Mostly, though, it’s a story of a mismatched couple coming to bond and shape each other’s world. As such it’s perfectly solid; you see why the two characters are drawn to each other despite their basic differences in temperament, and the adventures and exploits they pull each other into are well-planned and build well — if it’s clear that Persa’s play will always be the climax of the film, an extended road trip the two of them take in search of another of her family members nicely diverts the tale for just long enough, giving us a less expected dimension.

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Wapikoni Mobile is a non-profit organisation based in Montreal that sends mobile film studios to work with the youth of Indigenous communities, teaching them the skills to make movies and giving them the support to produce short films. Almost 200 Wapikoni shorts have won awards or special mentions in film festivals around the world, and many have appeared in previous editions of Fantasia. With the studios on hiatus due to the pandemic, this year the festival screened a collection of 17 movies selected by Wapikoni in a showcase of work created through the program.

I watched the showcase, and was impressed. Every movie had something to recommend it, and most of them had quite a lot. (Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find acting credits for most of the films; but as least I’ve been able to include links to some.)

The first of the films was one of the best, and possibly the most haunting film I saw at the festival all year. The 8-minute “Kakatshat,” by Eve Ringuette, starts in the 19th century with a curse from an abandoned old woman (played, I believe, by Thérèse Vollant), then moves forward to show the curse’s working-out. It’s stunningly well-shot, and, quiet and eerie, captures a profound atmosphere.

Next came “The Guest,” by Nicholas Rodgers. It’s a folkloric five-minute-long story about a man (Philippe Mathon) who takes a small omnivorous furry creature into his house only to find it has more of an appetite than he realised. It’s made in a distinctive kind of stop-motion that gives it a surreal touch; you can see it here. The next movie was also from Rogers, “RUN,” in which a man who’s committed a violent crime treks into a nighttime forest and finds there more than he expected. It’s a solid piece of horror that does some very nice work with soundscapes, and it’s available here.

Next came “Among The Forest,” by Oqim Nicholas. A youth journeys into the woods, pondering a horrible life left behind, and his internal monologue builds to a powerful ending. The writing gives us some particularly nice character work. “TRANSMISSION 01: 34-OD” by Jim Matlock is an experimental video that uses distorted sound and images to fashion a plea for change in the world, creating nice collage effects along the way.

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I try to keep an eye on comics, but like many people my first exposure to Pepe the Frog was as a poorly-drawn meme spouting racism. I remember reading about Pepe’s comics origin, but the name of Matt Furie, the cartoonist who created him, remained a piece of trivia. As did his comic Boy’s Club, where the frog first appeared. Now there’s a documentary telling the whole story of Furie, Pepe, and Boy’s Club — a tale of politics, appropriation, and how art can be used in ways the artist could not imagine, for worse and for better.

Feels Good Man is the debut film from director Arthur Jones, and it’s solid work, starting with its structure. It begins with Furie, a soft-spoken man who discusses his early life and work up through the creation of Boy’s Club. The cast of the comic were four anthropomorphic animals loosely representing parts of himself, and Pepe the Frog was one of the less important of the four. Furie has no problem in saying that the book was full of lowbrow humour — Pepe’s name was chosen, he says, because it sounded a little like pee-pee.

One page would turn out to be more important than he could dream, with a sequence in which one of Pepe’s roommates accidentally walks in on the frog in the bathroom, and sees him pissing with his pants and underwear all the way down to his ankles. Later the roommate asks Pepe why he lowers his pants so far and Pepe says “Feels good man.” That catchphrase spread as a joke, first among Furie’s friends, and then beyond, and then to the internet in the form of a meme.

Here the film moves away from Furie to discuss memes, and the 4chan message board, and its culture of offensiveness and self-loathing, and how Pepe fit into all of that. Much of the film from this point on shows Pepe and his image mutating further and further, joined in memes with characters like Wojak, co-opted by the racists of the alt-right, used by nihilists to push the election of Donald Trump — used even by Trump himself. Pepe was listed as a symbol of hate by the Anti-Defamation League, despite the best efforts of Furie to regain control of the image. Internet tech-bros paid ridiculous sums for ‘rare Pepes’ on the blockchain. Then, out of nowhere, an improbably happy ending, as pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong come across the frog online and use him as a symbol of their movement.

Furie remains a constant throughout the film, and he makes a satisfying if soft-spoken protagonist. You have to feel sympathy for him — his artistic creation was used without his permission in a way he abhorred but was powerless to stop. We see that Furie’s more than Pepe, and get a sense of his other work; we also see the difference between the Pepe he draws and the Pepe redrawn in memes, how Furie’s warm, thick ink line is more inviting, how his graphic sensibility recalls underground cartoonists and through them classic animation.

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One of the genuinely wonderful things about covering a film festival is occasionally getting to be among the first audiences for a movie trying something new. That is, being an early viewer of a movie that does things unlike other movies, and getting to make one’s own mind up on whether those things work. Movies at a festival have often not had a critical consensus formed around them, and have not yet been defined by other writers or had their influences mapped out. You as the viewer are alone with the thing, almost contextless, in a way that’s rare these days.

I feel this most vividly with movies I don’t fully understand. Not movies I think are bad, or movies I’m wholly sure are good, but movies into which I must feel my way slowly even after seeing them. Like or dislike a blockbuster tentpole, a Marvel film or Star Wars film, I understand what they’re trying to do and how. It’s when watching a movie that gives me clues but baffles me, a movie that clearly is animated by wisdom and intelligence but which I can’t quite assemble into a coherent whole, that I’m aware of being among the first to try to articulate what I’m seeing.

To say all this is to give an idea of the effect of Me And Me (Sarajin Sigan, 사라진 시간). It’s the debut feature from Jung Jin-young, who also wrote the picture. Jung’s a veteran actor, and he’s clearly thought through what he wants to do with his movie. At one viewing, I will not claim to fully understand it. But then, it’s fair to say that understanding is not always necessary to appreciate art.

The movie starts in a small village in Korea, with a young teacher, Soo-hyuk (Bae Soo-bin), and his wife Yi-young (Cha Su-yeon). It soon becomes clear that Yi-young has a problem: at nightfall she’s possessed by a spirit of a dead person. Not necessarily the same dead person every night, either. News of this spreads through the village, and leads to tragedy, which brings a police detective, Hyung-gu (Cho Jin-woong) to town. (Cho’s also the star of Jesters: The Game Changers, an example of a film that does what it does in a much more linear manner.)

With Hyung-gu’s entrance on the scene the story shifts to follow him as he investigates the rustics of the town. By about the middle of the film all the mysteries seem to be cleared up, and we at least think we know what’s happened. Then there’s a swerve. Without wanting to give away too much, it may be said that Hyung-gu wakes up to a very different life. As he, and we, try to work out what’s happened, unexpected connections come to light; the movie does some odd structural things; finally it ends, with the plot apparently not resolved as we might have looked for, but with a circularity (and a shot repeated from the opening) that implies things have worked their way around to a slightly better state.

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Watching a film festival at home instead of in theatres raises a question that’s become a much-debated point over the last couple of years: is the experience of viewing a movie on a TV screen essentially different and essentially lesser than watching the same movie in a theatre? I don’t think there’s a single answer to this question. Different movies and different viewers and different circumstances will create better or worse scenarios. I think it is probably safe to say that the theatrical experience has much more sensory power; that the powerful sound system and the controlled environment and the full dark of a theatre will usually be more immediately overwhelming to a viewer. But it’s reasonable to wonder if a movie that relies on sheer sensory power can be called ‘a good movie.’

This question came forcefully to mind while watching my first film on day 7 of Fantasia. Hunted was directed by Vincent Paronnaud, who wrote the script with Léa Pernollet. A cartoonist who won the Fauve d’or prize for best comics album at the 2009 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée at Angoulême, Paronnaud cowrote and codirected the 2007 animated adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. His new (English-language) movie boasts a powerful soundscape and lush, atmospheric nature photography along with a simple plot. I found it reasonably effective for a home viewing, once I understood what sort of film I was watching. I suspect it would have been much stronger for me in a theatre, because it would have been better able to work on me as a viewer in the way that its theme insists.

The movie begins with a prologue, a storyteller at a campfire telling a tale, and then we follow a woman, Eve (Lucie Debay), as she meets and is abducted by two men, one of them a slick con-artist (Arieh Worthalter) who has procured her as a victim for his accomplice (Ciaran O’Brien). Eve escapes, and flees into the woods. They pursue, and a life-and-death-hunt follows.

The movie is from a certain perspective a variant on “The Most Dangerous Game,” but is distinguished by a specific thematic approach and by an increasing level of weirdness as Eve and her pursuers flee deeper into the woods. It’s also distinguished by an overwhelming sonic texture (including an electronic score), and imagery of the deep mist-soaked woods. Watching at home, I was struck by the way sounds and sights worked together, and I strongly suspect in a theatre the effect would have been significantly more profound.

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Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645) was one of the greatest samurai and greatest swordfighters ever to live. By his own account, he fought over sixty duels and won all of them. Stories about Musashi have been told and retold over the centuries, notably including the great novel Musashi (1935-39) by Eiji Yoshikawa. Films about him have proliferated, the most famous likely being Hirohi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy (1954-55) starring Toshiro Mifune as Musashi.

One of Musashi’s greatest recorded battles was a conflict with the Yoshioka clan. Following two duels with successive heads of the clan in Kyoto in 1604, Musashi fought the remainder of the clan who attacked en masse with various allies. Musashi killed the leader of the clan, among others, and escaped, in the process developing a new style of swordsmanship.

So much for history. Now comes Crazy Samurai Musashi (狂武蔵) a dramatisation of the battle against the Yoshioka. If ‘dramatisation’ is the right word: the 92-minute film consists of a relatively brief prologue and epilogue to either side of an uninterrupted 77-minute shot of Musashi fighting the Yoshioka and their mercenary allies. Directed by Yûji Shimomura, it stars Tak Sakaguchi (Kingdom) as Musashi and was written by Sion Sono (director of Tokyo Vampire Hotel). And it’s not exactly what you might expect from all of the above.

Unlike most movies centred around swordplay, there’s little complicated choreography. Nor are there complex set-pieces of ambushes and attacks from the shadows. And there’s a surprising absence of blood, though CGI splatter is used with thoughtfulness to add impact to a sword-strike; little plumes of blood are used as a storytelling technique, and quite effectively.

This fits with the odd reality the film builds. Musashi begins the fight in a mass battle, one man against 100 of the Yoshioka clan plus 300 mercenaries. When they attack as a group it quickly becomes clear he can kill any given one of his opponents effectively at will — because he is that good — but is at risk from their sheer number. On the other hand, his opponents don’t want to launch a mass charge because no one of them is prepared to give his life. So after a while the mass of opponents divide up into groups of 20 or so, and Musashi moves from area to area, fighting these small bands.

Occasionally, he will find a single tougher opponent. These fights are set up to look like boss fights; meaning that where it takes Musashi 2 or maybe 5 seconds to kill a typical enemy, the bosses take 10 or 20. Because he’s Miyamoto Musashi, and, again, he is that good. The video-game feel’s intensified by the way Musashi finds bottles of water here and there in empty houses or the like: power-ups as his life-energy runs low.

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The chain of inspiration behind a work of art can be stunning to behold. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman was a musician, critic, and fiction writer in the early nineteenth century whose surreal and gemlike short stories are wonders of early fantasy. Some of those stories were worked into the libretto of Jacques Offenbach’s 1881 opera Les contes d’Hoffmann. Adapted to films at least three times, most notably by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in 1951, Offenbach’s work would inspire the great manga creator Osamu Tezuka in 1973. A sexually-charged tale with elements of the occult, Tezuka’s Barbara was an erotic story about a frustrated manga creator who met a woman who might be a literal muse. Now Tezuka’s Barbara is a film directed by Macoto Tezuka, Osamu’s son, with a script from HIsako Kurasawa; and it played at the Fantasia Festival on August 25.

The movie begins with bestselling writer Yosuke Mikura (Gorô Inagaki) meeting an apparently homeless young woman in a subway tunnel, and taking her home with him. This is Barbara (Fumi Nikaido, Fly Me to the Saitama and Inuyashiki). She critiques his writing, accusing him of being too safe and commercial, but soon she’s saving him from voracious women who turn out to be mannequins or dogs. Mikura pursues Barbara, but to win her he must convince her mother, an antique-store owner named Mnemosyne (Eri Watanabe) — but she has strange connections, and tragedy lurks in the wings.

Reality and dreams blur over the course of the film, and I’m not convinced the movie does a good job setting up either a coherent reality or an effective oneiric sense. In part as a result, I also did not feel the movie gained anything in its mix of real and dream. The conclusion in particular moves past tragedy to almost insist it’s a hallucination, but where that hallucination started is less clear. It’s possible, maybe even intended, to read the whole movie as a reverie in the head of Mikura. But I find no particular thematic weight in that approach. Whether viewed entirely or partially as a dream, Tezuka’s Barbara resists cohering into a meaningful story.

Which again might be the point. The movie does strain mightily after a sense of strangeness. I would say it largely fails to reach any consistent surreal atmosphere. There is a lot of sex, but a countervailing coldness leaves these scenes clinical and not passionate; as an asexual I can’t claim to be very perceptive when it comes to sex scenes, at this point in my life I can usually at least see what a film’s trying to do. In this case I think it’s trying to create a feverish sense, trying to speak about a fusion of sex and art. Certainly it investigates the idea of the muse from a number of angles. But nothing comes out of it. It never really takes flight.

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Day 6 of Fantasia 2020 started for me with a panel on folk horror. While you can find the occasional early example of the term, it was first used in its current sense in 2003 by director Piers Haggard to describe his 1971 film The Blood on Satan’s Claw; Mark Gatiss picked it up in his 2010 TV documentary A History of Horror to refer to Claw along with The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. The panel I watched was presented by Severin Films and titled “Narratives of Resistance in Folk Horror.” Hosted by Kier-La Janisse, director and producer of the upcoming documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, it gathered a group of writers and journalists to discuss folk horror with a focus on stories from beyond the British Isles. (Unfortunately, this panel’s the only one of the year not currently available on YouTube.) While it never really settled on a definition of the phrase, it was an often-interesting discussion about history, folk magic, and ritual, touching on works ranging from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” to the 1991 film Clearcut to Marcin Wrona’s 2015 movie Demon.

Following that came one of my favourite Fantasia traditions, the annual International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase. This year brought three movies from the US, and one each from Canada, Spain, Australia, South Korea, and Germany. As it happened, most of the shorts dealt in some way with the theme of isolation, meaning the showcase felt especially timely.

The Canadian film was first, the 13-minute “Toto,” directed by Marco Baldonado, who co-wrote it with Walter Woodman. In the near future, Rosa (Rosa Forlano), an old Italian-speaking grandmother in North America, buys a robot to help her prepare dinner for her granddaughter (Gabriela Francis), who is soon dropped off for a visit by Rosa’s daughter. By this time Rosa’s formed an odd bond with the machine, but will young Santina’s excitement at seeing the robot change things? This is a lovely small-scale story about intergenerational communication and the pace of change, both bitter and sweet. The grandmother, her daughter, and her granddaughter all relate differently to the robot, and all have different levels of fluency in Italian, meaning the bot and the language use both bring out the theme of change across generations; the movie says the same thing two different ways, enriching both, and one of those ways is distinctively science-fictional. It’s an excellent bit of domestic science-fiction, and one particular moment, with Rosa in the foreground while Santina and Toto dance together behind her, is a sweet and sad crystallisation of idea and emotion.

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