Black Gate

By July 29, the sixteenth day of the Fantasia Festival, I was beginning to feel exhausted. I’d had some thoughts of watching three movies that Friday, but in the end could only manage two. I made it down to the Hall Theatre in the afternoon to watch the Korean satire Collective Invention (Dolyeonbyuni), then came back right after for the raucous Japanese comedy Too Young To Die! (Too Young To Die! Wakakushite Shinu). Neither struck me as flawless, but both in different ways were interesting experiences.

Collective Invention tells the story of Park Gu (Lee Kwang-soo), a Korean man whose head has been changed into that of a giant fish thanks to unexpected side effects from medical tests. We get his story through the eyes of Sang-won (Lee Cheon-hee), an aspiring reporter who breaks Park’s story and makes him famous. Park’s not entirely happy about becoming a major media figure, and the medical company behind his transformation isn’t happy about the bad publicity they get. Their counterpunches, and the ups and downs of Park’s life and public profile, make the spine of the movie — along with the moral choices Sang-won and the others around him find themselves making, balancing the exploitation of Park against their own careers and ideals.

Directed and written by Kwon Oh-kwang, Collective Invention is a wide-ranging satire. It reads to me as though it takes on specific targets (the media, fame, the medical industry, the law, and more) as part of a general social critique. And at this point I need to repeat something I’ve mentioned before in these articles: I’m a North American with no particular insight into Korean society. So I can’t speak to how people with more knowledge than I will react to this movie; the point of my writing this review is that perhaps what I write may be relevant to an international audience. On the other hand, I get the distinct impression that this movie is primarily concerned with speaking to the Korean media landscape, to the concerns of Korean youth, and to Korea in general. That’s appropriate for a satire, but does it work for an international audience?

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I had errands keeping me away from the Fantasia film festival on Monday, July 25. Now, interruptions are a sad fact of life, but sometimes it’s easy to get back into the swing of things; and as it happened the next day I made it back to the De Sève theatre to watch an American horror film called We Go On, which served to get me back into the Fantasia spirit. Then the day after that I saw two more movies at the De Sève, an odd Swiss romance called Aloys followed by a French horror film called Therapy. The latter had been directed by 16-year-old Nathan Ambrosioni — his second feature film. Together the movies made an odd meditation on life, death, and horror.

We Go On was written and directed by Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland (the IMDB credits Holland with “story,” while Mitton gets credit as “writer” as well as for screenplay and story). Miles Grissom (Clark Freeman) is an adult man in Los Angeles suffering from a crippling fear of death. He therefore offers $30,000 to anyone who can prove that there’s life after death — reincarnation, ghosts, anything. Deluged with people who claim to have proof, Miles and his cynical mother (Annette O’Toole) begin a quest to investigate the most promising responses. Things do not go as Miles might have expected.

Nor do things go as the audience might have expected either, and in this case I mean that in the best way. We Go On is thoroughly unpredictable, with an unusual structure and a story that moves between horror and character-based drama. Miles and his mother almost alternate as leads, and one can make a strong argument that the crucial choice shaping how the climax plays out is hers.

More than that, when Miles first gets responses to his offer, he’s able to eliminate most out of hand except for three or possibly four. He then investigates those few contacts one by one; as you might expect he has no luck at first. Also as you might expect his early investigations end up returning to become relevant to the movie later on. But how they become relevant is interesting. In one case it’s plot-related, but another is more thematic, putting forward ideas about fear and the supernatural that inflect the rest of the movie.

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Impossible to predict some things. Notably: you can’t know how you’ll react to a work of art until you’ve experienced it. Looking at the movies Fantasia offered on Sunday night, July 24, I thought I’d try If Cats Disappeared from the World (Sekai kara neko ga kietanara), which promised a tale about a terminally ill man who makes a surreal Faustian bargain. After that, I decided I should watch Superpowerless, as it was a genre piece about an aging superhero who’d lost his powers. In truth, I had my doubts about both movies; Cats looked it might suffer from excess of romanticism and forced whimsy, while Superpowerless seemed like some kind of mumblecore satire treading ground comics had worked over decades past. In the event, I was wrong to doubt. If Cats Disappeared from the World would be likely the best movie I saw at Fantasia, and probably my favourite. Superpowerless, meanwhile, turned out to be the festival’s most pleasant surprise, the film which most greatly exceeded all my expectations.

If Cats Disappeared from the World, which played the large Hall Theatre, was directed by Akira Nagai and written by Yoshikazu Okada from a bestselling novel by Genki Kawamura. It follows a young postman (Takeru Sato, of Rurouni Kenshin fame) who as the film opens is diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. His death could come at any moment, the doctor tells him, but when he returns home he’s met with a double of himself who is, evidently, the devil; and the devil guarantees the unnamed postman he’ll die tomorrow. There is another option, though. The devil will give the mailman another day of life if the postman will allow the devil to remove a given thing from the world, retroactively changing events so that the thing never existed — removing as well all memories and feelings to do with that thing. Every day the devil will take another thing from the world, with each thing taken giving the postman another day of life. He agrees, and the devil announces the first thing he’ll take: telephones. Which, we soon see, is a problem as the postman’s ex-girlfriend (Aoi Miyazaki), the great love of his life, met him due to a wrong number.

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I’d marked four screenings on the Fantasia schedule to attend on Sunday, July 24. The first two were both at the small De Sève Theatre: a presentation of the 1983 Shaw Brothers film Holy Flame of the Martial World (Wu lin sheng huo jin), followed by a short film showcase. The showcase, Fragments of Asia 2016, promised half-a-dozen pieces from across Asia, both animated and live-action. Afterward I’d have time for food, and then two more movies would follow. Before all that, though, came one of the films I’d immediately highlighted when I first saw what was playing at this year’s Fantasia.

Each of the last two years I’ve been covering the Fantasia festival, they’ve shown a vintage film from the Shaw Brothers Studio, a classic martial-arts movie house from decades past. After last year’s Buddha’s Palm (Ru lai shen zhang) and 2014’s Demon of the Lute (Liu zhi qin mo), I was eager to see what would follow. That turned out to be Holy Flame of the Martial World, directed by Lu Chin-ku from a script he wrote with Cheung Kwok-Yuen from a story by Siu Sang. (I’ve seen references saying it was based on a comic, but can’t find a title or creator credits.) The print we saw was on 35mm film, possibly the last remaining such copy, and followed an equally-vintage trailer for Secret Service of the Imperial Court, also directed by Lu.

Holy Flame of the Martial World is one of several films from the Shaw Brothers house in the early 80s that turned to special visual effects to try to draw audiences in the wake of the success of Star Wars. The formula of ritualised martial-arts combat from earlier movies was expanded with mystical powers, supernatural beasts, and energy beams, all in the service of an aesthetic bent on entertaining the audience first, last, and always — character development and dramatic coherence be damned. In this case, the story’s engagingly complex and mostly coherent, with martial-arts factions proliferating, mystical quests, and a final high-powered showdown. A young couple are killed by baddies, and their infant son and infant daughter raised by enemy kung-fu teachers. Eighteen years later, the two children (Max Mok and Yeung Ching-Ching), without knowing the true story of their parents or who each other really is, seek the different halves of the ultimate weapon, the Holy Flame.

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