Black Gate

I had been planning to head home after the first movie I saw on July 22, Fly Me to the Saitama. But looking at what followed it in the Hall Theatre, I decided to stick around. Bliss was billed as an unconventional punk vampire movie, and indeed director Joe Begos introduced it to the crowd as a “hallucinatory splatter movie about sex, drugs, rock n’roll, and vampires.” Fair to say I was curious, unsure whether to expect something very good or off-the-rails bad. What I got is maybe best described as off-the-rails good.

First came a 13-minute short, “MJ,” directed by Jamie Delaney from a script by Delaney and Coral Amiga. Amiga also stars as Mary Jane, a quiet, isolated young woman who becomes increasingly wrapped up in social media and online hook-ups. It is not long before this obsession turns violent. It’s a well-shot film, with engagingly minimal dialogue. Amiga underplays her part to good effect, letting viewers alternately sympathise with and be appalled by her character.

Then Bliss. Dezzy (Dora Madison, of various TV series including Dexter, Chicago Fire, and Friday Night Lights) is an artist in Los Angeles, behind on her rent and about to get kicked out of her apartment-studio. She’s promised her agent a new painting, but hasn’t completed a picture in some time as she tries to get clean. Then she visits her old drug dealer Hadrian (Graham Skipper) and his pals (one of whom is played by George Wendt, of all people), where she gets a new drug called bliss, which fuels a wild night for her with her friend Courtney. And afterward, everything is different. Dezzy begins to paint again, sometimes without being conscious of what she’s doing, creating a weird hellscape. But her behaviour becomes more erratic and extreme. And bloody.

Also disorienting, even psychedelic. The haze of LA smog becomes the haze of altered consciousness. Dezzy finds her new creativity fuelled by bliss, meaning she has to seek out more and more of the drug to keep going. As she’d drawn into her painting, the people around her — landlord, agent, friends, boyfriend — become at best irrelevant and at worst obstacles to be dealt with. She is the painterly equivalent of a poète maudit, and even if there were nothing else happening in it Bliss would be notable for its depiction of artistic obsession with a woman as the tormented transgressive genius at its heart.

It is a very unintellectual (though not necessarily anti-intellectual) look at artistic obsession, though. There is a lot of viscera, and Madison spends a lot of time naked, including while working at the easel. This ought to feel ludicrous, exploitative, or both; it doesn’t, thanks largely to Madison’s talent and conviction. The film is locked on Dezzy as a character, and Madison carries it capably. She’s got a charisma that keeps the story from feeling monotonous or predictable, even though the outline’s familiar and the sequence of events — Dezzy looking for drugs, Dezzy engaging in extreme behaviour, Dezzy painting — repetitive. Each of Dezzy’s adventures feels like it goes a step further than the last, and Madison’s depiction of Dezzy’s reactions helps sell us on that.

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On Monday, July 22, I was back at the Hall Theatre for one of the movies I was most anticipating. It was a new live-action manga adaptation from Hideki Takeuchi, director of the Thermae Romae films: Fly Me to the Saitama (Tonde Saitama, 翔んで埼玉). The script by Yuichi Tokunaga adapts the comics from the early 80s by Mineo Maya, although apparently the filmmakers had to finish the last two-thirds of the story for themselves.

The film tells a story inside a story. In the frame tale, a family drives from Saitama, a prefecture on the outskirts of Tokyo, to a party in the heart of Japan’s capital where the daughter is to be engaged. On the way, the radio tells a peculiar story about a fabled time when the people of Saitama were oppressed by their metropolitan overlords in Tokyo. They had to obtain special visas to enter; armoured police used facial-recognition technology to pick out any residents of Saitama who snuck through the massive border fences. The good folk of Saitama were second-class citizens at best, exploited labour for the greatness and glory of the glittering city of Tokyo. In this dystopia Momomi (Fumi Nikaido, Inuyashiki), son of the governor of Tokyo, is president of the student body of an elite academy; enter new student Rei Asami (Gackt), just back from studying in America. Momomi falls for the charismatic Rei, but Rei’s hiding a dark secret: he’s actually from Saitama, and is plotting the downfall of Tokyo. This is exposed surprisingly early, setting Rei and Momomi off on a journey that might change the world.

A couple quick notes about the actors mentioned above. First, Gackt is the professional name of a singer who the IMDB assures me is “the most successful male soloist in Japanese music history.” He’s in his 40s, and playing a teenager. Fumi Nikaido is a woman playing a male role; the manga was a boys’ love story, and the movie does faithfully (if briefly) refer to Momomi as male, and keep him in male dress. I have no idea how this plays out in the context of Japanese gender roles, but the point I want to get at is that you don’t wonder about either this or Rei’s age, because this movie gives every impression of being completely, utterly, joyfully uninterested in any of these details. The actors act, as theatrically as possible, and they are committed to their roles, and nobody mentions age or gender, and so we are pulled along into the berserk strangeness that is the story.

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My last screening of July 21 brought me back to the De Sève Theatre for a showcase of animated short genre films from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, a grouping titled “Things That Go Bump In the East.” 11 films in a range of visual styles promised variety. I’d been having good luck with short films at the festival so far, and settled in eager to see what would come now.

First was a 6-minute stop-motion story from Japan’s Shinobu Soejima, “The House Rattler” (“鬼とやなり”). It’s based on Japanese folklore, telling a tale of a spirit who makes the mysterious sounds with no obvious source that you sometimes hear in an old house. In this case, the little demon comes into conflict with the modern world in a surprising fashion. The film makes strong use of sound cues, as you might expect, and the setting of the house haunted by the tiny dweller-in-wainscots is a wondrous mix of shadows and rich gold-brown hues. It has the feel of age and of a place lived-in, and that helps bring out the modern twist at the end.

Next was “The Girl and the Serpent,” directed and written by Wan Jinyue and Du Jinzhi. It’s also 6 minutes long, but has a much faster pace than the atmospheric “The House Rattler.” A snake-demon demands a village produce a maiden sacrifice, but ends up with an unexpected fight. The story’s a striking mix of 2D and 3D animation, with colour being used as a major element in the storytelling. The imagery’s fluid, shifting swiftly as the demon works against the girl both physically and psychically. Nevertheless, she finds the strength to resist. It’s a stunningly designed battle, and an entertaining short.

“Rainy Season” (“장마”), by writer-director Kim Se-yoon, brought a noirish horror-inflected feel to seemingly hand-drawn animation. It’s an intensely atmospheric 4-minute piece about a woman in an apartment during a storm. She’s shooting up, but is interrupted by a flash of lightning and something eerie in the tall building across from her. Alone in her apartment, she grows increasingly paranoid — but then, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean something isn’t out to get you. It’s a well-done piece of suspense.

The 17-minute “Gold Fish” (“Kim-hi,” 金魚), written and directed by Taiwan’s Fish Wang, is the story of a boy in a weird dystopia, slightly steampunk and more than slightly supernatural. The inhuman masters of a a sprawling, bleak city are drinking the dreams of children. Elderly adults are all but immobile, enslaved to inhuman masters. Except one boy has a chance to fight back, and topple the whole of the corrupt society. It’s an expressionistic story with some deliberately crude designs and some excellent colour work. Cool, dark tones contrast strongly with unexpected moments of eye-popping colour. It’s not a complex story, but the scenes that illustrate the different movements of the tale are very well-done, and the tale builds nicely through a series of increasingly surreal images. I felt the ending lacked a little, but it was on the whole a solid and surprising short.

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For my third movie of July 21 I wandered back to the Fantasia screening room. There, I settled in with a movie from the Philippines: Ode To Nothing. Written and directed by Dwein Ruedas Baltazar, it follows Sonya (Marietta Subong), a woman no longer young who owns her own funeral home in an unnamed town. Alone except for her father, Rudy (Joonee Gamboa), Sonya tries to keep the funeral home going despite debts to local loan shark Theodore (Dido Dela Paz). Then a body is brought to her for burial under suspicious circumstances. Rather than bury the corpse, though, Sonya begins to speak to it, and comes to think that the body of the old woman is bringing her luck — even to treat the body as her surrogate mother. Is the corpse responsible for the sudden influx of business to the funeral home? And even if it is, can you trust the gifts of the dead?

Ode to Nothing is a fascinating film that continually does things you don’t expect, quietly and slowly. That quiet and slowness is a key part of how it works. It’s shot beautifully, in long lingering takes and wide shots, with muted colours dominated by a dull green. A character takes a flight of stairs out of frame, and rather than move or cut to follow the camera stays where it is, focussed on the stairs; and you can tell the movie works because by that point the audience is invested enough to stay focussed on the stairs as well, waiting for the character to return.

Worth emphasising the visual power of the film, because it is so static for so long. I noted the first camera move at about the 19-minute mark, just after the corpse is brought to Sonya, meaning the dead body paradoxically seems to give the film a new kind of life. But Ode to Nothing always gives us interesting things to look at, things for the camera to linger on. Sonya rarely leaves the funeral home, or at least we don’t follow her outside except once, so the massive building becomes a key part of the film. To call it a character in its own right isn’t quite correct; it’s a corpse in its own right, old and slowly rotting away in tropical heat and humidity, every piece of flaking paint caught in deep focus. But it is also a literal home, with odd knickknacks and embalming paraphernalia and floral arrangements Sonya can’t sell and tape players which produce echoes of a Chinese pop song Sonya loves to listen to. And at no point is the place spooky or horrific. Merely sad, and quietly run-down.

Dialogue is minimal — the first word is spoken 9 minutes into the 92-minute film — but movies the story forward nicely. If the film allows things to happen for reasons that are at first obscure, before long it becomes clear who’s doing what why, and it always makes a kind of character-based sense. The story is not especially complex, but is based in character, and those characters are engaging enough that we follow them even when they seem to be doing nothing in particular. We get to know them deeply, without dialogue or particularly dramatic action, just by the way they go about their day, staring out a window or doing dishes.

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For my second film of July 21 I stayed at the De Sève Theatre to watch one of my more anticipated movies of the festival. Each year Fantasia plays a Shaw Brothers film on 35mm — not one of the Shaw classics, usually, but one of their stranger works. The past few years I’ve seen Demon of the Lute, Buddha’s Palm, Flame of the Martial World, and Bastard Swordsman, as well as Five Fingers of Death. This year we got to see The Boxer’s Omen (Mo, 魔), from 1983, directed by Kuei Chih-Hung from his own story as scripted by Szeto On. Technically a sequel to Kuei’s film Gu, the English title hints at some of its influences: a bit of The Omen, a bit of Rocky, and a lot of low-budget exploitation film.

When Hong Kong gangster Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei) sees his brother crippled in a match with a cheating Thai kickboxer, Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung Sze), he travels to Thailand to challenge the evildoer to a revenge match. While there, weird visions lead him to a Buddhist monastery. It turns out that in previous lives Chan and the recently-deceased abbot were twins. This is a problem for Chan. The abbot killed the student of an evil wizard (Elvis Tsui), leading the wizard to then kill him with a spell that will now go on to kill Chan due to his linkage to the aforesaid abbot. Chan learns this from talking to the dead abbot, and after some confusion decides to become a monk to be able to defeat the wizard — but what of his match against the kickboxer who crippled his brother? And what about the wizard’s three living students?

This description of the plot barely hints at how bizarre, dreamlike, and transgressive this film is, but ideally gives an idea of how much scope there is for mystical goings-on. Rituals and spells are depicted with loving care, even when grotesque or indeed outright disgusting. But then a flashback in which the abbot fights the student and master wizards is simply surprising, as the duels involve crystals and puppets and wall-crawling and lurid lighting. On the other hand, an extended sequence shows the wizard’s students preparing a spell of revenge, which involves each of them eating and regurgitating food for the others to then ingest — and goes on from there, creating a demon inside a crocodile corpse, who Chan eventually must defeat. That of course comes at the climax of the film, in an ancient temple in Nepal, when Chan must engage in a magical fight unlike any I have ever seen.

What is most strange about the film is how it doesn’t feel like a straight-ahead exploitation film. Theoretically it should. There’s the gross-out bits, there’s a couple of violent kickboxing scenes, there’s a fair amount of nudity. And yet there’s also something else going on. I’ve seen some writers compare the film to Jodorowsky, and maybe that’s reasonable for the weirdness of it.

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My first film at Fantasia on July 21 was actually two films put together. In 2009 Atsuya Uki released a 25-minute short he’d written and directed, called “Cencoroll,” based on a one-shot manga he’d written and illustrated. The short was well-received, and over the last decade he’s created a 50-minute follow-up. The two movies have now been released as one, Cencoroll Connect (Senkorōru, センコロール コネクト). They work together as one story, but I wonder, never having seen the original “Cencoroll” on its own, whether the first short would have left more room for an audience’s imagination to work.

The story begins with a giant amorphous monster appearing in a town in the north of Japan, where a young man named Tetsu (Hiro Shimono) already has a smaller monster that can change shape, Cenco, as a kind of pet. But Shu (Ryohei Kimura), another young man with yet another creature, has schemes for the giant newcomer. Into this mix comes Yuki (Kana Hanazawa, Night Is Short, Walk On Girl) a classmate of Tetsu who finds out about Cenco — and who turns out to have a unique gift of her own.

That sets up the plot of the first short, which unsurprisingly ends with a massive fight scene. The second (spliced seamlessly after the first) then expands from there, adding new factions, explaining Shu’s background, and giving some new context to the power Yuki displayed. It doesn’t play like two disconnected stories; the first film serves well as an explosive if somewhat long first act, while the second film feels like the logical continuation. I would not have guessed the two parts of the story were created a decade apart.

It’s solid work, well-animated, though at times a bit small-scale. Massive brawls in the middle of a city feel empty, where you’d expect to have more involvement from police or the armed forces (though it has to be said there’s an implied explanation in some of what we learn in part two). Cencoroll Connect makes up for that with fluidity of motion, and the way the inhuman monsters attack and respond and react to things around them in human ways that convey emotion through movement.

I don’t think there’s anything spectacularly original in either the story or the designs, but the animation gives the story a fair amount of energy. There’s an odd lack of colour in the film, or at least an overall cool palette. This perhaps emphasises the prosaic setting for the various monster fights — the film never leaves the city setting for long, and battles take place in city streets and a school rooftop and the tip of a skyscraper. But if the tone of the climax gains from an increasing darkness, visually the movie is overall, if not dull, at least neutral in places where you’d expect it to pop.

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My last movie of July 20 was a horror film from South Africa. Written and directed by Harold Holscher, 8 has elements of the classical ghost story embedded in a larger tale of folklore and tragedy. It’s a period tale, set in 1977, and is set in a farm named Hemel op Aarde: Heaven on Earth.

Not long after the start of the film the run-down farm’s inherited by a man named William (Garth Breytenbach), a failed businessman who wants to start over there along with his wife Sarah (Inge Beckmann) and niece Mary (Keita Luna). Mary, who came to live with William and Sarah after the death of her parents, is happy to come to the farm; she’s an inquisitive girl deeply interested in all manner of subjects, including African myth and insects. Sarah doesn’t care for these things, or for having to live far from the big city. William’s difficulty in getting the electricity running at the farm doesn’t help. Luckily, the White family is given a hand by an older Black man named Lazarus (Tshamano Sebe). William’s soon relying on Lazarus for all sorts of things, despite Sarah’s distrust. And despite the distrust of a nearby village of Black people, who know and despise Lazarus, and who have no use for William, either. Is Lazarus hiding a dark secret?

In fact, we know from the opening shots of the movie that he is. And as 8 goes on that mystery is unveiled; unveiled almost too completely for the film to stay a horror story, in fact. There’s an honesty and directness to the film that’s unusual in horror. There are few jump scares, and few horrific twists. Instead there’s an ultimately character-based story that comes close to being a kind of tragedy. You know why people act the way they do, and what Lazarus wants. You understand the price he has to pay for his actions. And you have sympathy for everyone involved.

It’s oddly colourful for a horror movie, too, rich and shadowed, but not afraid of the bright light of the sun. I found approaching it as a horror film left me wrong-footed; the farmhouse, which seems like a spooky haunted house in the early scenes of the movie, becomes less important narratively and thematically as the story goes on. If the usual haunted house seems to have something to say about (for example) class or power or history or the personality that dwells within it, Heaven on Earth comes to have less and less meaning, as the focus of the story increasingly moves away from the main building. What might have been an icon of colonial power is instead just a place where things happen.

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The evening of July 20 saw me stay at the De Sève Theatre after the Born of Woman showcase for a feature film written and directed by Jon Mikel Caballero: The Incredible Shrinking Wknd. It’s a time-loop story, a subgenre that strikes me as having increased in popularity significantly over the past few years. We’re at the point, then, that a time-loop story has to do something different to stand out. So what does Wknd do?

It’s the story of Alba (Iria del Rio), newly turned 30, who’s spending a weekend partying at a cottage in the country with a group of acquaintances as well as her boyfriend of three years or so, Pablo (Adam Quintero). Alba’s generally thoughtless and lives for the day; despite having spent time at the cottage when she was young, she forgets to bring bottled water to a house with no indoor plumbing. Pablo wants something more, and in an argument one night breaks up with Alba. And then, not long after, reality resets and Alba gets to live through the weekend again. And again, and again; and then she notices the weekend’s getting shorter, and the time she has to live through is dwindling.

I’ll note to start with that the movie’s technically well-done. It looks very fine, with colours that establish moods, and a good variety of visually-interesting natural settings. Iria del Rio gives Alba a charismatic energy while making it clear that charisma’s covering up a certain kind of emptiness; there’s less to Alba than there appears, in a nicely-calculated way.

Narratively, the movie’s clever, almost a necessity in a time-loop story. The dialogue’s solid, and there’s a very nice visual idea (best left for the viewer to discover) that brings out the way the weekend’s shrinking. That twist itself is handled well, giving an increasing sense of tension as well as contrasting nicely with Alba’s tendency to care only about the present.

It gets a little odd in that Alba herself doesn’t reset, which becomes a minor plot point. If she gets drunk in one go-round, say, she’s hungover in the next. This is perhaps a way to talk about consequences, but it raises questions about the mechanism by which the time-loop exists in the first place and whether matter’s actually being transported through time. This is a film largely uninterested in such questions, though, and indeed the lack of concern with why the loop exists and why it works as it does is one of The Incredible Shrinking Wknd’s more frustrating aspects.

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On the afternoon of Saturday, July 20, I passed by the De Sève Theatre for the Born of Woman 2019 series of short genre films directed by women. It was the fourth iteration of the showcase, and in four years it’s become a hot ticket; I nearly didn’t get in. But there was just space enough in the end, and so I was able to see the collection of 9 films representing half-a-dozen countries.

The showcase started with “Lili,” a 9-minute piece written and directed by Yfke Van Berckelaer. An actress (Lisa Smit), Lili, comes to audition for a role. The camera’s fixed on her, the man (Derek De Lint) she’s reading for unseen. He seems receptive to what she brings on her first reading, but has her try the dialogue again, and again, pushing her more and more. You can see what’s coming, and what the reversal will be, but the movie works because the slowly pushing-in camera’s a disturbingly effective point of view, because Smit in particular is very good in her part, and because the dialogue’s cleverly and subtly ironic.

The art of sequencing a short film showcase can be overlooked, but in this case the arrangement of the shorts (most of which, in my opinion, were extremely strong to start with) was perfect. A good case in point was following “Lili” with the melancholic “Sometimes, I Think About Dying,” a 12-minute story from director Stefanie Abel Horowitz from a play by Kevin Armento, adapted by Horowitz, Armento, and Katy Wright-Mead, who also stars. It’s the story of Fran (Wright-Mead), a quiet, depressed woman who makes a connection with a male co-worker, Robert (Jim Sarbh). Will she be able to come out of her shell enough to maintain a relationship?

The movie’s almost unbearably painful in its portrait of a woman lacking in self-confidence. At the same time, Fran’s oddly sympathetic, so that by extension Robert feels like a lifeline for her. The orbit of the two of them is well-crafted, and the film really lands solidly because it knows where to end — not just what point of the story, but what seems like the exact right frame of film to end on.

Then different again was Australian writer-director Adele Vuko’s “The Hitchhiker,” about three women driving through the night to reach a music festival. Jade (Liv Hewson), the driver, picks up a hitchhiker (Brooke Satchwell), in part to distract her friends from innocent questions cutting near to a secret Jade doesn’t wish to reveal. The hitchhiker has a secret of her own, though, which only becomes clear once the friends pull in to a roadside bar.

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