Black Gate

I was at the J.A. De Sève Theatre early on Tuesday, July 31, for a press screening of Mandy. It’s the second film by Panos Cosmatos (director of Beyond the Black Rainbow), who also wrote the script with Aaron Stewart-Ahn. The movie stars Nicolas Cage as Red Miller, a lumberjack who lives in a cottage in the deep woods of the Shadow Mountains with his wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), a metalhead artist, in the long-ago year of 1983. Mandy unwittingly catches the eye of a cult leader (Linus Roache), whose minions, the Children of the New Dawn, abduct her. Bad things happen. Miller is tortured. And, inevitably, he embarks on a quest for bloody revenge.

There are films that experiment with the artform of cinema, using sound and visuals in unconventional ways to inspire in the audience strange emotions or new states of mind. And there are grindhouse movies that use revenge plots, violence, buckets of fake blood, power fantasies, maybe a bit of sex, and whatever else comes to hand to entertain the hindbrain of the audience. And then there’s this movie, which does both at once. Mandy is both for the arthouse and the grindhouse, and the match is perfectly harmonious.

This might make it sound like a Quentin Tarantino project, and I suppose there are some points of resemblance; like a Tarantino film, it starts with an exploitation-movie plot. But rather than play with structure or dialogue it uses things like weird lighting effects, sound design, and hypnotic pacing to almost slip past the conscious mind of the viewer. It’s surreal in a way Tarantino never approaches. It’s much more Lynchian, in the way it’s not afraid to slow down to a doped-up pace and in the way it pays attention to soundscapes and in the way it’s not afraid to show a character reacting to something in an almost uncomfortably long take. (There’s even a backdrop near the end that seems to have been borrowed from a certain eccentric psychiatrist in the town of Twin Peaks.)

The aesthetic here is utterly bizarre, shaped by early heavy metal and 80s horror and fantasy paperbacks (from which Mandy reads aloud). Lurid light fills the sky, even at night. Long synthesizer notes and slow doom metal fill the soundtrack, a perfect match to the madness onscreen. Nature photography turns the forests and mountains into suburbs of hell. Animated sequences provide further sci-fi visions. The movie’s nominally set in the real world, but doesn’t feel like it. And then there’s Nicolas Cage.

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The Centre Cinéma Impérial is one of Montréal’s last surviving movie palaces. Built in 1913 as a vaudeville playhouse, it’s survived most of the past hundred years and change as a cinema. In 1996, the inaugural edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival was held at the Imperial, and Fantasia still returns there for a few screenings every year. It’s a beautiful location in which to view a movie. Currently boasting over 800 seats (including some up in a balcony), it has gilded scrollwork, putti, a proscenium arch around the screen. About twenty minutes’ walk east of the main Fantasia theatres in Concordia University’s downtown campus, it was my destination on the evening of Monday, June 30, for a screening of a 1983 documentary by veteran Québec director Yves Simoneau (perhaps best known to American genre fans for directing four of the first five episodes of the 2009 reboot of V). After that, I’d be hurrying back to the Hall Theatre for a crazed Japanese action-horror dark-comedy thrillride, Tokyo Vampire Hotel. First, though, I’d get to see the recently-restored 35-year-old documentary about European comics, Pourquoi l’étrange Monsieur Zolock s’intéressait-il tant à la bande dessinée?

The screening was preceded by a presentation. Marc Lamothe, one of the Festival’s General Directors, recalled the early years of Fantasia at the Imperial Theatre. Marie-José Raymond spoke about the restoration; she’s one of the co-directors of Éléphant: mémoire de cinéma Québécois, a project dedicated to restoring and digitising Québec feature films. She was followed by businessman Pierre-Karl Péladeau, then by Simoneau and some of the local artists who participated in the film. Simoneau was presented with the Prix Denis-Héroux for his contribution to Québec cinema.

Pourquoi l’étrange Monsieur Zolock s’intéressait-il tant à la bande dessinée? won a Genie award (the Canadian film industry awards from 1980 to 2012, now the Canadian Screen Awards) for Best Feature Length Documentary. Written by Marie-Loup Simon, it follows a private investigator named Dieudonné (Michel Rivard) who’s hired by a mysterious man named Zolock (Jean-Louis Millette) to investigate the appeal of bandes dessinées — French comic books. Dieudonné himself seems to have stepped out of a comic, in his trenchcoat and fedora; Zolock too, a master criminal whose house is dominated by a black room where Zolock first meets Dieudonné, and, at the end, explains his interest in comics. In between, Dieudonné travels about and interviews the leading European and Francophone comics artists of the day.

The result is a murderer’s row of comics talent. Very nearly every major figure in European comics alive and working at the time makes at least a brief appearance here. Interviewees include, in no particular order, Jean Giraud (Mobius), Hugo Pratt, Claire Bretécher, Philippe Druillet, Albert Uderzo, Pierre Culliford (Peyo), Maurice De Bevere (Morris), Franquin, Jacques Tardi, Yves Got, Annie Goetzinger, and Enki Bilal — as well as Québec artists Garnotte, Serge Gaboury, Réal Godbout, and Pierre Fournier. The names alone make this film a major document in comics history.

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I had three films on my schedule for Monday, July 30. First, an animated science-fictional retelling of Cinderella for adults, called Cinderella the Cat. Then I’d hurry from the J.A. De Sève Theatre to the Centre Cinéma Impérial, where Fantasia was presenting a documentary from the early 80s about bandes dessinées: Pourquoi l’étrange Monsieur Zolock s’intéressait-il tant à la bande dessinée? Then I’d run back to the Hall Theatre for a presentation of Sion Sono’s Tokyo Vampire Hotel, a kinetic horror-action film with campy apocalyptic overtones. Even for Fantasia, it was going to be a strange day.

Cinderella the Cat (originally Gatta Cenerentola) had less to do with the tale that inspired it than you might think. In the near future, a genius inventor’s created a ship that can create holograms and which will be the Science and Memory Hub for the city of Naples, where it is docked — for that is the home of its inventor. This man, Vittorio Basile (voice of Mariano Rigillo), has a young daughter named Mia (who is essentially mute throughout the film), and is about to marry a glamorous woman named Angelica (Maria Pia Calzone). Unfortunately, Angelica is under the thumb of a mob boss named Salvatore (Massimiliano Gallo). Vittorio ends up dead at Salvatore’s hands, and Angelica takes control of the ship. Years later, the ship’s been turned into a night-club, Vittorio’s former bodyguard Primo Genito (Alessandro Gassman) has become an undercover cop out for revenge, and Mia’s about to reach the age where she’ll take control of her inheritance — if Angelica, and Mia’s six stepsisters, don’t put an end to her first.

The plot’s intriguing, but what has to be said at once is that this is a beautiful film that does stunning things with light. More than that, there are ghostly holograms, fireworks, bits of ash (or cinders), always stuff moving on screen, giving texture to the images and scenes. The effects for all these things work, creating a sense of motion and shadow. Watercolours and 3D CG mix astonishingly well. Characters are animated, with expansive body language, especially Salvatore, gesturing wildly and always seeming to play to an audience whether he’s on or off stage. I will say that I didn’t get much of a sense of the ship as a place, because it holds too many environments within it — bedrooms, a stage, a broken and flooded hold, any number of corridors, on and on. It’s almost a weird lush techno-gothic castle, but sprawls a little too much. Still, the world of the film’s stylish, a noirish, shadowed place with obvious science-fictional touches but also a retro sense. It works in vaguely the same way the Dini-Timm Batman Animated Series did — using bits of past fashions and prop designs to create a setting with a reality all its own.

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Before writing about the movies I saw during the last weekdays of the Fantasia festival, I’m going to skip back to the beginning to write about some films I watched before attending my first screening this year with a general audience. At a festival with 130 movies, most of which are shown in a theatre once or maybe twice, one has to make some hard choices about which to see. Fortunately, Fantasia’s screening room gives harried film critics the chance to catch some of the movies they have to miss in theatres due to one scheduling exigency or another. I passed by on the first day of the festival, and found that this year the screening room offered curtained cubicles and a healthy selection of films. Among them was an Indonesian western named Buffalo Boys, an experimental German horror film called Luz, and a transgressive French animated webseries titled Crisis Jung.

The festival hosted the world premiere of Mike Wiluan’s Buffalo Boys, but, knowing I’d miss its theatrical showing, it became the first film I saw in the screening room. Directed by Wiluan from a script by Raymond Lee, Rayya Makarim, and Wiluan, it’s an Indonesian take on the Western genre. In the 19th century, the Dutch attempt to consolidate control of Indonesia; a Dutch agent murders a rebellious sultan, but the sultan’s brother and infant sons escape. Decades later, as they travel the American west, the sultan’s brother, Arana (Tio Pakusadewo), decides it’s time for them to return to Java so that his brother’s sons can seek justice for their father. The elder son, Jamar (Ario Bayu), has grown into a strong man, skilled in hand-to-hand fighting; his brother, Suwo (Yoshi Sudarso), is less confrontational but more charismatic — and good with a knife. The three of them make their way to the territory now ruled by the tyrannical Dutchman Van Trach (Reinout Bussemaker), where they stop an attempted robbery and become involved with the daughters of a local chief, all of whom are threatened by Van Trach’s machinations.

The movie opens by noting that “this is one story where fact and fiction collide,” and ends with a character observing that “when legends are born they never die.” This is a film conscious not only of its genre, but of the mythic underpinnings that give the genre strength. The paraphernalia of the western film’s used well: twanging guitars on the soundtrack, lens flares, gunfights, conversations around a campfire at night. But it’s fused with the martial-arts action movie: fights are a whirl of punches, kicks, knife strikes — and then, where logical and necessary, gunplay. One scene in the middle of the film, in a saloon, brings home the way the movie at its best fuses different cinematic traditions of action and stylised violence.

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By Eva and Matthew Surridge

Every year the Fantasia International Film Festival has several free screenings of short films for children at Montreal’s McCord Museum of Canadian History. These showings are titled My First Fantasia. On Thursday, July 26, Black Gate‘s regular Fantasia correspondent, Matthew David Surridge, was joined by his niece Eva May Surridge, age 8, to watch a block of shorts titled Daydreams. This special article presents Eva’s thoughts on the movies.

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I’ll begin by asking you about each of the movies in turn. First was Anna Gentilini’s “The Amazing Little Worm,” a hand-drawn story about a worm who wants to be other animals.

I think it’s for any ages because it’s very colourful and funny.

Next was Katerina Karhankova’s “Plody mraku” (“Fruits of Clouds”), a story about a small furry creature in a dark forest who dares to explore the shadows and finds a great treasure.

I think it’s not for little little kids because it’s a little scary.

Then was “The Green Bird,” directed by Pierre Perveyrie, Maximilien Bougeois, Marine Goalard, Irina Nguyen-Duc, and Quentin Dubois, a CG film about a bird that’s laid an egg it’s determined to see hatch.

It’s really, really funny. I want to watch it again.

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I settled in at the Hall Theatre on the evening of Sunday, July 29, to watch a movie about which I knew little. I knew it was Japanese, I knew it was titled One Cut of the Dead (Kamera o tomeru na!, カメラを止めるな！), and I knew it was written and directed by Shinichiro Ueda. The movie ended up being excellent and even uplifting. But writing about it presents a challenge.

(Before the feature there was a short called “Crying Bitch.” Written and directed by Reiki Tsuno, it follows a man who tries to break up with his mistress while his wife is becoming a literal monster. Things don’t go as planned for him all down the line. It has some effective physical comedy and unexpected moments.)

One Cut of the Dead is a movie that starts out one way, and then a bit past the half-hour mark reveals that it’s something other than the one-cut zombie comedy-thriller we thought we were watching. In an ideal world, viewers would go into the film blind, I suppose. In this world, I’d like to actually write about what I saw; and in any event I didn’t go in blind, exactly, and that didn’t hurt my experience of the film. So I’ll say that if you want to have a real surprise, don’t read further in this review. But do see the film if you want to watch a comedy with a few horror elements. I think it is worth pointing out that this isn’t a zombie movie, as such, for all its initial appearances.

Let’s start with that first half-hour take. We’re watching a zombie movie being made, with a manic director (Takayuki Hamatsu), a couple young fresh-faced stars, and assorted crew including a makeup lady (Harumi Shuhama). What we’re watching is being filmed in one take, the camera roaming around as various people drift by in the old abandoned warehouse where the movie’s set. And then there’s a zombie attack for real, and the director loves it.

But there’s something weird about this movie. Sure, we see a cameraman, but who’s filming the cameraman? Dialogue’s random, setting things up that never seem to get paid off. Everything moves very well, and it’s a fun film to watch, but one might think it all feels a little ramshackle. And then the twist comes that explains what we’ve just seen.

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Sunday, July 29, was an intriguing day. Not so much because of the first movie I planned to see, an anime called Penguin Highway about a young boy investigating the mysterious appearance of penguins in his small Japanese town. But because of the second screening, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase 2018. It’d present eight films, and having seen prior editions of the showcase, I knew how unpredictable it would be.

First, though, was Penguin Highway (ペンギン・ハイウェイ). It’s the first feature from director Hiroyasu Ishida. The script’s by Makoto Ueda, adapting a novel by Tomihiko Morimi (which is scheduled to appear soon in an English translation from Yen Press). Ueda also wrote the script for another animated adaptation of a Morimi novel, Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. This one’s quite different from that film, though.

It’s about a boy, Aoyama (voiced by Kana Kita), living in a village where penguins start to appear from no known source. Aoyama, a brilliant and scientifically-inclined child who writes down everything that happens to him in his notebooks along with all his thoughts and analyses, decides to solve the mystery of the penguins. Complicating things is his crush on a never-named adult woman (voice of Yu Aoi, who appeared in live-action in Tokyo Ghoul and Japanese Girls Never Die aka Haruko Azumi is Missing) and a classmate, Hamamoto (Megumi Han) who has a crush on Aoyama.

Penguin Highway begins by adding a bit of surrealism to everyday life, but appears unsure where to go from there. Probably the best thing in the film is its depiction of Aoyama, a charmingly arrogant fourth-grader who’s counting the days until he wins his Nobel Prize in some scientific field. He comes off as rigid and overly logical in a way that feels believable, with a self-assurance that’s refreshing and also credible given his intellect. Unfortunately, this rationality’s sometimes overplayed, notably later in the film when he tries to apply his scientific instincts to analysing love. (Are you surprised to hear that this doesn’t work?)

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The last movie I saw on Saturday, July 28, was at the Hall Theatre. It was Punk Samurai Slash Down (Panku Samurai Kirarete Soro, パンク侍、斬られて候), an adaptation of Ko Machida’s 2004 novel directed by Gakuryu Ishii and scripted by Kankuro Kodo (who also wrote Too Young To Die!). It’s a period story about a wandering samurai, Junoshin Kake (Go Ayano, also at Fantasia this year as Sato in Ajin: Demi-Human), who concocts a scheme to get himself hired as a retainer of the Kurokaze Han noble house. He kills an old man, and convinces one faction of the Kurokaze Han, led by Shuzen Oura (veteran Jun Kunimura, whose string of credits include The Wailing as well as this year’s Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura) that the dead man was an agent of a suppressed group of heretics called the Belly-Shaking cult. The cult believes that the world has been eaten by a gigantic tapeworm. The ideal is to be excreted from the tapeworm, which is brought about by shaking the belly. But the contempt for the world also has led the cult to massive rioting and cruel criminal acts in the past; the spectre of their revival is terrifying — until it turns out to be false, and Kake’s threatened with execution. Unless he can prove himself “innocent” by secretly bringing the cult into existence, which would also enhance the credibility of Oura’s political faction. He sets out to create the threat he’s warned against, and things rapidly spiral out of control.

This is a very odd movie; it doesn’t simply begin strangely, but continually increase its oddness at each point when you think you’ve begun to assimilate what it’s doing. The scale increases, as well, as the Belly-Shaker cult grows beyond all expectation and a wholly unexpected other faction emerges. Ultimately the film ends in a cosmic battle of thousands of samurai and their allies against the Belly-Shaker cult, and perhaps it’s a mark of success that the large-scale battle scene never overwhelms the satirical tone of the film but ends up supporting it. Without actually being Gilliam-like there’s a bit of a feel to the ending of a Gilliam movie, wild exuberance petering out into a knowing anti-climax.

There is a range of tones to the movie, though, and Kake is enough of a coherent character to engage an audience. Conversely, there’s a narrator (Masatoshi Nagase) telling the story in part through voice-over, providing another perspective; eventually we find out who this seemingly-omniscient narrator is, and learn he’s actually embedded in the story. Nobody’s above the fray, nobody’s out of the world of the film — even those trying to get themselves out of the world entirely. The gnostic leanings of the Belly-Shaker cult feel something out of a Philip K. Dick story, a paranoiac danger that might actually understand reality better than anyone would like. Except they’re the villains; and except that the nominal heroes aren’t heroic either, as the first thing we see Kake do is kill a man in cold blood. Ayano’s charismatic enough that we tend to forget this enough to accept him as a protagonist, but the movie doesn’t. (And this does come back to him in a telegraphed bit of poetic justice.)

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Saturday, July 28, saw me arrive at the Hall Theatre early for a showing of the Japanese historical fantasy Laughing Under the Clouds, yet another manga adaptation. Following that, I’d head across the street to the J.A. De Sève Theatre, where I’d watch a short film showcase called Afromentum. It’d feature four short films by Black filmmakers from around the world — including an adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s short story “Hello, Moto.”

Laughing Under the Clouds (Donten ni warau, 曇天に笑う) was directed by Katsuyuki Motohiro, whose excellent adaptation Ajin: Demi-Human I’d just seen the evening before. The script was written by Yûya Takahashi from the manga by Kemuri Karakara. In the 19th century, a trio of brothers in a Japanese village guard against the return of a terrible dragon. The eldest, Tenka Kumo (Sota Fukushi) is a highly-skilled fighter; his younger brother Soramaru (Yuma Nakayama) is nowhere near as good; the third, Chutaro (Kirato Wakayama) is just a child. But agents of the dragon are at work, and the creature will rise soon. Can the Kumos stand against it?

This is a disappointing movie. After seeing Ajin I had great respect for Motohiro’s skills, and I’d appreciated Fukushi’s work in other movies this year: The Travelling Cat Chronicles, Bleach, and Laplace’s Witch. But things don’t come together here. There are some very nice moments, including a splashy opening scene, but this movie doesn’t work as a whole. The characters are unconvincing, it tries to fit too much into a 94-minute running time, and the conclusion’s an extended anti-climax.

The problem, I think, comes from the core trio of brothers, and the way the movie envisions them. Soramaru’s interesting because he’s fallible in a way that Tenka isn’t, but it’s not clear why he isn’t as good a fighter as Tenka if Tenka’s been teaching him. This power difference drives the plot. The ages of the characters aren’t stated, but there’s only a year difference between the two actors, and Nakayama certainly looks like an adult in his early 20s — shouldn’t he be at least close to Tenka in skill? But he isn’t, and he’s frustrated, and so at one point he abandons his brothers to go train with a group of government agents who are rivals to the Kumos. The stakes of the rivalry seem petty next to the danger of the dragon, though, so this never really feels especially dramatic.

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