Black Gate

The first movie I saw at Fantasia on Thursday, July 19, was at the J.A. De Sève Theatre, a Korean film called The Fortress (Namhansanseong, 남한산성). Based on a novel by Hoon Kim, Dong-hyuk Hwang wrote the screenplay and directed his own adaptation. It’s a historical war story, set in 1636 when the Chinese Qing dynasty invaded Joseon-ruled Korea. The royal court has to flee before the Qing armies, taking refuge in a mountain castle, the fortress of the title. The Qing besiege the place, and the film follows what happens in the fortress as a result. More precisely, it follows the dispute between two of the officials of King Injo (Hae-il Park): on the one hand Myeong-gil Choi (Byung-hun Lee, who was in RED 2 and was Storm Shadow in the G.I. Joe movies), the Interior Minister who wants to negotiate with the Qing and if necessary surrender; and on the other, Sang-heon Kim (Yoon-seok Kim), the Minister of Rites who wants to hold out until the end, believing that an army’s gathering in the south that will strike north and relieve the fortress.

A blacksmith (Soo Go, The Royal Tailor) from a nearby village conscripted to serve as a soldier is the voice of the common man, while Prime Minster Ryu Kim (Song Young-chang, Kundo: Age of the Rampant) schemes to maintain his place and refuses to consider surrender. Class conflicts develop, as the court tries to keep the soldiers in line while allotting them the barest minimum of supplies needed to survive a harsh winter. Meanwhile conflicts among the court are a mix of show and threat, ministers alternately genuflecting to the King and calling for each others’ heads.

At its heart, though, this movie is about the dispute between Choi and Kim. The key is that both are honourable men, and both have deep principles informing their positions on the war. They respect each other, by and large, but are utterly opposed — with the Prime Minister a kind of wild card in their conflict. The difference between the two men is established from the very opening scenes of the movie. Choi goes alone on horseback to negotiate with the Qing, and does not flinch when they launch a flight of arrows that fall purposely just short of his mount: this establishes he’s a brave man, which we need to understand to grasp that his desire for negotiation doesn’t come from personal cowardice. Then we see a ferryman lead Kim across an icy lake to the fortress, and observe fatalistically that on the next day he’ll do the same for the Qing. Kim responds by killing him, establishing his ruthlessness but also his determination to save Joseon’s independence.

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The only film I planned to see on Wednesday, July 18 was called Cam. Directed by Daniel Goldhaber from a script written by Isa Mazzei, it tells the story of a woman named Alice (Madeline Brewer, of The Handmaid’s Tale and Orange is the New Black) who works as an erotic webcam performer under the name of Lola — until she finds her account stolen by parties unknown. As Alice investigates she finds it’s more than just her financial information or identity that’s been stolen; someone who looks and sounds exactly like her is performing as Lola in her place, and this Lola is breaking all the rules Alice established for herself as a performer. Alice investigates and tries to regain control of her life, driving the story toward a brutal conclusion.

The first thing that must be said about this film is that it is structured perfectly. It’s only 94 minutes long, but it gets across a lot of information and introduces us to a lot of characters — Alice’s friends and rivals among her co-workers; some of her customers; and her family (who don’t know what she does for a living). The plot’s laser sharp: we spend the first third learning about Alice’s life as a performer, getting to understand the environment, and seeing how she plans her shows for the sake of getting her clients to give her tokens which move her up the ranking of women on the webcam service. Then she loses control of her account, and has to find out what’s going on, and her actions are exactly what you’d expect — talking to her friends, suspecting her rivals, trying to deal with the company, trying to report her problems to the cops (who don’t understand, and one of whom tries to hit on her). This is a mystery, and her investigation gets more and more desperate, setting up the final third of the film in which there’s another slight shift of genre as Alice finds out what’s happening and tries to deal with it. The ending’s unexpected, tense, and thoroughly solid.

It is probably worth noting — as it was in the Fantasia program — that Mazzei’s a former camgirl, meaning that she’s writing from a place of knowledge. Issues relevant to sex workers (as when Alice’s family finds out what she does, and the consequences that follow from that) are used well, and the depiction of Alice’s job is appropriately everyday: it’s a job, with things she likes and things she doesn’t, and some co-workers she gets along with and some she doesn’t, and regular customers good and bad, and all the rest of it. I don’t think the film’s especially celebratory of the work, but one does get a bit of a sense of why Alice keeps at it: she has an outlet for her creativity and performative drive.

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I had one film on my schedule for Tuesday, July 17. It was a Japanese movie called Room Laundering, which looked like an odd fusion of comedy and horror. I wasn’t too sure what to make of it from the program description, but sometimes it’s the films that don’t lend themselves to easy description that’re the most rewarding. And so here.

Room Laundering (Rûmu rondaringu, ルームロンダリング) was directed by Kenji Katagiri, and co-written by Katagiri with Tatsuya Umemoto. The father of Miko (Elaiza Ikeda) died and her mother vanished when she was a child; after her grandmother dies when she’s 18, her uncle Goro (Joe Odagiri) takes her in and she begins to make a living as a room launderer. Japanese law requires landlords to tell prospective tenants if the previous tenant of an apartment died through murder or suicide, which would tend to cut demand for the unit — but the law doesn’t say they have to tell any further tenant beyond the first one following the death. Thus, Miko: she takes the apartment for a couple of days, counting as a tenant and relieving the landlord of their legal obligation. One problem emerges, and that is that Miko can see ghosts. They’re not very scary to her, though, as they can’t really do anything to the physical world, and on the whole are sad rather more than angry. But they do ask her to do things for them. One middle-aged punk rocker (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) wants her to send in an old demo tape to a record company, which he didn’t have the nerve to do when he was alive. A dead woman not too much older than Miko (Kaoru Mitsumune) wants her to find out who killed her — and here a mystery plot emerges. But there’s another mystery, as well: what happened to Miko’s mother? And beyond that — what’s her uncle Goro hiding? And can Miko, forbidden by her boss from associating with her neighbours, make a connection with the shy young man next door?

For all the mysteries, though, and for all the untimely deaths, this is a surprisingly light and charming film. My first reaction after it was over was that it was an unlikely fusion of Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain and Ringu, but much more the former than the latter — it takes place in Japan, and there is a ghost that wants people to be exposed to a tape, but beyond that it’s much more Amélie, if slightly more melancholic. The world in this film is improbable and sad, but the people are often surprisingly supportive. Not universally, but frequently. And, crucially, there’s a sense of the absurd in which the film takes a kind of life-affirming joy.

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Monday July 16 was an odd day, beginning with the neorealist neo-noir Neomanila and going off in different directions from there. First would come a time-travel comedy from New Zealand, Mega Time Squad. Then a movie that was a kind of pre-apocalyptic film, I Have a Date With Spring, from South Korea. The directors of both the two later movies would be present to take questions.

The director and writer of Mega Time Squad is Tim Van Dammen. His movie’s about Johnny (Anton Tennet), a loutish but somewhat good-hearted drug dealer in the small New Zealand town of Thames. Alongside his best friend Gaz (Arlo Gibson), Johnny works for the nearest equivalent to a crime lord around, a self-important short-tempered kingpin named Shelton (Jonny Brugh, from What We Do in the Shadows). Ambition leads Johnny to make a try for money being held by a Chinese antique shop owner, which in turn leads to him stealing a Mysterious Item from the shop. The Item turns out to be a limited time machine — once activated, it causes Johnny to return to the same place and time on every subsequent use. Johnny, now on the outs with Shelton, makes a series of bad choices and uses to the Item to bail him out each time, eventually gathering a group of temporal duplicates of himself: the Mega Time Squad. But can he settle things with Shelton, and the Chinese man now hunting him down? And is there any truth to the legend that a vengeful demon will strike down whoever wields the Item?

This is an amiable (if profane) film, clever yet not over-complicated in its temporal mechanics. There’s nothing epic about it at all, and in this case that’s to the good. You don’t feel the stakes are overblown at all, or even especially high — technically Johnny’s life is at stake, but the guys in Shelton’s gang don’t feel like killers; legbreakers, maybe, but not killers. Shelton himself, as played perfectly by Brugh, doesn’t seem the sort to take responsibility for a murder. This is fine, as the result is that the level of danger’s enough to keep things moving but not enough to outweigh the humour.

The time-travel element’s explored in reasonable depth, but doesn’t feel exhaustive. It’s a driver of action, not a thing to be developed for its own sake, and that’s about right. There are a couple of spots (notably in terms of how some of Johnny’s duplicates show up in a particular place) that are a bit confusing to me, but this is a time-travel film, and it’s possible a second viewing would clarify the plot mechanics — which anyway are less important than the general drift of the action. And that’s always clear.

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You can tell a bit about an audience at Fantasia just from how they react to what goes on screen before the movie starts. You don’t get trailers before a movie, though sometimes you see a trailer for that year’s festival, using brief clips of several of the films playing that edition of Fantasia; this year’s trailer often drew cheers. You get a couple commercials, from a very limited selection; there’s one particular commercial for Nongshim noodles that’s played for several years and often draws warm applause for its earnestness. And of course there’s the meowing, an audience tradition — after the light goes down and before the movie starts, people in the audience meow, others shush them, still others make other animal noises. How much of any of this you get depends on how playful the audience is, and how excited they are for a crowd-pleasing thrill-ride. Which means, from the noise an audience makes before a film begins, you can tell what kind of a film you’re about to see.

The first film I saw on Monday, July 16, was a neo-noir movie from the Philippines called Neomanila, and there was no meowing and no applause for the Nongshim commercial at all. This was a serious crowd that had come to the J.A. De Sève Theatre to see a serious and dark movie. Which is what they got, and a good one, too.

Neomanila was directed by Manila-based Mikhail Red, and written by Red with Rae Red and Zig Dulay. Toto (Timothy Castillo) is a kid in Manila whose brother’s been arrested, and the police are leaning on him to give up a drug dealer in exchange for his brother’s freedom. Toto’s gang is leaning on him not to flip. Toto finds the dealer’s dead, anyway, killed by Irma (Eula Vades), who offers Toto a job to pay his brother’s bail. Toto gets drawn deeper into the world Irma and her partner Raul (Rocky Salumbides) inhabit, where behind the facade of a pest control shop they run deadly missions against alleged drug dealers. Things build, but only grow darker, more despairing. This is a downbeat film, and the ending doesn’t shy away from the logic the story builds.

This is very definitely a crime movie, with a highly realistic approach to depicting Manila’s underworld. Note that I don’t just mean that it’s trying to be mimetic, but that in the fullest sense it’s trying to be realistic — echoing Italian neorealism, a politically aware film shot on location and focussing on the lives of the urban poor, telling stories of desperation that dive deep into the characters’ psyches. On the other hand, Red’s talked about the filmic language of the movie, noting devices he consciously uses to build narrative tension as well as similarities to Leon: The Professional and Blade Runner, and saying it has a “very comic book feel to it.” I’d say that may be overstating things a little, but to say that the movie’s an experimental neo-noir is quite fair.

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My last movie of Sunday, July 15, was a film I knew little about going in. It was The Scythian (Skif, Скиф), a Russian film directed by Rustam Mosafir from a script he wrote with Vadim Golovanov. It started late, and for most of the day I’d been unsure whether I’d stick around to watch it; in the 11 hours between leaving my house and the time it started, I’d ingested a few handfuls of peanuts, one (1) tin of off-brand cola, and a few mouthfuls of water. Still, I took my seat, the movie started, and then I quit paying attention to my physical body for one hour and forty-seven minutes. The Scythian is one of the best action films I’ve seen in years. It’s engagingly violent, and the violence is done well — but more than that, it’s filled with cleverness and unexpected twists. If you’re a fan of sword-and-sorcery or sword-and-sandal movies, you owe it to yourself to see this movie, and as soon as possible. (And I note it’s being released August 14 under the title The Last Warrior on VOD, Blu-Ray, and DVD.)

The story’s set in Russia in the Middle Ages, as the Russian Lord Oleg (Yuriy Tsurilo) is conniving to gain control of Kiev. Among his most trusted warriors is a man named Lutobor (Aleksey Faddeev), whose wife Tatyana (Izmaylova Vasilisa) has just given birth to a son. But then Tatyana and the baby are kidnapped by Scythians, specifically by a clan of elite assassins who’re the last remnants of their people. But one of the Scythians, a man named Marten (Alexander Kuznetsov), is betrayed by his own people and captured by Lutobor. Lutobor now intends to take Marten as his guide, trek into Scythian lands, face down the clan of trained killers, and recover his wife and son — not to mention find out who hired the Scythians in the first place.

It’s hard to know where to begin in talking about this movie. It’s not especially deep, though it is conscious of itself as a piece of heroic fiction — it begins by talking about its era as “a time for new heroes brave at heart and strong in spirit.” The key is that everything it does, it does very well. Most crucial, I suppose, is that it tells a ferocious story with some surprising character choices, presents a strong relationship between the two male leads that deepens over the course of the film, and evokes a sense of a whole world beyond the specific plot to hand. This is nominally historical adventure, but in fact it pushes “historicity” to the edge and beyond, incorporating magic potions, omens from the gods, and surreal costumes and props. To me, this is absolutely sword-and-sorcery, a classic pulplike fantasy set in (or in this case near) Central Asia, something out of Robert E. Howard or Harold Lamb or Arthur Howden Smith’s Grey Maiden tales.

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My third movie on Sunday, July 15, was a France-UK co-production called Cold Skin. It was scheduled to start at 5:10 in the Hall Theatre, and ran 107 minutes. At 7:15, across the street at the De Sève, there’d be a showing of the 1911 Italian film L’Inferno, an adaptation of the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Musical accompaniment to the silent film would be provided by Maurizio Guarini of Italian prog band Goblin, well-known for providing the soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria among many other films. I figured I had a shot at getting in to see L’Inferno, but it’d depend on the length of the line-up. In the meanwhile, I was quite looking forward to Cold Skin.

Directed by Xavier Gens, the screenplay by Jesús Olmo and Eron Sheehan was based on the Catalan novel La Pell Freda by Albert Sánchez Piñol. It follows an unnamed man (David Oakes), presumably English, eventually to be known as Friend, as he travels by ship to an isolated island in the far south where he will take detailed meteorological readings. It is September 1914, and elsewhere the First World War’s begun; on the island Friend finds, there is no other human inhabitant but a surly lighthouse-keeper named Gruner (Ray Stevenson, perhaps best known for his role as Volstagg in the Thor movies). As Friend soon finds out, though, there are humanoid but non-human inhabitants: fish-creatures that come out at night and attack. Friend finds Gruner keeps a fish-woman (Aura Garrido) as a slave, but must live with him and the creature he names Aneris as, night after night, the other humanoids attack Gruner’s fortified lighthouse.

The first thing that must be said about this film is that it looks spectacular. The landscape of the island is harsh, craggy, barren, and beautiful. Friend’s cabin and Gruner’s lighthouse look lived-in and, crammed with detail, fit their period perfectly. There’s a kind of tactile 1914 that comes out of this movie, particularly the early scenes, before that external world is as it were stripped away from the humans. It’s a realisation of the era that seems to owe nothing to Merchant-Ivory or traditional period films; it’s harder-edged, unyielding. The lighting and cinematography are haunting and perfect: there’s a sense of place to the island built by the quality of sunlight, and a character to the interior scenes (and rare underwater scenes) as the light shifts.

The next thing that has to be said is that the acting in no way takes a back seat to the images. Oakes, Stevenson, and Garrido build complex characters and establish complex relationships among them — relationships that build and change over the course of the film. Garrido’s worth particular mention here, as her character is functionally mute yet always comprehensible. But all three capably bring out the dynamics among the characters that drive the plot, notably the tense not-quite adversarial relationship between Friend and Gruner.

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Sunday, July 15, was going to be my first really busy day of the Fantasia Film Festival. There were four movies I planned to see, with a chance of a fifth, depending on how things worked out. The day’d begin at the Hall Theatre; first, I’d see Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura, a lighthearted Japanese urban fantasy. Then would come Aragne: Sign of Vermillion, also from Japan, a horror anime.

Destiny (Kamakura Monogatari, DESTINY 鎌倉ものがたり) is directed by Takashi Yamazaki, helmer of the Parasyte movies, from a screenplay Yamazaki wrote based on the manga by Ryôhei Saigan. The movie follows Masakazu and Akiko Isshiki (Masato Sakai and Mitsuki Takahata), newlyweds, as they move to Masakazu’s home in the small-but-historic city of Kamakura. Masakazu’s a writer, but Akiko’s plans for their household meet a slight obstacle when she discovers that Kamakura, by dint of being “a magnet of mystical energy for millennia,” is home to any number of supernatural creatures: water imps, death gods, ghosts, bad luck gods, the list goes on. A series of episodic adventures show us different facets of the city and its inhabitants while also deftly advancing the Isshikis’ relationship, finally culminating in an extended otherworldly adventure that brings together subplots unobtrusively introduced over the course of the movie.

This is one of the most purely delightful movies I’d see at Fantasia, and indeed one of the most delightful I’ve come across in a long time. Tonally it’s somewhat similar to the Harry Potter films, in the particular kind of cartooniness of the CGI, in the conscious quaintness of the setting’s historicity, in the way the orchestral soundtrack is consciously lush yet awe-inspiring, and above all in the way that minor details turn out to be pieces of a larger puzzle: the way everything sets up everything else, the way the world feels both expansive and interconnected, perfectly machined in retrospect but almost overwhelming with implications as you live in it. There’s a deeper sense of the folkloric here than in Potter, though. I’ve heard some people mention a feel like a live-action Miyazaki film, and in terms of the creative visual design of the many creatures of Kamakura I can see that. But there’s a clearer bad guy here than is usual in a Miyazaki tale (although that doesn’t become obvious until late in the story).

Still, there’s a similar thrill in storytelling, and an equally unusual sense of structure. For example, Masakazu’s not just a writer but an adviser to the police, and a case he’s called on to solve turns out to have a very close solution to one of the stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But this is not a problem, because the mystery is in fact solved very soon after it’s introduced; yet if it turns out to be an episode with its own quick satisfaction, it’s also a vehicle to set up other plot elements with their own pleasures. Here as elsewhere the film packs any number of sub-stories into its overall tale, creating a world full of incident that miraculously never feels rushed or underexplored, a world full of ideas with just the right emotional heft.

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