Black Gate

I had an odd schedule on Sunday, July 17. There were two movies I wanted to see. The first was a Chinese historical martial-arts film called The Final Master (Shi Fu), which played at noon. The second was a live-action Japanese manga adaptation, Tokyo Ghoul (Tôkyô gûru), and that played at 9:35 in the evening. I eventually decided to go to the Hall Theatre for the first movie, spend the afternoon doing errands, and return for the second movie in the evening. In the end, this turned out to be a good plan.

The Final Master was written and directed by Haofeng Xu, based on his original novel. It follows Chen Shi (Fan Liao), a martial-arts master, who arrives in the city of Tianjin in 1932. He wants to establish a school there of his own but faces opposition from the major schools already in the city. He has to overcome a series of challenges from his scheming rivals, political as well as physical. He begins a romance with Zhao Guohui (Jia Song, also at Fantasia this year in the Hong Kong action film Shock Wave), a beautiful woman with a scandal behind her, and begins training a rickshaw driver named Geng (Yang Song, who was also in both of Xu’s previous movies, Judge Archer and The Sword Identity) who may have even more talent for fighting than Chen himself. But if Geng may help him overcome some of the trials set by the other schools, yet other levels of politics come into play as the military plans a takeover of the martial-arts world.

This really only scratches the surface of the intricate film. There’s a novelistic feel to it in the accumulation of incident and character, but it’s remarkably effective because Xu keeps things moving at a rapid if not unforgiving pace. Plans are hatched, betrayals accumulate, and the scope of the film increases bit by bit. It’s not quite an epic, but characters who seem minor develop into major figures, and the city of Tianjin acquires a character of its own.

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After seeing two showcases of short films on the afternoon of Saturday, July 15, in the evening I went to my first movie of the 2017 Fantasia festival to screen in the 400-seat D.B. Clarke Theatre. That was a film called Mohawk. Directed by Ted Geoghegan, his second film after 2015’s We Are Still Here, with a script by Geoghegan and Grady Hendrix, it tells a story from the War of 1812. In upstate New York a British agent, Joshua (Eamon Farren, Richard Horne on Twin Peaks: The Return), is in a polyamorous relationship with a Mohawk woman, Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn), and a Mohawk man, Calvin (Justin Rain). Calvin’s stirred up American soldiers in the area by an injudicious attack; when Joshua meets a unit of about a half-dozen Yanks in the woods, Calvin and Oak save him — but the confrontation turns into a running battle. The brutality mounts, revelations are made at inopportune times, and an image from a dream recurs.

This is less an action film than a suspense film, built around two small groups chasing each other through the woods. The focus is admirable, but the last act of the movie drifts from suspense into fantasy-horror — or, perhaps, into a dark super-hero story. To me, there isn’t enough groundwork earlier in the film setting up the movement into fantasy. Viewers more sympathetic to the genre shift will appreciate the movie more, although I think there are a few other issues with it as well.

Before discussing the storytelling, it is perhaps worth talking about the film’s portrayal of the Mohawks in the context of a violent historical adventure. Notably, it avoids a lot of action-film clichés and imagery. This is clearly a movie that wants to be on the Mohawks’ side; I suspect audiences will have varying opinions of how well it succeeds at that. I can say that at the question-and-answer period after the film, Horn and Rain were clearly proud of their work and the story of the film. I can also say that a non-Indigenous friend of mine who works with First Nations people left the screening early.

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Saturday, July 15, looked like an unusual day for me at Fantasia: I’d mostly be seeing short films. It’d begin a bit after noon, with a set of shorts called SpectrumFest: Films from the Autism Spectrum, a collection of pieces from young filmmakers on the autism spectrum. Then would come this year’s edition of the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, featuring eight science-fictional short films from around the world. Both showings looked fascinating, if in different ways. SpectrumFest was new to me, but I’d seen the SF showcases in previous years, and been impressed both by the individual films and by the way they worked together — if short films are loosely equivalent to prose short stories, the SF short film showcases make excellent anthologies.

First came SpectrumFest. Montreal’s Spectrum Productions is a non-profit organization who works with youth and young adults on the autism spectrum, giving them resources and equipment to express themselves creatively through film and animation. Among other programs, Spectrum runs summer camps and a weekly after-school program, as well as Saturday morning cartoon-making workshops. This year, Fantasia hosted an exhibition of some of the films created by the young filmmakers working with Spectrum in a showcase that was free to the public. Almost two dozen of the student filmmakers’ productions were screened, collectively a stunning and unpredictable burst of creativity.

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Friday, July 14, felt like my first real day at the 2017 Fantasia Festival. After only one film the night before, I had three movies I wanted to see that afternoon and evening. First would come Tilt at the 175-seat J.A de Sève Theatre, a thriller that was drawing attention on the festival circuit for its political subtext. After that, at the 700-seat Hall, would come A Ghost Story, a movie about loss; I thought it looked slightly more interesting than the comedic manga adaptation Teiichi: Battle of the Supreme High because A Ghost Story depicted its ghost in the form of an actor with a sheet over his head. The sheer brazenness was appealing. Besides, after that my last film of the day would be another manga adaptation at the Hall, Museum (Myûjiamu), directed by Keishi Otomo. I’d seen and enjoyed two other adaptations by Otomo before, the third Rurouni Kenshin film two years before and then last year The Top Secret: Murder in Mind. The odds seemed good for Museum, a crime thriller about a cop tracking down a frog-masked serial killer.

But the day opened with Tilt. Directed by Kasra Farahani from a script he wrote with Jason O’Leary, it follows a documentary filmmaker, Joe (Joseph Cross), whose wife Joanne (Alexia Rasmussen) is pregnant. Joanne’s making some money as she trains to become a nurse, but Joe’s having problems putting together his second film, about the economy and the myth of an American “golden age.” Over the course of Tilt — the title, we’re told, of Joe’s well-received first documentary, about control and chaos in pinball — we see Joe slowly lose his grip on reality as he strains to get his film’s material into some kind of shape. He takes to walking aimlessly around nighttime Los Angeles, his sanity deteriorating. Will he find help before he reaches a breaking point?

The movie’s already drawn some attention because contrasting with Joe’s increasingly ragged work on his film, with his rants about the 1950s and American empire, is the concurrent rise in the background of Donald Trump as glimpsed through news reports and the characters’ disbelieving jokes. Given the lead time involved in film production, there’s yet to be a substantial cinematic response to Trump’s election, so the Trumpian motif in Tilt stands out. Still, it’s mainly an element in the film’s atmosphere: media reports, snide jokes, a jump scare involving a Trump mask that I suppose we must consider cinema’s first Trump scare. It weighs heavily only perhaps because of this particular historical moment, and because we’ve not yet gotten to the point of frequently seeing Trump in fiction films. But, as Farahani has pointed out in interviews, Trump’s in the movie only because he seemed to the filmmakers to represent some of the themes they were working with — a kind of white male entitlement and anger. Tilt isn’t a response to the America Trump is making, so much as a look at the emotional texture Trump has seized upon.

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I’ve been swamped by movies since the 2017 Fantasia International Film Festival began, and that’s left me with no time to write about the things I’ve seen. It looks like those reviews will start coming next week, after the festival ends. But on Wednesday I saw a movie that’s getting a wide release this weekend, and on the off chance what I have to say might be useful to anybody trying to plan their weekend, I thought I’d abandon my usual diary format to say a few words about Atomic Blonde.

The movie’s officially the directorial debut of longtime stunt coordinator David Leitch, who also directed some of the scenes in John Wick. He’s working here with a script from Kurt Johnstad, who wrote (among other things) the screenplays for 300 and 300: Rise of an Empire. This is another comic adaptation, based on The Coldest City, a 180-page graphic novel written by Antony Johnston, drawn by Sam Hart, and published in 2012 by Oni Press; a prequel, Dead of Winter, came out last year with art by Steven Perkins.

Atomic Blonde is set in November, 1989, as MI6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) is sent to Berlin to get an East German defector across to the West, and recover a list of double agents. She also has to investigate the recent murder of another British agent, and work out how much she can trust the British station chief in Berlin, the manic David Percival (James McAvoy). This isn’t an espionage thriller, though, not really. This is an action film, and the violence starts early and recurs often as Broughton goes about her mission. Does the whole thing work?

Yes and no. I found the action scenes were strong and inventive. The clear highlight is an extended long-take fight scene in the middle of the movie that moves from brutal to comic and back again. Like a lot of the fights, there’s an engaging mix of martial-arts fluidity, improvised weapons, gunplay, and unexpected reversals. Punches and kicks land with satisfying weight, if not consequence. Theron’s Broughton wears more and more of the marks of her combats as the film goes along, but these bruises and scars merely nod faintly toward reality. This is an action movie, and there’s a slickness to the action that keeps it engaging, if rarely at the level of the one-take set-piece. You don’t care about the plausibility of Theron fighting in high heels because she’s visually coded as very nearly a super-hero: always in immaculate black-and-white costumes (rarely grey in non-fighting sequences), always lit and framed as the larger-than-life lead.

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Leaflets fall from the sky on the streets of an idyllic village in France. Soldiers fetch them from the ground as the papers collide, their ominous fluttering booming in your ears.

We follow a boy, clad in the regimental coat of a British soldier. In his eyes, we bear witness to the hardened resolve to survive. He collects the leaflets with his fellow soldiers, scrutinizing them with a benign detachment.

When bombs rip through the sky, the boy tears into a sprint. Leaflets go flying in an eerie flurry of white. He finds refuge among a barrier of sandbags, only to shoot from the post the moment another torrent of bombs descends. In the next moment, he clambers past an obstacle and reenters the place of battle. There, he confronts the staggering sight of his fellow countrymen, awaiting their departure on the shore.

Thus begins Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan’s magisterial account of a monumental event in World War II. In many ways, the film owes its resonance to Tommy, played by Fionn Whitehead, whom we first see comprehending the silent herald of death. He demands your attention with his earnestness to scrape through the onslaught of terror with the skin on his bones and the heart jackhammering in his ribs.

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