Black Gate

There were two screenings I wanted to attend at the Fantasia Festival on Saturday, July 29. First was the Russian science-fiction film Attraction (Prityazhenie). After that was a triple-bill of animated shorts: “Valley of White Birds,” from China; “Scarecrow Island,” from Korea; and “Cocolors,” from Japan. All together, a promising day of fantastic imagery on the big screen in the 400-seat D.B. Clarke Theatre. (In addition, a long short film preceded Attraction, “Past & Future Kings”; as it happens I know some of the local creators, and so feel it would be inappropriate to write about the movie here.)

Attraction was directed by Fedor Bondarchuk from a script by Oleg Malovichko and Andrey Zolotarev. It is an epic (132 minutes, though the IMDB claims there’s a 117-minute version as well) story about an alien spacecraft that crashes into a neighbourhood in the south of Moscow. I saw a trailer before going in that made the film look like an Independence Day–like story about humans rallying to fend off an invasion; I don’t think it’s giving away a major twist to say the movie’s nothing like that at all. Instead, it’s about the Russian government trying to negotiate a first contact situation while assorted everyday Muscovites react with more or less suspicion — and one of the aliens (Rinal Mukhametov) ends up making contact with the young daughter (Irina Starshenbaum) of the army officer (Oleg Menshikov) overseeing the crash site. They fall in love, but he has to get back to his ship as the hate and fear of the humans reaches a boiling point.

Attraction has some very definite echoes of Starman and (by the end) of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Like those movies, it’s about idealism and human nature; about both the good and bad of the human condition and human emotional terrain. Like those movies, it derives tension from pitting the stupidity, fear, and violence of humans against human generosity and the human ability to love. If the result isn’t really in question, it’s a reasonably convincing trip getting there. There’s romance and action and character beats and a few laughs, and all are managed reasonably well, even if the movement from one to another can come as a swerve.

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On Friday, July 28, I had two films on my schedule at the Fantasia Festival. The first was a German period crime film with biographical aspects, a movie called Fritz Lang that imagined the great director of the title mixed up with the killings that would shape his now-classic film M. The second was a screening of George Romero’s 1973 film The Crazies, arranged quickly by the festival’s organizers as a tribute following Romero’s death only 12 days before. Together the movies would make for a day that, to me, exemplified much of what is best in Fantasia: a profound appreciation of film history of every kind, mixed with challenging genre artistry.

Fritz Lang was directed by Gordian Maugg from a script he worked on with Alexander Häusser. Opening in 1929, the black-and-white film follows director Fritz Lang (Heino Ferch) in the wake of the relative failure of a string of Lang’s films, including his pioneering science-fiction movies Metropolis and Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon). Casting about for a new idea for a film that will satisfy him artistically and also make money, Lang hears about a series of murders in the city of Düsseldorf. He grows fascinated by the killings, and travels to Düsseldorf to take a hand in the investigation. But why is he so drawn to the lurid crimes?

There’s a kernel of reality in Fritz Lang. Lang did research the Düsseldorf killings, and they did partially inspire his next film, M (though at times Lang would downplay the link, pointing to other murders he researched). The movie at hand greatly expands Lang’s involvement with the murders, and invents any number of scenes in which he interacts with the police and killer. That’s fair enough for a historical drama, but at the same time the film’s primarily interested in what makes Lang tick — why he’s drawn to make a story of the killings, and how those killings parallel events in his life. In order to make those parallels dramatically forceful, the movie then has to dramatise certain events in Lang’s life which in reality are to an extent mysterious. Again there’s nothing wrong with that. But it does make for an odd and at times uneasy blend of period mystery and biopic.

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On Thursday, July 27, I planned to watch two films at the Fantasia International Film Festival. First, an artistically ambitious movie from the Philippines called Town In A Lake (Matangtubig). Then, later in the evening, a documentary about the quest to develop nuclear fusion technology called Let There Be Light. Both looked to be about the mysteries of the universe, in very different ways.

Directed by Jet Leyco and written by Brian Gonzales, Town In A Lake takes place in a small isolated town in the Philippine jungle with an official crime rate of zero. Until, as the movie opens, two girls are abducted. One is later found dead. The crime draws the attention of the national and international media, which descends on the town, disrupting the locals’ lives and mourning. Meanwhile, the investigation into the crime goes on. Who committed this evil, and why? Can there be a wholly natural explanation for it, coming on the heels of so much peace?

Watching Town In A Lake is only part of the experience of the film. It’s a story that doesn’t provide easy explanations, or even that much in the way of conventional character-centred drama. There are characters, and there is what is effectively a mystery story that ultimately takes on aspects beyond the merely rational. But these things emerge over the course of the film’s 88 minutes; we assemble the bits we’re given, the sounds and images we experience, and make the pieces make sense even as we’re absorbed by the sensory depth of the movie. This is a meditative experience, with long takes and subtle camera moves and a rich soundscape. Still, I found it took some pondering to understand (and I want here to express my thanks to filmmakers Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Gabriela MacLeod as well as critic Kurt Halfyard for a useful discussion after the film that clarified many things for me). There is a good argument that in attempting to understand what we see rationally, in attempting to work it out like a logic puzzle, one does not take the best approach to the film — that in so doing we come like the outsider media, imposing our own frames of understanding on matter that is richer and more allusive than can be explained by words and reason. “Relax,” runs one line of dialogue, “thinking won’t get you anywhere.” On the other hand, there is a counter-argument that if this is so, any explanation will be self-evidently insufficient, that the emotional and sensory resonance will naturally and necessarily dwarf the meaning of the logic. So it is here, I think. You can work out a perfectly sound explanation of what’s happening onscreen. But there is always more than the explanation can resolve. There are always more mysteries.

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I wrote the other day about 78/52, the first movie I saw at Fantasia on Wednesday, July 26. It played at the De Sève Theatre, the smaller of the two main Fantasia cinemas, and as it happened I’d see two more movies there the same day. The first was an Estonian movie (technically an Estonian-Dutch-Polish co-production) called November, a period piece set among Northern forests, rich in folklore and cinematic beauty. The second was a documentary called Tokyo Idols, about the Tokyo-centred industry of young female pop singers.

November was written and directed by Rainer Sarnet from the novel Rehepapp by Andrus Kivirähk. Shot in a sumptuous black and white, it shows us an Estonian peasant village in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, isolated among the deep woods, ruled by a family of Germans. We see the grinding poverty of pre-industrial village life and we see the German lords in their rich but decaying manor house. More significantly, perhaps, we see the world of spiritual forces and witchcraft within which the peasants live. Dead souls return to share a feast. Witches can teach a girl to take the shape of a wolf. Hidden treasures lurk under floorboards. Plagues take human form. And you can sell your soul to the devil to get a servant made of scraps of wood and other leftovers, a thing called a kratt; if you’re really cunning, if you know the trick of it, maybe you can cheat the devil and get away with your soul intact.

Against this rich background we see a love triangle develop. Liina (Rea Lest) is love with Hans (Jörgen Liik) who himself has his heart set on the German baroness. In and around this are other subplots and anecdotes of village life. A man becomes obsessed with the maid of the manor house. Older people see what might have in their own lives as Liina pursues Hans. Hans, meanwhile, also aspires to be a poet. But if he sells his soul for love, can he ever become the writer he wants to be?

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On Wednesday, July 26, I watched three movies at the Fantasia Film Festival. The first, which I’ll write about here, was a documentary about film itself. Or, more precisely, a single movie. Or, even more precisely, a single scene of a single movie. Directed by Alexandre Philippe, 78/52 is a 91-minute film that takes an in-depth look at one of the most famous sequences in cinematic history: the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho.

Opening with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe — “The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” — the movie examines the scene from all angles. We hear about its place in film history, in the context of 1960, in Hitchcock’s career. We hear about its structural significance in Psycho, about its symbolic significance. We learn about the technical processes by which the scene was put together, its edits and sound cues and of course the soundtrack music. We hear an analysis of the acting. And we learn about the reaction of the first audiences to what was one of the most startling moments in film history.

The conceit of the black-and-white film is that we see interviewees in different greenscreen-composited rooms of the Bates Motel discussing different aspects of the scene. I didn’t find that really worked — the lack of interaction between the rooms and interview subjects means there’s no sense of connected space between them — but the material’s strong enough to make up for it. 78/52 presents an in-depth analysis of its subject without being dry or pedantic. Without making too many overstated claims, it effectively establishes the importance of the shower scene. Different perspectives bring out the subtexts at work. The complexity of the scene’s established, and also a sense of mystery, a sense that it has a kind of depth that can’t really be explicated however much it’s talked about.

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