Black Gate

“School Radio to Major Tom” (“こちら放送室よりトム少佐へ”, “Kochira Housoushitsu yori Tom Shosa e”) is a bittersweet story that becomes a tearjerker by the end. A 10-minute short written and directed by Chisaka Takuya and set in 1989, it follows Eisuke (Tokuma Kudo), a teen who broadcasts and records his own science-fictional radio drama about a certain Major Tom every morning at his school; one day he comes in to find a girl (Chika Arakawa) who attends night classes has added a part of her own to his story. He responds, incorporating what she’s done, and then she responds to that, and the story takes flight without them ever meeting except by voice. Graduation looms, when Eisuke assumes they’ll finally see one another, but viewers who remember the song that gives the film its title may well expect things to go differently. The movie captures the atmosphere and technology of its era very well (shot on actual analog 16mm film), but more importantly it captures character. And it finds effective parallels between the story the two characters tell and their own lives. It’s a tremendously effective piece of work.

With it was bundled It’s A Summer Film! (サマーフィルムにのって), the debut directorial effort from Sôshi Masumoto, who also wrote the script with Naoyuki Miura. It’s a movie about a film club at a Japanese high school, which is divided in two. Which is to say, club president Karin (Coda Mahiru) is revered by almost all the club as a genius auteur, who loves the romance genre — but the outsider named Barefoot (Marika Itô, who had a supporting role as a punky outsider in the first Kakegurui movie) loves her samurai cinema, and has a script ready to go to make her own samurai film even though the rest of the club’s ready to pitch in to make Karin’s newest crowd-pleasing epic. This is the story of Barefoot’s journey to realising her dream, along with her friends and fellow outsiders, science-fiction fan Kickboard (Yumi Kawai) and aspiring swordswoman Blue Hawaii (Kirara Inori).

Before Barefoot can make her film, she needs a star, somebody just right for the role. She’s mentally rejected everyone she knows — but then a new boy named Rintaro (Daichi Kaneko) turns up, and it clicks for her. She pursues him for the role (literally, in an engaging chase scene), and then gathers a supporting cast and crew to help her make the film she dreams of. There are complications: Rintaro has a secret. And there’s the one-sided rivalry between Barefoot and Karin — Barefoot’s aggrieved by Karin’s success, while Karin hardly notices the existence of Barefoot. Will Barefoot’s movie come together in the end?

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The strangest title of any film at Fantasia 2021 was the Korean short “Digital Video Editing with Adobe Premiere Pro: The Real-World Guide to Set Up and Workflow.” (“그녀를 지우는 시간”) A 40-minute piece written and directed by Hong Seong-yoon, it opens with a scene from a romance movie as a young woman meets a handsome businessman — and then there’s a ghost. And the image freezes. And in a voice-over we hear the director, Seo, explain that his movie’s haunted, with a ghost showing up in crucial shots, and is there any way to edit around those shots? He’s talking to a freelance film editor, Ms. Park, and the movie mostly takes the form of a dialogue between the two of them as they try to work out how to cut the undead while still creating an artistically satisfying film. We see scenes from the film played over again as the editor tries out a variety of tricks, hear the debates between editor and director, and see clever ideas that eliminate the mysterious haunting.

Seo’s work is generic romance, but “Digital Video Editing” is a funny and engaging film, with good performances and an excellent script. It’s a bit of a look backstage at how a movie gets put together, and presents a dialogue that echoes a lot of artistic collaboration. Park, the outsider, has ideas about what to do with the film. Seo, who’s worked on it much longer, has specific things he feels need to come across. But do those things work? One way to look at the ghost is as a kind of spirit of the film, forcing the movie to take a certain form regardless of the intent of anyone working on it. But more importantly, it’s spooky. Add to that the dialogue’s sharp, and the sense of how film works is very strong; this is a very good short.

Bundled with it was Not Quite Dead Yet (一度死んでみた, Ichido Shindemitai). It’s a comedy from Japan, in which Mr. Nobata (Shinichi Tsutsumi), the head of a mid-sized pharma company, tries an unorthodox maneuver to try to find out the identity of a mole in his company: he takes a new drug his scientists have developed, the ‘Juliet pill,’ which will leave him apparently dead for 48 hours. Things don’t go as planned, and Nobata’s enemies strike — but he can still appear as a ghost to his daughter Nanase (Suzu Hirose, Fireworks and Laplace’s Witch), a struggling death metal singer, and with her help might survive to turn the tables. But she’s become estranged from him following her mother’s death, while he’s assigned one of his more self-effacing employees, Taku (Ryo Yoshizawa, of the live-action Bleach and Gintama films), to keep an eye on her. And the mole in the company is still there, now out to make sure Tanabe never revives.

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Out of Hong Kong comes Time (殺出個黃昏, Shā chū gè huánghūn), a film by Ricky Ko about a trio of elderly assassins. Written by Ching Yi Ho and Ka Tung Lam, it’s a character-based drama far more than it is an action movie, though it does start and end with action scenes. It’s also a showcase for some veteran Hong Kong actors, notably Petrina Fung Bo Bo (who the Fantasia program notes tell me was known as “the Shirley Temple of Hong Kong”) and 1950s movie star Patrick Tse; as the title hints, the film is a story about the progress of time and the situation of the elderly.

Decades ago, Chau (Tse), Fong (Fung), and Chung (Suet Lam) were a team of assassins for hire. As the film begins, Fong’s decided to get the band back together. She’s found a new business opportunity: providing quick merciful deaths to the elderly in Hong Kong who have decided to end their lives in a world that they feel has no more place for them. Chau, the martial-artist and knife expert who does the actual killings, is at first repulsed but soon decides that it’s for the best that he provide clean ends for people who will kill themselves one way or another. But then the group’s contacted by a 16-year-old, Tze Ying (Suet-Ying Chung), who sees no future for herself and so is determined to hire their services.

Chau ends up taking her under his wing, only to find out that she has very real problems. Meanwhile, Fong’s son and daughter-in-law are scheming against her. And Chung’s lost his heart to a prostitute (Belinda Yan Zi-fei) who appreciates him as a client but has no desire for a non-professional relationship. These stories weave around each other, making for an elegant plot that shows us the leads as a group and as individuals.

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On the 3rd Day (Al Tercer Día) is an excellent horror film from Argentina, based on the novel 3 días by Gonzalo Ventura. The book was turned into a script by Ventura with Alberto Fasce, and the adaptation directed by Daniel de la Vega. It’s from the same production company that brought the world last year’s The Undertaker’s Home (AKA The Funeral Home), and there are some passing similarities: both are well-shot films that have fun playing with traditional horror elements, and indeed have all the zest of classic horror stories, while also making interesting structural choices and telling a good story in thoughtful ways.

There’s a limit to how much one should describe the plot of On the 3rd Day; part of the fun of the film is in figuring out what’s happening at about the rate the main character does. That character is Cecilia (Mariana Anghileri), who abducts her son from her abusive husband one night and then ends up in a bad car accident involving a strange old man named Enrique (Gerardo Romano), who himself is carrying a curious cargo. Three days later Cecilia wakes up in an old house with no idea of what’s happened since the accident and no idea where her son is. We follow her as she wanders off to find out the secret of those missing days, and in a parallel track of story follow Enrique as he tries to solve some mysteries of his own connected with that night.

We soon get an idea of what kind of story Enrique thinks this is, one in which he’s a hero fighting terrible darkness. But is he right? Much of the early part of the movie revolves around the mania that appears to drive him, implicitly set against with the mystery that grips Cecilia. Enrique’s very certain about many things, perhaps too certain, while Cecilia’s part in the story is defined by her uncertainty. It makes for a good contrast, and the film’s incredibly effective at slowly revealing the truth of what’s going on — not just in measuring out how much to deliver when, but also how to exceed the promises it appears to make about the kind of movie we’re watching. What looks like a suspense film becomes utter horror, and one that goes all the way into a kind of dark romanticism, a gothic tone that nods to classics of German Expressionism.

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