Black Gate

In the waning hours of the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival I sat down to watch The Unknown Man of Shandigor (L’inconnu de Shandigor), a 1967 Swiss spy film directed by Jean-Louis Roy, who collaborated on the script with Gabriel Arout and Pierre Koralnik. The film’s got a new 4K restoration by the Cinematheque Suisse; I’d never heard of the movie, but the description was intriguing, a black-and-white mod odyssey through the weirdness of the 1960s, with nods to Dr. Strangelove and Alphaville, and including Serge Gainsbourg as the leader of a group of bald turtleneck-clad assassins. Was this a lost classic, or an eccentric curiosity? Or both?

The plot of the film concerns one Doctor Von Krantz (Daniel Emilfork, who would go on to feature in The City of Lost Children), an admirer of Dracula prone to observations such as: “I don’t like humanity. Or, I do, but in a jar of arsenic.” The good doctor has invented the Canceler (or Annulator), which can nullify a nuclear explosion. As this is the height of the Cold War, his fortified home has now become the target for spies from multiple different nations. American agent Bobby Gun (Howard Vernon) races with the dastardly Russian Shostakovich (Jacques Dufilho) to get their hands on the device — but the key may lie with Von Krantz’s young and idealistic daughter Sylvaine (Marie-France Boyer), who dreams of a man she once knew (Ben Carruthers), a mysterious man in the city of Shandigor.

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I wrote a little while ago about watching three documentary films bundled together at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival, centred around the short feature You Can’t Kill Meme. There was another set of three documentaries at Fantasia this year, and as the festival drew to a close, I sat down to watch them as well. These two shorts and the short feature Dear Hacker were a bit more diverse in subject matter, but shared themes of technology and power.

First was writer-director Aleix Pitarch’s “Orders,” a disturbing animated short based on a true story. The movie re-creates a horrific phone call that was made to a fast-food restaurant by a man claiming to be a police officer, using actors and an edited transcript of the call (I am not sure where the transcript is supposed to have come from, but the events are clearly based on a deeply disturbing reality). Without going into detail, the story’s a dark working-out of something like Stanley Milgram’s experiments about authority and what ordinary people can be ordered to do. As we hear bits of the phone call, and hear things getting worse and worse, we see everyday images of the day’s work at a fast-food restaurant.

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“Aquatic Bird” is an 18-minute short film from Chinese writer-director Zhang Nan. It weaves together the stories of three interrelated characters — a prostitute (Bird), a man who admires her from a distance (Aqua), and one of her regular clients. The first two are brought together by the light of a green laser pointer; there is a lot of surrealism in this film. It looks very nice, and the script’s very taut — but given the weirdness of the film, I wonder if maybe a bit too taut. To the extent I was able to follow it, the structure worked and built to a solid conclusion. But there’s a lot I did not understand, notably the use of a dream scene, and a peculiar egg of surprising plot significance.

Bundled with it was Midnight In A Perfect World, from the Philippines. Directed by Dodo Dayao, who co-wrote the script with Carljoe Javier, the feature takes place in a near-future Manila where infrastructure’s been upgraded to near-utopian levels. But there are strange blackouts that hit parts of the city after midnight, and you must not be caught out in those places at those times. People disappear, leaving behind only wild rumours about what’s happened to them. Luckily there are safehouses, in which one can take shelter. But there are stories about the dangers of those safehouses, too. The movie follows a group of young friends caught in one blackout, and follow them as they take refuge in a safehouse — then find out one of the group didn’t make it inside.

The first thing to say about this movie is that it captures a striking note of cosmic terror, with a strong inflection of the New Weird (there’s an interesting interview where Dayao mentions being influenced by China Miéville). There are science fiction influences here, certainly, but not in the form of clearly-defined technologies operating in an easily knowable world. Dayao’s said that he worked out the reasons beyond all the unreal elements in the story, but chose not to include them in expository lumps at the expense of breaking up the flow of a scene. In part because of that, the film creates a world which we believe is operating according to rules, however alien, but rules which may be beyond understanding. It’s a little like Lovecraft by way of Laird Barron.

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Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙), from Hong Kong, had its Canadian premiere at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival. It’s the first film from director Kin Long Chan, who co-wrote the movie with Ryan Ling, and stars Ka Tung Lam (also known as Gordon Lam, a veteran actor and the screenwriter of Time, also at Fantasia 2021) as Kwan, a former member of the British armed forces in Hong Kong. After the British turn Hong Kong over to China, Kwan retires and falls in with organised crime. In 2019, he’s scheming with a turtle smuggler named Pickle (Ying-gor To) to convince his boss Tai (Ben Yuen) to take a deal for black-market turtles — and then a South Asian immigrant thief named Mani (Bipin Karma), who ripped off Tai, stumbles into Kwan’s home desperate for sanctuary. Mani pays well to get a temporary hiding place from Tai’s goons in Kwan’s home. But Tai’s after Mani’s accomplice, his cousin Kapil (Bitto Singh Hartihan), and then there are those turtles to worry about. Violence escalates throughout the movie, and it’s clear that at any moment the bloodthirsty Tai could turn on Kwan.

A story of crime and brutality, the drama and conflict of Hand Rolled Cigarette emerge not just from character but from the society the characters struggle with and against. Most obviously, Mani faces blunt hostility because of his race. The movie’s sharp enough to show some of that coming from Kwan, our protagonist and the closest thing to a sympathetic figure in the film. Kwan’s past in the military, meanwhile, comes into play in a number of ways — to start with, as an instance of a broken promise, as he and his men were not granted citizenship by the country they served.

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