Black Gate

The Duellists (UK, 1977)

In the wake of the surprise success of Richard Lester’s 1973-74 Musketeers movies, there was a spate of swashbuckler films in the mid to late Seventies attempting to replicate Lester’s success — some by Lester himself. The trend peaked in 1977 with a trio of notable films all based, like The Three Musketeers, on classic Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction. The Salkind brothers, who’d produced Lester’s Musketeers films, tried again with Crossed Swords, based on Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper and following Lester’s example with another all-star ensemble cast. Britain’s ITV, which had done well a couple of years before with an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo starring Richard Chamberlain (The Three Musketeers’ Aramis), followed up with another Dumas adaptation, The Man in the Iroin Mask, also starring Chamberlain. Best of all was a movie not inspired by the Musketeers films, though it did use their outstanding fight director, Bill Hobbs: The Duellists, directed by Ridley Scott in the vein of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975). Let’s check them out.

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“Reklaw” is a 12-minute short by Polaris Banks, starring Lance Henriksen playing somewhat against type as the pacifist ringleader of a group of talented vigilantes who drive around trying to keep people out of jail by destroying evidence before the police arrive. We learn this through watching one specific case where they attempt to save a woman from the law only for violence to rear its head. The film moves well, with an interesting structure and a few clever ideas, and there’s a good mix of men-at-work humour with serious commentary on society. But the backstory’s opaque, and probably could have used more room to breathe. There’s an interesting idea here, which could make a feature film or a TV show (and indeed Banks has said the short’s a proof of concept), but is probably not displayed at its best in a single 12-minute short.

Bundled with the short was Yakuza Princess. It’s a Brazilian film, from director Vicente Amorim, who co-wrote with Kimi Lee, Tubaldini Shelling, and Fernando Toste. They were working from a graphic novel called Samurai Shiro, by Danilo Bayreuth, which I have not read. It’s an action movie based in the Japanese community of Sao Paolo, Brazil.

20 years ago there was a massacre of a Yakuza clan in Japan. Today, Akemi (Masumi) is a young woman in Sao Paulo’s large Japanese community who has grown up studying swordplay but unaware of certain key truths about her family. Elsewhere in the city, a young man (Johnathan Rhys-Meyers) with amnesia, nasty battle-scars, and a katana wakes up in a hospital. The film proceeds to bring these things together, with a healthy dose of gunplay and swordfighting.

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Things That Go Bump In the East 2021 was this year’s iteration of Fantasia’s regular showcase of short genre films from Asia. This year brought a collection of eight films from six countries, including the US (“for a dash of diasporic bedevilment,” as the Fantasia program notes observed).

It started with “Chewing Gum” (“Chingum”), from India. It’s an 18-minute piece directed by Mihir Fadnavis, who co-wrote with Srinivas Annamraju. One stormy full moon night, a deceitful man boards a train. But something’s in there with him. And it demands a kind of tribute: chewing gum. He flees, and the monster pursues, and the farther he goes, by whatever means of transport, the faster it follows. This is an incredibly well-done film in black-and-white — mostly black, in fact, as Pratik Shah’s cinematography covers the screen in gorgeous shadows, pushing the classic horror atmosphere. I’ll note that I’ve seen an intriguing review (confirmed by an official synopsis of the film for another festival) that points out a political subtext I didn’t catch; it’s another layer to a stunningly well-crafted spooky film about a supernatural nighttime pursuit, with a subtle soundtrack and a splendid build.

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The Villeneuve Dune is breathtaking. I was literally having trouble breathing during the closing scenes. While I watched, I kept mulling over why this version works so well and Lynch’s fails so badly. Lynch is a genius; he had a strong cast; he had enormous financial resources to deploy.

Villeneuve might just be more in touch with this kind of story. (Despite the POV drifting in and out of consensus reality, Dune is not Eraserhead.) But a more important factor is time.

Lynch’s Dune was 137 minutes long in its theatrical cut. Villeneuve’s Dune is nearly 20 minutes longer and it only takes the audience near (but not quite all the way) to the end of the novel’s Book One, covering less than half the story. The completed version could easily run to more than 6 hours. Lynch simply wouldn’t have been allowed to create a movie that massive in the mid-80s.

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