Critic Farah Mendlesohn introduced the term ‘portal fantasy’ in her 2008 book Rhetorics of Fantasy to describe stories in which a protagonist leaves their home and enters a new, larger, magical world. I’ve seen the term used often to refer to a specific subtype of these fantasies, in which a protagonist from conventional reality passes through a portal to a fictional realm and proceeds to quest about and have adventures. The rise of this more specific definition is not entirely surprising, given how common that kind of story is, perhaps especially with younger protagonists. Either sort of portal fantasy can present a character, confronted with a new and strange world, with an opportunity to grow and change. Or, instead, can be about reification of the character’s previous identity — a locking-in of who they are, after the success of a quest that aims to stop a bad change form occurring.

Such is A Costume For Nicolas, an animated film from Mexico. It’s directed by Eduardo Rivero and written by Miguel Uriegas, based on the book Pablo y El Baúl by Jaime Mijares (there’s an English version and a Spanish version, Un Disfraz para Nicolas; Fantasia presented the English version). The studio that made it, Fotosintesis Media, has a mission to create positive “social impact,” and so this film is a fantasy following Nicolas, a young boy with Down syndrome, voiced by a young actor with Down syndrome, Fran Fernández.

The condition’s not named onscreen, but informs the character: 10-year-old Nicolas is who he is, a happy child raised by his mother (voice of pop star Paty Cantú), who makes him costumes and tells him stories about a fantasyland where a powerful but mysterious wizard dispelled nightmares at a high cost. When Nicolas must go to live with his grandparents and his cousin David, he not only has to fit in at a new home and a new school, he also must stop the monster feeding on David’s nightmares — which leads both boys into the fantasy world of Nicolas’ mother’s stories. There, his costumes become a magic which gives them a hope of completing a quest to save the world and free David from nightmare.

It’s a lovely film that fundamentally works. It’s colourful and imaginative, the 2D animation always bright and energetic. The designs are excellent, particularly in the fantasyworld with its castles and magic. The human characters are good pieces of design, too, with expressive faces and figures a little like the adult humans of Calvin & Hobbes.

The story’s a little oddly structured, in that it’s a bit slow to get to the fantasyworld, and once it does it takes place almost entirely in that other realm. In other words, it doesn’t try to balance the two realities. But this works surprisingly well — Rivero and Uriegas perhaps understand that once we get fully into a story’s fantasy world, returning to a mimetic world can be a hard sell. The delayed gratification of the fantasy here may be tough for young children, clearly the primary audience of the film, who must wait for the really wondrous parts. But then again, it also means the film builds to its most spectacular moments, giving us a chance to get used to its visual style and to live with the characters.

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The Fantasia Film Festival usually runs around three weeks, but 2020 and its myriad of challenges meant this year’s festival lasted only two-thirds of that. Time moves fast, faster still during Fantasia, and so it came about that with a sudden shock I found myself in the final hours. I had three on-demand movies still to watch that I hadn’t gotten to, and only one on a fixed schedule, my first of the last day.

That film was called Fugitive Dreams, and it was directed and scripted by Jason Neulander from a play by Caridad Svich. It opens in an abandoned gas station where a Black woman, Mary (April Matthis) is about to slit her wrists in the ladies’ room. At which point a White man named John (Robbie Tann) bursts in, grabs some toilet paper, and almost incidentally stops her suicide attempt. The two of them, neither entirely mentally healthy, become squabbling comrades as they set out across what appears to be an empty midwestern America, sometimes riding the rails like hobos in old movies.

The exact era of the story’s difficult to pin down; after drive-in movies have been around a while, but probably before cell phones and the internet. On their journey John and Mary meet other drifters, including the menacing Israfel (Scott Shepherd) and his mute mother Providence (O-Lan Jones). Interleaved with this story are dreams, visions, and memories — along with lies and questions, notably about John’s background and parentage. It all makes for a surreal road movie without a real destination.

Most of the movie is stunning high-contrast black-and-white, and it’s quite striking — like an older film in its lighting, but a modern one in its visual storytelling. Some dreamlike segments are in colour, and while they look fine, other than a recurring image of a poppy field none of them quite match the stark beauty of the wide-open monochrome spaces, or of a nighted conversation in a shuddering boxcar. The acoustic soundtrack’s a fine match for the imagery, emphasising the way the film aims at evoking classic Americana. Old movies are referred to in dialogue, a kind of imagined paradise for John, and the sense of a road-trip film is very strong.

So are the religious overtones, visible in the names of the characters, and in the choice of an abandoned church for the film’s climax. But to what end is less clear. The empty church echoes the empty landscapes of the film, and hints at the characters’ abandonment by God; if you see them as searching for the divine, it’s certainly a downbeat symbol. But it’s a little unclear what the characters actually are seeking. A home, perhaps, but that’s left underdeveloped.

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Science fiction has strong historical links to the adventure genre, but ideas-oriented science fiction tends to move away from adventure. Adventure fiction typically focusses on individual protagonists doing world-altering things, and a science fiction backdrop makes for a fictional world susceptible to alteration. But much actual social change is driven by organisations and groups, and science fiction that wants to talk about ideas usually acknowledges that. At the extreme you get something like Asimov’s early Foundation stories: tales in which the inevitable working-out of sociological forces are at the centre of the story, not the actions of a single hero. It’s not impossible to balance a quest-story about a single protagonist with a realistic portrayal of a world defined by its social structures, but tales that pull off both aspects are worth noting.

Which brings me to writer-director Noah Hutton’s Lapsis, an excellent near-future science fiction film that does both things very well indeed. Not too long from now, the quantum internet connects the world. To make the quantum computing systems work, cablers need to connect long cables between large cube-shaped nodes. These nodes are built in wilderness areas, so cablers have to walk through the woods trailing a wire behind them. They get paid well for this, in gig-economy fashion: if you have a cabler medallion, you log into an account, select a path, and take your cable along the path. You have to hurry to get the cable laid before a bot passes you by and steals the route, though, for if that happens you don’t get the points that’ll give you your payout.

Ray (Dean Imperial) is a blue-collar deliveryman whose boss gets busted, necessitating a search for a new job. Ray’s got a brother, Jaimie (Babe Howard) who he loves dearly but who suffers from a terrible fatigue-related condition, and to pay for an experimental treatment Ray strikes a deal with an underworld connection to get an under-the-counter cabling medallion. Cabling’s harder work than Ray expected, but things get really weird when he logs in to the account associated with the medallion — and finds a hoard of points already there. And finds other cablers grow hostile at the mention of his account’s name. Ray’s got to solve the mystery of the account, support his brother’s treatment, stay out of jail, and succeed at laying cable through a forest filled with people who seem to get stranger the farther he goes.

This is an excellent set-up, and Hutton explores it with profound intelligence and creativity. He has a background in documentary film, including two films about the oil industry and an ongoing project about an attempt to build a computerised simulation of a human brain; this perhaps helped him develop a future world that feels so deeply real. Lapsis is a thorough and solid extrapolation of the modern world, not just in terms of the macro scale of the class system and the gig economy, but in smaller stuff like the cheerful interface for the cablers’ accounts. Or the way the sharing economy has expanded to the point people rent storage space in their garage.

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The Court Jester (Paramount 1956)

Swashbuckler heroes tend to be boisterous and aggressively cheerful, embracing whatever life throws at them, not reacting so much as over-reacting to every joy and challenge, happy to be outside the constraints that keep normal folk like us from picking up apples in the grocery by impaling them on the points of our swords. Swashbuckler films often have comic overtones because it fits the character of their devil-may-care protagonists. And some swashbuckler movies take the plunge into outright parody. Here are two of the latter, plus an immediate predecessor that helped pave the way.

The Flame and the Arrow

Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1950
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Source: Warner Bros. DVD

Burt Lancaster burst onto the Hollywood scene in 1946 playing a tender tough guy in The Killers, a dark film noir based on a Hemingway story, and he soon earned a reputation for excelling at edgy, dramatic roles. But before Hollywood, and before his service in World War II, Lancaster had been… a circus performer. In the 1930s he was one-half of Lang & Cravat, a comical acrobatic act with his diminutive partner and lifelong friend Nick Cravat, who, as part of his shtick, never said a word, leaving all the snappy patter to Lancaster.

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Tone is one of the most important characteristics of a story, one of the hardest to get right, and one of the hardest to discuss. The feel of a story, what is above and beyond the mechanics of plot or the construction of character or even the specifics of imagery, is a large part of what comes to mind when you think of a story after the story’s done. And tone can be the main concern of a storyteller; it’s a perfectly valid artistic choice to subordinate narrative logic or character motivation or whatever else to the feel the story’s supposed to instill. Or, at least, it’s a valid choice when it works. Which brings up the difficulty in describing tone. It’s often hard to explain what creates it and how well that succeeds, but more, the perception of tone can vary wildly. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. Particularly when the tone is abstract.

Which is all useful to remember in viewing Laurin. A German production shot in Hungary, it was written and directed by Robert Sigl and released in 1988. A 4K restoration’s drawn attention to the movie, and this year’s Fantasia hosted its Canadian premiere. The movie aspires to the tone of a dream or a fable, and whether it succeeds will likely depend on the individual viewer.

It’s set in a small town in Europe in the very early twentieth century. People have begun to disappear, particularly children. Laurin (Dóra Szinetár) is a young girl whose mother has died a bizarre death, and whose father is absent at sea. She’s drawn into the mystery of the missing youths, investigating castle ruins and a mysterious man in black.

And that’s essentially the movie. It aims at creating a dreamlike tone more than a tight dramatic plot, and at only 84 minutes, that’s not unreasonable. It is very slow, and the story simple. Dialogue’s mostly underwritten. Does it work? I would say some aspects, certainly. For me the movie was undermined by its way of telling its story. But that approach is probably central to what the film’s doing, and it’s possible I’m overly concerned with a narrative structure in which Laurin itself is less invested. There is the raw matter for a structured story here, but the movie is more interested in tone than structure. If you can put aside the desire to follow the development of a story and instead dwell in the moment of what you see, that tone might be enough for you.

To go into more detail, let’s start with what clearly works. The film’s gorgeous. There’s an intense autumnal atmosphere in the rich colours of the woodlands and the deep shadows of the night photography. Interiors of homes have the close, overstuffed feel of the late Victorian era (or, in this case, early Edwardian). Contrasting with both is a schoolroom setting that is appropriately muted and drab. There’s a lushness too in the detailed costumes, as there is in the movie’s use of long shots of forests and stone ruins. Note also that despite the feverish tone that emerges there are no special effects to challenge the mood.

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