Black Gate

After taking a day to attend to various non-cinema matters, I came early to the last day of the Fantasia Film Festival. I had two movies I wanted to see in theatres, but first I wanted to catch up on something I’d missed when played on the big screen: the 2019 International Science Fiction Short Film Showcase. Luckily, I was able to watch it at the Fantasia screening room. Uncharacteristically, American shorts dominated this year; in an appropriately science-fictional statistic, 7 of 9 movies were from the US, with one from Australia that ended the showcase (at least in the order described in the Fantasia program) and one from Ukraine that began it.

“Eternity,” directed by Anna Sobolevska from a script by Sobolevska and Alina Semeryakova, is an effective 23-minute tale about a future year 2058 in which dying people can upload themselves into digital worlds designed by a massive corporation. These worlds have been tested by living humans, but for some even the best are pallid copies of the real world. One way or another, nobody wants the simple afterlives provided by the state. Ian (Oleg Moskalenko) is a man who doesn’t buy into the illusions provided by the Charon Corporation. But his wife Marie (Daria Plakhtiy) is thrilled by the cyber-estate they’re offering. Then tragedy strikes, and Ian has to make a series of terrible choices, balancing the desires of both of them with his idea of integrity.

This is an extremely strong film. It looks sharp, to start with; both the grim, shadowy real world and the lushly-hued cyber-fantasies come across well. The acting’s strong, especially from Moskalenko. The story structure’s solid, getting across a complicated science-fictional idea, exploring it with both plot twists and background ideas (Charon is everywhere, it seems), and above all telling a character-centred tale.

What may be most impressive is how many themes are on display here. I read it as a story about a man struggling to hold on to his beliefs in the face of corporate pressure, trying to set aside sterile romanticism but forced into being complicit with the powers that run the world. But then there’s also a lot here about the power of capitalism, especially in opposition to what used to be viewed as transcendental values — Charon sells a simulacrum of heaven, almost but not quite the real thing. So the film’s about life, death, and what’s beyond, and how to meet all these things. And, on top everything else, it’s built around a relationship of man and wife sketched both convincingly and briefly. This is Sobolevska’s first film as both writer and director, and it’s impressive; one hopes to see more from her in future.

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I approached my second and last film of July 30 with real uncertainty. I’d never seen many tokusatsu films or TV shows, and what I had seen I hadn’t cared for. (‘Tokusatsu’ literally means something like ‘special effects,’ but in the West it’s come especially to refer to shows like Power Rangers or Kamen Rider.) Still, playing in the De Sève Cinema was Garo — Under the Moonbow (Garo: gekkô no tabibito, 牙狼 — 月虹ノ旅人, also translated Garo: Moonbow Traveler), written and directed by Keita Amemiya. It’s the latest installment of a franchise, created by Amemiya, which began with a 2005 TV series and has continued through more TV shows, live-action movies, and anime series. as well as video games, manga, and various other tie-ins. A veteran creator of tokusatsu dramas, Amemiya is particularly known for his powerful design sense, and the images and description of the film promised a stylish fantasy adventure. Although it’d be my first experience with a series that had dozens of hours of continuity behind it, I decided it was worth passing up a chance to see The Crow on the big screen in order to watch Under the Moonbow.

The movie’s about Reiga Saezima (Masei Nakayama), one of an order of warriors, the Makai Knights, who protect humanity from monsters called Horrors. Superhumanly powerful, he becomes even stronger when wearing his suit of special golden armour — which is unfortunately corrupted by evil not long after the movie opens. Saezima has to purify it, but also must save his true love (Natsumi Ishibashi), who has been abducted by Horrors. Yet as he fights his way through a bizarre train, even more plots boil away, leading ultimately to a fantastic battle involving secrets of his lineage.

The first thing to say is that the film’s easily understood without any prior knowledge of the franchise. I suspect that the climax will have more weight for people familiar with the world and with certain characters who appear there, but everything’s set up well enough in the film itself. Exposition’s delivered cleanly, and does not overbalance the plot. The complexities of the world are dramatised well, and if in an absolute sense evil still remains to be fought, at least the main antagonist of this particular story is dealt with.

Beyond that, the plot’s nicely-worked. The tale keeps expanding as the film goes on, sprouting subplots. A range of characters get moments of their own in which to shine; everyone does something important in bringing matters to a happy ending. Rules of this fantasy are established, and followed logically in ways that bring out unexpected wrinkles. Importantly, new ideas and images are always emerging,

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My first movie on July 30 was the first feature by two French directors of independent short films, Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel. Jessica Forever, which the duo wrote as well as directed, is set in a near future in which disaffected and violent youth, mostly male, roam empty suburbs. The law hunts them down with killer drones, and the movie opens with a cloud of drones after one man, Kevin (Eddy Suiveng), who has squatted in an empty house. He’s saved from the law by a mysterious woman named Jessica (Aomi Muyock) and her squad of young men, who welcome Kevin into the fold.

Various bonding scenes follow, but the emotions of the group are odd: muted, to the extent they exist at all. The young men, each in their late teens or twenties, sleep in one room. All worship Jessica. Kevin makes a smooth transition to becoming one of them, training with them in the use of weapons and force. Then another flock of drones approaches, and there’s a surprising death, and the survivors have to flee. They end up on an island, where history risks repeating itself: some members of the group get too close to the locals. Will they find new allies? Or pull the attention of the authorities down on their heads?

The first thing to say about the movie is that it looks lovely. Images are nicely composed, the camera mostly still (it struck me at one point that it seemed to move more when Jessica was in frame, but I wouldn’t swear to that). There’s a kind of sterile perfection in the images of rich estates and partly-green suburbs, emphasised by the lack of people — we see cars and trucks in the distance, see a mall with passersby in it, meet a community on the island where Jessica’s group ends up, but mostly the world is empty of outsiders, of passersby or neighbours. There is a solitude here; a silence and a stillness.

Along with that there’s an affectlessness to both the characters and actors. There’s a blankness to them that’s maybe less an absence of emotion than an absence of a certain kind of social convention. You don’t know how to read them. This all fits perfectly well with the film’s set-up: these are young men gone wild, grown up outside of family or community, learning how to interact with each other. Their only guide, their teacher and parent, is Jessica. Who she is, and why she is gathering these men, is not explained; this is not the sort of film that explains these things. The important thing is that her relationship to her followers comes through, and for the most part it does.

I would go so far as to say that one of the most intriguing aspects of the film is the way it depicts its characters. These youths are convincingly violent, and many of them have done terrible things. But they don’t act the way this sort of character acts in virtually every other movie set in the contemporary world. These aren’t tough-guy hard men trying to assert dominance by busting each others’ balls. They’re quiet, if not reflective, and give each other space and respect. There’s a kind of alternative masculinity to these men, strong and capable of violence but not brutal.

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The last of the four movies I had on my schedule for July 29 promised to be interesting on any number of levels. Son of the White Mare (Fehérlófia) is an animated film made in 1981 by Hungarian Marcell Jankovics, directed by him from a script he wrote with László György. It’s based on the work of poet László Arany and folktales of the Magyars and Avars; Jankovics, who has published 15 books on comparative mythology, picked and chose from among the various versions of the tale to create what he wanted — a weird, protean, eye-popping, archetypal light show.

The version presented at Fantasia was a new 4K restoration of the movie. Hundreds of hours went into cleaning and colour-grading the film, with the participation of Jankovics. When the movie originally came out it was not a box-office success, but it has since gained a high (and thoroughly deserved) reputation among animation fans; the restoration’s an important project, and the results are beautiful, doing the colours justice.

The story itself is a fairy-tale: a king and queen are deposed, and the queen in the shape of a white horse gives birth to a boy who grows into a hero by drinking her milk. He sets out to find his brothers and destroy the dragons who overthrew his father’s rule. This entails a long journey into a mysterious underworld, where he must rescue captive princesses, slay the dragons, and return.

Beyond the subject matter, the structure’s a fairy-tale as well. It’s generally cyclical, beginning with a child in a deep dark forest and ending with the restoration of the idyllic state of things before the saga began. The rule of threes is everywhere: three brothers, three princesses, three dragons. It begins with “Once upon a time” and ends with “they lived happily ever after.”

But then the way it’s made is something else again. The animation’s expressionistic, mostly in primary colours without black contour lines, shapes frequently neon-bright and often against dark backgrounds, sometimes strobing from one hue to another. The designs are almost Blakean, mixed with elements of art-nouveau.

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