Black Gate

For my third movie of July 21 I wandered back to the Fantasia screening room. There, I settled in with a movie from the Philippines: Ode To Nothing. Written and directed by Dwein Ruedas Baltazar, it follows Sonya (Marietta Subong), a woman no longer young who owns her own funeral home in an unnamed town. Alone except for her father, Rudy (Joonee Gamboa), Sonya tries to keep the funeral home going despite debts to local loan shark Theodore (Dido Dela Paz). Then a body is brought to her for burial under suspicious circumstances. Rather than bury the corpse, though, Sonya begins to speak to it, and comes to think that the body of the old woman is bringing her luck — even to treat the body as her surrogate mother. Is the corpse responsible for the sudden influx of business to the funeral home? And even if it is, can you trust the gifts of the dead?

Ode to Nothing is a fascinating film that continually does things you don’t expect, quietly and slowly. That quiet and slowness is a key part of how it works. It’s shot beautifully, in long lingering takes and wide shots, with muted colours dominated by a dull green. A character takes a flight of stairs out of frame, and rather than move or cut to follow the camera stays where it is, focussed on the stairs; and you can tell the movie works because by that point the audience is invested enough to stay focussed on the stairs as well, waiting for the character to return.

Worth emphasising the visual power of the film, because it is so static for so long. I noted the first camera move at about the 19-minute mark, just after the corpse is brought to Sonya, meaning the dead body paradoxically seems to give the film a new kind of life. But Ode to Nothing always gives us interesting things to look at, things for the camera to linger on. Sonya rarely leaves the funeral home, or at least we don’t follow her outside except once, so the massive building becomes a key part of the film. To call it a character in its own right isn’t quite correct; it’s a corpse in its own right, old and slowly rotting away in tropical heat and humidity, every piece of flaking paint caught in deep focus. But it is also a literal home, with odd knickknacks and embalming paraphernalia and floral arrangements Sonya can’t sell and tape players which produce echoes of a Chinese pop song Sonya loves to listen to. And at no point is the place spooky or horrific. Merely sad, and quietly run-down.

Dialogue is minimal — the first word is spoken 9 minutes into the 92-minute film — but movies the story forward nicely. If the film allows things to happen for reasons that are at first obscure, before long it becomes clear who’s doing what why, and it always makes a kind of character-based sense. The story is not especially complex, but is based in character, and those characters are engaging enough that we follow them even when they seem to be doing nothing in particular. We get to know them deeply, without dialogue or particularly dramatic action, just by the way they go about their day, staring out a window or doing dishes.

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For my second film of July 21 I stayed at the De Sève Theatre to watch one of my more anticipated movies of the festival. Each year Fantasia plays a Shaw Brothers film on 35mm — not one of the Shaw classics, usually, but one of their stranger works. The past few years I’ve seen Demon of the Lute, Buddha’s Palm, Flame of the Martial World, and Bastard Swordsman, as well as Five Fingers of Death. This year we got to see The Boxer’s Omen (Mo, 魔), from 1983, directed by Kuei Chih-Hung from his own story as scripted by Szeto On. Technically a sequel to Kuei’s film Gu, the English title hints at some of its influences: a bit of The Omen, a bit of Rocky, and a lot of low-budget exploitation film.

When Hong Kong gangster Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei) sees his brother crippled in a match with a cheating Thai kickboxer, Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung Sze), he travels to Thailand to challenge the evildoer to a revenge match. While there, weird visions lead him to a Buddhist monastery. It turns out that in previous lives Chan and the recently-deceased abbot were twins. This is a problem for Chan. The abbot killed the student of an evil wizard (Elvis Tsui), leading the wizard to then kill him with a spell that will now go on to kill Chan due to his linkage to the aforesaid abbot. Chan learns this from talking to the dead abbot, and after some confusion decides to become a monk to be able to defeat the wizard — but what of his match against the kickboxer who crippled his brother? And what about the wizard’s three living students?

This description of the plot barely hints at how bizarre, dreamlike, and transgressive this film is, but ideally gives an idea of how much scope there is for mystical goings-on. Rituals and spells are depicted with loving care, even when grotesque or indeed outright disgusting. But then a flashback in which the abbot fights the student and master wizards is simply surprising, as the duels involve crystals and puppets and wall-crawling and lurid lighting. On the other hand, an extended sequence shows the wizard’s students preparing a spell of revenge, which involves each of them eating and regurgitating food for the others to then ingest — and goes on from there, creating a demon inside a crocodile corpse, who Chan eventually must defeat. That of course comes at the climax of the film, in an ancient temple in Nepal, when Chan must engage in a magical fight unlike any I have ever seen.

What is most strange about the film is how it doesn’t feel like a straight-ahead exploitation film. Theoretically it should. There’s the gross-out bits, there’s a couple of violent kickboxing scenes, there’s a fair amount of nudity. And yet there’s also something else going on. I’ve seen some writers compare the film to Jodorowsky, and maybe that’s reasonable for the weirdness of it.

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My first film at Fantasia on July 21 was actually two films put together. In 2009 Atsuya Uki released a 25-minute short he’d written and directed, called “Cencoroll,” based on a one-shot manga he’d written and illustrated. The short was well-received, and over the last decade he’s created a 50-minute follow-up. The two movies have now been released as one, Cencoroll Connect (Senkorōru, センコロール コネクト). They work together as one story, but I wonder, never having seen the original “Cencoroll” on its own, whether the first short would have left more room for an audience’s imagination to work.

The story begins with a giant amorphous monster appearing in a town in the north of Japan, where a young man named Tetsu (Hiro Shimono) already has a smaller monster that can change shape, Cenco, as a kind of pet. But Shu (Ryohei Kimura), another young man with yet another creature, has schemes for the giant newcomer. Into this mix comes Yuki (Kana Hanazawa, Night Is Short, Walk On Girl) a classmate of Tetsu who finds out about Cenco — and who turns out to have a unique gift of her own.

That sets up the plot of the first short, which unsurprisingly ends with a massive fight scene. The second (spliced seamlessly after the first) then expands from there, adding new factions, explaining Shu’s background, and giving some new context to the power Yuki displayed. It doesn’t play like two disconnected stories; the first film serves well as an explosive if somewhat long first act, while the second film feels like the logical continuation. I would not have guessed the two parts of the story were created a decade apart.

It’s solid work, well-animated, though at times a bit small-scale. Massive brawls in the middle of a city feel empty, where you’d expect to have more involvement from police or the armed forces (though it has to be said there’s an implied explanation in some of what we learn in part two). Cencoroll Connect makes up for that with fluidity of motion, and the way the inhuman monsters attack and respond and react to things around them in human ways that convey emotion through movement.

I don’t think there’s anything spectacularly original in either the story or the designs, but the animation gives the story a fair amount of energy. There’s an odd lack of colour in the film, or at least an overall cool palette. This perhaps emphasises the prosaic setting for the various monster fights — the film never leaves the city setting for long, and battles take place in city streets and a school rooftop and the tip of a skyscraper. But if the tone of the climax gains from an increasing darkness, visually the movie is overall, if not dull, at least neutral in places where you’d expect it to pop.

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