Black Gate

My first movie on July 28 was one of my most-anticipated of the festival. In 2017 I watched Gintama, a live-action manga adaptation I thought was one of the funniest things I’d ever laid eyes on, and which also told a good solid science-fictional action-adventure story. Naturally when I saw Gintama 2 was playing at Fantasia I was eager to see it. It is unfortunate that sometimes great expectations result in great disappointment.

The story of Gintama 2, which is titled in full Gintama 2: Rules are Made to be Broken (Gintama 2: Okite wa Yaburu Tame ni Koso Aru, 銀魂2 掟は破るためにこそある) follows the first directly enough. In an alternate reality where extraterrestrials conquered Japan in the nineteenth century, a new society’s sprung up that’s a weird mix of period technology, super-science, Japanese cultural traditions, and aliens. Samurai were discharged from their traditional role, launched a rebellion, and were defeated. One former samurai, Gintoki Sakata (Shun Oguri, Terra Formars), has formed an odd-jobs company with young Shinpachi Shimura (Masaki Suda, Wilderness, Assassination Classroom, Princess Jellyfish) and superstrong teen alien girl Kagura (Kanna Hashimoto, Kingdom, Assassination Classroom). This time out, they become involved with a plot against the shogun, and a scheme that divides their country’s police force, the Shinsengumi.

The main actors from the first movie reprise their roles. Director Yuichi Fukuda returns as well. But the feel of this movie is very different. There’s less comedy, and less focus on the main characters. I have no idea how much this reflects the source material. But I found I was disappointed.

To be clear, this is recognisably a sequel to Gintama. It has a similar look, with outrageously-costumed leads wandering a Japan blending past and future. And there is still a lot of humour, in a similar vein to the original. There are more gross-out gags than in the first film, but not so much as to represent a really different approach. Early on, in particular, we see some of the same kind of metafictional jokes that marked the previous movie.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t last. Instead Gintama 2 turns out to be more interested in the internal strife within the Shinsengumi, to the point that the ostensible leads are largely sidelined. While the film does find some humour in the Shinsengumi storyline, for the most part it’s much more restrained. We get a scheming manipulative villain we’re apparently meant to take seriously, and the riotous pace of the first movie never kicks in.

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For my last movie of July 27 I crossed the street to the De Sève Cinema to take in the French-Swiss co-production Les Particules (The Particles). It’s the first fiction feature by director Blaise Harrison, who co-wrote the script with Mariette Désert. After a day of particularly frenetic movies, this was good way to end the evening; a subtler, atmospheric, intelligent, and character-based film that thoroughly succeeded at what it was trying to do.

The movie follows Pierre-André, or P.A. (Thomas Daloz), an inarticulate older teen in a small town on the Franco-Swiss border. He’s in a band, kind of, or at least has a group of friends; we see them at school, and buying drugs, and taking drugs, and wandering around. We see a romance between P.A. and a chronically ill girl named Roshine (Néa Lüders), and watch their relationship develop. It’s all good slice-of-life storytelling.

Except we also follow P.A. on a school trip into the Large Hadron Collider hundreds of feet below their village. And we come to suspect the installation might be linked to the strange things that happen over the course of the movie, slowly at first, then as the film goes on a little faster and a little more obvious. Reality changes. Things, and characters, disappear. Are the quantum-level forces of the LHC causing the world to change? Or does this have to do with mental illness? Or both?

This is a stunning movie, in its sound and images, but also in the way it brings out the sense of lived experience and everyday life. And then again in the way that everyday life fits into a symbolic pattern, exploring many meanings of ‘particles’ in human existence and in the larger world. So the first shot is a view from above of the countryside as P.A. takes the bus to school: lights of houses, here and there, against the darkness of the night, glowing particles in blackness. And so, later, Christmas tree lights are something similar. So also is snow, as winter and the school year wind on.

But the crucial point, I think, is that the youths we see in the film are particles themselves, fitting into the school system, fitting (or not fitting) into society, bouncing off each other in unexpected collisions. P.A.’s relationship with Roshine is symbolically matter and anti-matter meeting. The hard physics of the LHC provide the underpinning for a metaphor that gives the material of the film some unity.

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My fourth film of July 27 was once again in the Hall Theatre. It was a Russian film about which I had heard very good things, with one web site calling it among the best action movies of the year so far. You may have heard of Chekhov’s gun; well, Why Don’t You Just Die! (Papa, Sdokhni) gives us Chekhov’s gun, along with Chekhov’s other gun, Chekhov’s claw hammer, Chekhov’s power drill, Chekhov’s CRT TV, and any number of Chekhov’s other odds and ends.

Written and directed by Kirill Sokolov, the film opens with a young man before the door of an apartment, nervously contemplating the doorbell, a claw hammer clutched behind his back. His name is Matvey (Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Marten in The Scythian), and he has come to visit Andrey Gennadievitch (Vitaliy Khaev), the father of Matvey’s girlfriend Olya (Evgeniya Kregzhde). Matvey’s got a score to settle with Andrey, or thinks he does. There’s more going on than he knows, though, and after the opening tension explodes into violence things settle down only to open up as more and more characters get drawn into the confrontation.

The film unfolds largely within Andrey’s apartment, with flashbacks now and again showing us background that shapes what goes on. New wrinkles are constantly added, new aspects of character demonstrated. The plot takes on new shapes at unexpected moments. Violence is a leitmotif; beautiful, horrific, entertaining violence.

There is a lot of blood and blood-splatter in this film; there is torture and the threat of torture. It’s all presented with a cartoony verve, but this is not violence for the sake of violence, or violence for the sake of comedy. The movie is in fact very violent and very funny, but uses violence for the sake of story, creating a tension and a tone and, in the end, getting a certain point across. It will not be to all tastes. It very much was to mine.

There’s a temptation to talk about Quentin Tarantino when faced with a violent but clever small-scale crime film. The sense of corruption is probably most like Tarantino; more than brutal men doing brutal things, there is here the feel of a tough world in which everybody’s out for their own interests. But then the characters also, most of them, have redeeming features, too. Goons are also friends. Sometimes. As a result Why Don’t You Just Die! feels more like an early Guy Ritchie film — the Guy Ritchie of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels or Snatch, not the Ritchie of the Sherlock Holmes films. The film’s pacing in particular is like those movies, and how flashbacks are cut in after a bizarre or unexpected plot twist as a way of explaining the twist. But also how people do bad things for good reasons, or what they think are good reasons.

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My third movie of July 27 was a live-action manga adaptation by the dauntless and prolific Shinsuke Sato. Having been thrilled by his previous work in past years (I Am A Hero, Bleach, Inuyashiki, Death Note: Light Up the New World, and Library Wars), I was eager to see something new from him. This year’s offering was Kingdom (Kingudamu, キングダム), which Sato scripted along with Tsutomu Kuroiwa, adapting the manga of the same name by Yasuhisa Hara. As of August, there were 55 volumes of the manga, which had already been adapted into a 77-episode anime. I am not familiar with the source material beyond those statistics, but they suggest that Kuroiwa and Sato had their work cut out for them fitting the story into a two-and-a-quarter-hour movie.

The setting is ancient China, where war swirls among feuding kingdoms. Two orphans are taken as slaves by a wealthy merchant. They grow up dreaming of a better life, and practicing swordplay on their own in the forest near their master’s home. One, Piao (Ryo Yoshizawa, Gintama), is bought by a government minister. Piao’s blood-brother, hothead Xin (Kento Yamazaki, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure), is therefore surprised some time later when a dying Piao returns with a mission for him — and the soldiers who gave Piao his mortal wound hard on his heels. Xin’s launched on a quest that leads him to the young king Ying Zheng, now deposed by a palace coup. The minister who bought Piao had used him as the king’s double, which saved Ying’s life. Now the ambitious Xin wants to keep him alive, and make his own way to a great destiny.

This is a well-told story. It builds nicely, through varied set-pieces that come at key structural points, are executed with flair, and move the story forward. It’s always colourful and fun to look at, though unsurprisingly the costumes show the manga roots of the film: major characters stand out through their eye-catching gear, to the point that we know a general we see at only a couple of points is obviously going to play a major role in the climax. But this fits into the overall tone of the movie, both narratively and visually. The choreography is strikingly effective, which is important, and the humour works, mostly coming in the form of Xin’s aggressive attitude toward just about everything.

If you look carefully, you might notice the film’s not actually as lavish as it seems. There aren’t any major urban scenes, for example. But there’s enough variety generally that you don’t notice any lack. Xin and company explore a lot of different places, and the story feels full to bursting. The sense of a vast kingdom containing a range of people and cultures and landscapes comes across, and that means more is not needed.

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