Black Gate

My second film of July 28 screened at the De Sève Cinema. It was an animated film from Korea with a Japanese director, Takahiro Umehara, and it was stunning. Watching early scenes of The Moon in the Hidden Woods (Sup-e Sum-eun Dal, 숲에 숨은 달) I wondered where the movie could go from its opening act — it had already shown us a major city, fights, desert nomads, monsters, a wild variety of costumes and architecture and technologies and designs. Surely, I thought, it would have to slow down. It did; and then built back up again.

Long ago, in another world, the moon disappeared and its place was usurped by Muju, the red sky. The world’s been wasting away ever since, but as the film proper opens there is another usurpation, as the ambitious Count Tar claims a throne and the rightful Princess, Navillera, flees rather than be forced to marry him (voice talent for the film includes Lee Jihyon, Jung Yoojung, and Kim Yul, but I cannot find a cast list attaching actors to roles). In the metropolis of Trade City she comes across a drumming contest, and falls in with one of the rival groups, which is led by a youth named Janggu (the word, incidentally, for a specific kind of Korean drum). Helped by Janggu’s allies they flee through a wasteland where terrible Shadows come out under the red sky, and end up at the drummers’ village — where they find a clue that hints at the salvation of the world, to be found deep within the mysterious Hidden Woods.

The movie’s not just constantly visually creative, but a fascinating mix of sensibilities. There’s a post-apocalyptic feel here, as this world has been rebuilt in the shadow of a great tragedy, but there is also steampunk in its technology. And a traditional mythic fantasy feel in the way the social structure’s set up (the casual acceptance of monarchy, for example) and in the use of elements like music and community ritual. Above all the worldbuilding is incredibly rich in the way different places are not just designed differently but also mix different visual elements. Cities feel like cities, with a variety of fashions and cultures.

Character design is relatively realistic, but with a cartooniness that plays well in comic moments. Still, this is far from the anime approach of simply-drawn characters against a hyper-realistic background. The film’s all of a piece, and there’s an almost relaxing reliance on traditional 2D drawn imagery over 3D CGI. There is some well-used computer imagery, but the look of the movie’s traditional. It is in fact a thoroughly well-done children’s or YA film, something that plays well for adults but (I would think) particularly speaks to a younger audience. Navillera and Janggu are our leads, the people about whom the tale revolves. The other characters are well-drawn, but relatively uncomplicated. There is a slight implication of some of the adult characters having a relationship that might play differently to older viewers, in terms of their emotional tone, but that’s left understated.

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I’ve watched Rollerball (1975) at least a couple of times every decade since I first saw it on VHS in 1988. Before then, I had caught sporadic bursts of ultra-violence set to the contrasting strains of Toccata in D Minor and Adagio whenever the film was shown late at night on TV, and when my mum was unaware I was watching it.

It’s a great example of growing up with a film. We all have films that resonate with us on a personal level; films that we saw as impressionable teens and then revisited as allegedly wiser adults. With Rollerball, when I was younger it was all about skipping through the ‘boring corporate’ stuff and watching the games; reveling in the bone-crunching impacts, the frenetic energy and realism of the sport’s depiction.

In later years, as I grew out of my empathy-less youth, the party scenes laden with hollow bacchanalia and culminating in the tree burning scenes, and Moonpie’s inevitable yet devastating fate affected me deeply.  Now, older, battle-scarred and tainted by the cynicism of modern living, it’s the corporate stranglehold on life that interests me, that and the knowing glances between every character in the film who seem to be working together to make Jonathan E fail.

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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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