Black Gate

My second feature film of Saturday, July 13, was at the De Sève Theatre. It was the one-man animated feature Away, by Latvian Gints Zilbalodis. Zilbalodis wrote, directed, edited, animated, designed the sound, and did everything else for this 75-minute wordless fable about a young man trying to cross a mysterious island.

Before it played came “An Eye For An Eye,” a 17-minute animated short from Poland. Written and directed by Julia Ploch, who adapted her own original comic story, it’s about a hero who vanishes and a youth who tries to seek him out. Both characters are frogs, and the hero, the Red Frog, has disappeared after a quest for the secret knowledge held by the mysterious Great Catfish. It’s a structure a little like Telemachus seeking Odysseus, I suppose, but the result’s different.

We see what happened when the Red Frog finds the Catfish, the wounds he suffers and his Jonah-like travails, and get a glimpse of the wisdom he’s learned. That gives the conclusion a powerful heft. The story’s well-told and unpredictable, in (what looks like a) hand-drawn style, sketchy but sinuous, with an understated use of colour. Banners and panels appear on screen with secondary events within them, picture-in-picture storytelling. Dialogue’s replaced by word balloons holding pictures. In a technical sense, it’s a fascinating and effective way to adapt a graphic novel, and the overall story’s a solid and well-structured creation.

Away begins with a youth parachuting into a desert. He’s chased by a shadowy giant to a green oasis in some hills. There, the youth finds a map, a motorbike, and a small curious yellow bird. The map shows us that he’s at one end of an island, and there’s a town at the other end. The youth chooses to get on the bike, with map and bird, and race past the giant. Chased by the dark shape, who is less a physical threat than an entropic force that drains life and energy, the boy tries to reach the town at the far end of the island, passing many strange places along the way.

The movie’s made in an expressive, simplified CGI style with bright but harmonious colours. It’s fluid, with expressive movement and particularly beautiful moments in its sense of scale. The film makes extensive use of long takes, particularly notable when they come in the form of long gliding camera moves tracking across swathes of landscape. Still there’s a constant sense of movement and, dramatically, of a chase — of the need for the youth to keep moving forward. While characters do sometimes feel as though they’re skating over the landscape, or interact with other physical objects in an uncanny fashion, it’s easy to view this as part of the dream-world and dream-logic of the film.

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There’s a critical truism that all art is political. I would prefer to phrase it as “all art can be read politically,” because art has to be interpreted. And no work of art can be read only one way. Individual perspective and changing circumstances will give a work very different meanings, possibly including different political significance. (I once worked out my version of the truism as “all readings of art will depend in part on the reader’s historical and political situation,” which is why I’m not a sloganeer.)

Consider Master Z: Ip Man Legacy (originally 葉問外傳：張天志, romanised as Yip Man ngoi zyun: Cheung Tin Chi). Directed by Yuen Woo-ping, it’s a spin-off from the three Ip Man films that starred Donnie Yen (a producer for this movie), which were loosely based on the life of the kung fu master who taught Bruce Lee. Master Z is the story of one of the masters Ip Man defeated in one of the earlier movies, Cheung Tin Chi (Zhang Jin, also credited as Max Zhang; I’m told this film’s title comes from an alternate way of romanising ‘Cheung’). When we meet him, in Hong Kong in 1961, he’s sunk so far as to have become a semi-principled gangland heavy. As the movie starts, he leaves this life for a more honest path. Complications ensue.

Most particularly, there’s Kit (Kevin Cheng), a hotheaded drug-peddling gangster with a withered arm, and Kit’s sister Kwan (Michelle Yeoh), who leads a crime syndicate she wants to make into an honest organisation despite the corrupt British rule in Hong Kong. After Cheung gets involved in a fight between Kit and a young woman named Julia (Liu Yan) — who’s sticking up for her friend and roommate, the opium addict Nana (Chrissie Chau) — he ends up working in the bar owned by Julia’s brother Fu (Naason), who’s engaged to Nana. Unfortunately, that part of town is where Kit wants to peddle drugs. And what part does restaurateur and community leader Owen Davidson (Dave Bautista) have to play in all this?

Put like that the film may sound complicated or soap-operatic, but in practice it’s all very clear and sets up a plot that’s engagingly complex yet relatively character-centred. The story’s a function of individuals with relatable motivations reacting against each other, and develops accordingly. Those motivations are big bright primary-colour emotions: love, love of power, and revenge. The different relationships among the characters provide complexities and shadings to these motivations, and the variety of strands in the plot are woven with dexterity. If occasionally characters drop out of the film for a time — most notably Cheung’s young son — we don’t notice.

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I’d skipped the first day of the 2019 Fantasia Festival since the only movie I wanted to watch, The Deeper You Dig, played the next afternoon. That gave me three movies on Day 2, and after seeing first an indie horror film made by three people and then an Australian comedy led by a major Hollywood star, I could only wonder what I’d get in the Irish-Danish-Belgian co-production called Vivarium.

Directed by Lorcan Finnegan from a script by Garret Shanley, it was based on a story by Finnegan and Shanley (the same team collaborated on Finnegan’s previous film, Without Name). Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg star as Gemma and Tom, a young childless married couple hoping to buy a home. A strange real estate salesman named Martin (Jonathan Aris) takes them to see a property in a new housing development. The place is eerily perfect and inhuman, the development empty of all other life. Then Martin vanishes, and when Tom and Gemma try to drive away they find geography doesn’t work right; they constantly find themselves back at the front door of the house Martin selected for them, number 9.

Whatever they do, they cannot escape. The streets are a maze that always returns them to the start. Their car eventually runs out of gas. And then a box is delivered, with a baby boy inside, and a note telling the couple that if they raise the child they’ll be allowed to leave. They do start to take care of the infant, but the boy grows quickly into an uncanny child (Senan Jennings) with inhuman reactions. What will he become as an adult? And what will it cost them to see it?

This is a visually striking movie that exploits the formal qualities of CGI and indeed of digital photography. Tom and Gemma are trapped in a world of unreal balloon-clouds; of perfect blue sky and of infinite green houses, their colours boosted just a little, just not quite real. The opening, introducing Gemma at the school where she teaches, is vital in providing a contrast — in showing what the real world looks like. More specifically, the opening shots of the movie show a cuckoo pushing eggs out of the nest it’s claimed; in addition to anticipating the film to come, these first shots are a vivid depiction of actual nature that establishes the sterility of the housing development as a stark opposition to the world of living things.

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My second movie of Fantasia 2019 was in the 750-plus seat Hall Theatre. Little Monsters stars Lupita Nyong’o as a kindergarten teacher who takes her class on a field trip — only to get caught up in a zombie invasion. Written and directed by Abe Forsythe, it’s an occasionally tasteless but surprisingly effective horror-comedy.

The movie begins with an argument between a man and a woman, shown through a montage as one ongoing shouting match over months or years. Quick gags establish that she’s a high-achiever and he isn’t, and that she wants kids while he doesn’t. It’s funny and well-paced, a good way to start the movie and establish the lead character. After the relationship ends in a break-up we follow the man, Dave (Alexander England), as he moves in with his sister and does a terrible job of being a responsible mentor to his nephew Felix (Diesel La Torraca). When Dave falls for Felix’s kindergarten teacher, Miss Caroline (Nyong’o), though, he volunteers to help her lead the class in a field trip to a nearby petting zoo and minigolf course. Which happens to be next door to an American military base. Where the experimental subjects have just gotten loose. Those subjects are of course zombies, and when they swarm the nearby farm Miss Caroline and Dave have to do their best to save the kids — aided, abetted, and more often opposed by children’s entertainer Teddy McGiggles (Josh Gad, the voice of Olaf in Frozen).

It’s a solid comedy film. The jokes are inventive, most of them land, and they’re constructed well: there are set-ups you don’t notice and pay-offs you don’t see coming. This helps tie in the pre-zombie parts of the film to the main course. Themes running through the movie come to the fore under the pressure of action, too. Character is revealed in different ways at different points. Since the humour arises out of recognisable if exaggerated people doing roughly credible things, it’s surprisingly engaging. Add as well solid comic timing, and pacing that always moves quickly and lightly.

There are some jokes that are predictable. Young children are inevitably made to say or see something hideously inappropriate (though not in terms of their exposure to gore, which the movie does not use extensively). Dave’s a loser at the start of the film, so various jokes follow from that. Personally I could have done without seeing Asian tourists with cameras, though one might argue this was not blatantly playing to stereotyped tropes.

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