Black Gate

I had time for one more movie in the Fantasia screening room before I’d head over to the J.A. De Sève Theatre to watch a film called Madeline’s Madeline, an experimental film about a girl in a theatre group struggling to define herself. It’d be the last movie I’d see in the De Sève at this year’s festival, but before it started I opted to watch a Finnish comedy about death metal. (There’s a reason for that choice, involving the final film of the festival; more on that in a few posts.)

Heavy Trip was directed by Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren, who also wrote the movie with Jari Olavi Rantala and Aleksi Puranen. Turo (Johannes Holopainen) is the singer of a four-man death metal band in a northern town in Finland. They’ve been rehearsing for twelve years under the reindeer slaughterhouse owned by the family of guitarist Lotvonen (Samuli Jaskio) — “your playing makes the reindeer want to kill themselves,” they’re told cheerfully. Early in the movie they finally write their first song, though they still don’t have a name when chance brings the promoter of a Norwegian metal festival to the slaughterhouse. Through a series of lies and misunderstandings, the idea percolates through the town that Turo’s band, now calling themselves Impaled Rektum, will be playing the festival. They won’t; but will the band’s newfound fame lead Turo to finally confess his love for Miia (Minka Kuustonen) before she’s stolen away by the local big man, Jouni (Ville Tiihonen)? And what happens when the truth finally comes out?

There’s a pleasant tone to the movie, which is surprisingly quiet for a film about metal. The band members — which also include hellraiser drummer Jynkky (Antti Heikkinen) and a bassist, Pasi (Max Ovaska) AKA Xytrax, with an encyclopedic knowledge of his chosen music genre — are unexpectedly unaggressive. Sometimes that’s taken too far; the running gag of Turo puking whenever he takes the stage is obvious, for example. Still, the band members are at least established as characters, with their main personality traits defined. Unfortunately, they’re then given very little to do.

It feels as though not much happens through the first two thirds of the movie. That’s illusory, to an extent. Characters are introduced, one dies, Turo’s love for Miia is set up, Jouno does his best to ruin the band’s dreams, and so on and so forth. But it’s sluggishly-paced, and not especially interesting. The movie plays things too straight; it’s aware of the absurd things the characters do, but nobody reacts to any of it (I will concede that this might play better with an audience to do the reacting instead). As a character, Turo’s too passive to hold much interest. And the idea of the Norwegian festival is too prominent; one waits for the band to hit the road to go to play a festival, rather than waste time sitting around their hometown. The name of the movie is Heavy Trip, but the trip you’d expect doesn’t come along until the third act.

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I was at the Fantasia screening room early on August 1 to watch a movie I’d missed when it played in a Fantasia theatre: Tigers Are Not Afraid (Vuelven), written and directed by Issa López. I’d heard a number of people around the festival rave about it, and I was intrigued. 10-year-old Estrella (Paola Lara) is a girl in a Mexican city ravaged by drug violence. When her mother goes missing, she falls in with a gang of four boys who live on the street. But their leader, a scarred child named Shine (Juan Ramón López), has stolen a cell phone containing a video incriminating an aspiring local politician (Tenoch Huerta) in brutal criminal activity. Now his cartel’s after them, and death is all around. So, perhaps, is magic; but magic is not always safe.

The first thing to know about this film is that it’s a powerful story. It’s structured well, paced well, and is tremendously inventive. The characters are alive and well-rounded; the actors are excellent, both Lara and López crafting disturbingly real people. It’s a powerful story, too, dealing with primal emotions about love and abandonment and fear and wonder. Visually, it’s precise, opening up at odd moments in odd places, so that the boys’ rooftop camp feels like a sanctuary, or an old house can feel like an elven palace. Special effects are integrated well and push the reality of the film in exactly the right directions. This is an excellent movie. And it is a profound movie, with a lot to say about storytelling and magic and myth.

The film begins with Estrella in class, taking part in a discussion about fairy tales. From the start, then, the movie does not hide its influences; this is a fairy tale of the modern world. My fellow-critic Giles Edwards observed that there’s a Peter Pan–like sense to the film, with Estrella as Wendy; I note that Lord of the Rings is mentioned explicitly a couple of times in the film, and in fact the agents of evil here chase small people who have an item of potential power that can destroy a kind of dark lord — but which they themselves cannot use. At any rate, beyond any one story there’s a kind of syncretic aspect, pulling together all kinds of childhood fables into the story of these very desperate children; a meta–fairy tale, if you like, a story that uses fairy tale elements deliberately, and as part of its affect establishes up front that this is what it’s doing.

That perhaps sounds over-clever, but although this is a very clever movie it’s never too clever, never too cute. One way or another, there is an elegant interweaving of the fantastic and the grimly real. Much of the film seems to be aiming at an effect of the uncanny, where it’s possible to view the magical as merely the improbably coincidental, but I would argue certain shots in the film that are not from Estrella’s point of view preclude that possibility, and in any event I can’t see how to read the conclusion without accepting the magical as literally true. Does that make the movie fantasy or myth or magical realism? I’m not at all sure it matters. What does matter is the skill with which the story’s unfolded. The fantastic’s used with an understanding of its power. It’s something that transfigures the world — which I think is in part the point of the film.

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On Tuesday, July 31, the first movie I planned to see alongside a general audience was a Hong Kong action movie called The Brink. After that, I’d pass by the screening room before heading home. There’d be only two more days of Fantasia after this one, and I wanted to catch up on things I’d missed in theatres. I was specifically curious about a Korean movie called The Outlaws, about a cop who’s working against the clock to catch a Chinese gang who’re trying to take over territory in a district of Seoul. Two promising action movies; I had reasonable hopes for the afternoon.

The Brink (Kuang shou, 狂獸) was directed by Jonathan Li, his first film, and written by Lee Chun-Fai. On the seas just outside Hong Kong, a gold smuggler named Jiang (Shawn Yue, Wu Kong) kills his superior and sets his sights on the big boss of the smuggling ring, a man named Blackie (Yasuaki Kurata, God of War) who rules a ship-board casino just outside Hong Kong waters. Meanwhile, an intense cop named Cheng (Max Zhang, Pacific Rim: Uprising) has set his sights on Jiang — who captures Cheng’s faithful partner A-de (Yue Wu, God of War) to get him to back off. Instead, the plot thickens, drawing Cheng’s boss (Gordon Lam) into the fray. A showdown at sea looms as a typhoon bears down on Hong Kong.

Depending on your tolerance for genre conventions, the movie’s story will seem either clichéd or an exercise in working with reliable tropes. Cheng’s a lone wolf who does things his way, while his boss yells at him to follow the rules. A-de has just one more day on the force. You can see that the whole story’s going to come down to a fight between Chang and Jiang.

Personally, I don’t mind clichés done well, with energy. I think The Brink’s hit-and-miss as far as that goes. The overall structure, establishing Cheng with a fight that goes wrong, then showing Jiang’s viciousness, and going on from there by moving back and forth between the two men — that works well, in theory. The conception of the characters, though, isn’t deep enough. You can’t have a chess-game of an action movie if the players are stereotypes. More effort was needed in imagining the leads.

On the other hand, the actors do their best to elevate the material, or at least make it new. Yue fares a little better than Zhang, probably because he has more to work with in the script. His Jiang’s a guy who came up from nothing through ruthlessness and a feral intelligence; now he sees his chance at a big score, and goes for it. Zhang, by contrast, is charismatic enough, and finds some interesting moments here and there, particularly with one of the few women in the film. Cheng unintentionally gets his partner killed in the movie’s first scene, then enters a kind of semi-paternal relationship with his dead partner’s daughter (Cecilia So); she’s underwritten, with an interesting subplot left underdeveloped, but she at least gives Cheng some desperately needed depth.

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