Black Gate

The only film I planned to see on Wednesday, July 18 was called Cam. Directed by Daniel Goldhaber from a script written by Isa Mazzei, it tells the story of a woman named Alice (Madeline Brewer, of The Handmaid’s Tale and Orange is the New Black) who works as an erotic webcam performer under the name of Lola — until she finds her account stolen by parties unknown. As Alice investigates she finds it’s more than just her financial information or identity that’s been stolen; someone who looks and sounds exactly like her is performing as Lola in her place, and this Lola is breaking all the rules Alice established for herself as a performer. Alice investigates and tries to regain control of her life, driving the story toward a brutal conclusion.

The first thing that must be said about this film is that it is structured perfectly. It’s only 94 minutes long, but it gets across a lot of information and introduces us to a lot of characters — Alice’s friends and rivals among her co-workers; some of her customers; and her family (who don’t know what she does for a living). The plot’s laser sharp: we spend the first third learning about Alice’s life as a performer, getting to understand the environment, and seeing how she plans her shows for the sake of getting her clients to give her tokens which move her up the ranking of women on the webcam service. Then she loses control of her account, and has to find out what’s going on, and her actions are exactly what you’d expect — talking to her friends, suspecting her rivals, trying to deal with the company, trying to report her problems to the cops (who don’t understand, and one of whom tries to hit on her). This is a mystery, and her investigation gets more and more desperate, setting up the final third of the film in which there’s another slight shift of genre as Alice finds out what’s happening and tries to deal with it. The ending’s unexpected, tense, and thoroughly solid.

It is probably worth noting — as it was in the Fantasia program — that Mazzei’s a former camgirl, meaning that she’s writing from a place of knowledge. Issues relevant to sex workers (as when Alice’s family finds out what she does, and the consequences that follow from that) are used well, and the depiction of Alice’s job is appropriately everyday: it’s a job, with things she likes and things she doesn’t, and some co-workers she gets along with and some she doesn’t, and regular customers good and bad, and all the rest of it. I don’t think the film’s especially celebratory of the work, but one does get a bit of a sense of why Alice keeps at it: she has an outlet for her creativity and performative drive.

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I had one film on my schedule for Tuesday, July 17. It was a Japanese movie called Room Laundering, which looked like an odd fusion of comedy and horror. I wasn’t too sure what to make of it from the program description, but sometimes it’s the films that don’t lend themselves to easy description that’re the most rewarding. And so here.

Room Laundering (Rûmu rondaringu, ルームロンダリング) was directed by Kenji Katagiri, and co-written by Katagiri with Tatsuya Umemoto. The father of Miko (Elaiza Ikeda) died and her mother vanished when she was a child; after her grandmother dies when she’s 18, her uncle Goro (Joe Odagiri) takes her in and she begins to make a living as a room launderer. Japanese law requires landlords to tell prospective tenants if the previous tenant of an apartment died through murder or suicide, which would tend to cut demand for the unit — but the law doesn’t say they have to tell any further tenant beyond the first one following the death. Thus, Miko: she takes the apartment for a couple of days, counting as a tenant and relieving the landlord of their legal obligation. One problem emerges, and that is that Miko can see ghosts. They’re not very scary to her, though, as they can’t really do anything to the physical world, and on the whole are sad rather more than angry. But they do ask her to do things for them. One middle-aged punk rocker (Kiyohiko Shibukawa) wants her to send in an old demo tape to a record company, which he didn’t have the nerve to do when he was alive. A dead woman not too much older than Miko (Kaoru Mitsumune) wants her to find out who killed her — and here a mystery plot emerges. But there’s another mystery, as well: what happened to Miko’s mother? And beyond that — what’s her uncle Goro hiding? And can Miko, forbidden by her boss from associating with her neighbours, make a connection with the shy young man next door?

For all the mysteries, though, and for all the untimely deaths, this is a surprisingly light and charming film. My first reaction after it was over was that it was an unlikely fusion of Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain and Ringu, but much more the former than the latter — it takes place in Japan, and there is a ghost that wants people to be exposed to a tape, but beyond that it’s much more Amélie, if slightly more melancholic. The world in this film is improbable and sad, but the people are often surprisingly supportive. Not universally, but frequently. And, crucially, there’s a sense of the absurd in which the film takes a kind of life-affirming joy.

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Monday July 16 was an odd day, beginning with the neorealist neo-noir Neomanila and going off in different directions from there. First would come a time-travel comedy from New Zealand, Mega Time Squad. Then a movie that was a kind of pre-apocalyptic film, I Have a Date With Spring, from South Korea. The directors of both the two later movies would be present to take questions.

The director and writer of Mega Time Squad is Tim Van Dammen. His movie’s about Johnny (Anton Tennet), a loutish but somewhat good-hearted drug dealer in the small New Zealand town of Thames. Alongside his best friend Gaz (Arlo Gibson), Johnny works for the nearest equivalent to a crime lord around, a self-important short-tempered kingpin named Shelton (Jonny Brugh, from What We Do in the Shadows). Ambition leads Johnny to make a try for money being held by a Chinese antique shop owner, which in turn leads to him stealing a Mysterious Item from the shop. The Item turns out to be a limited time machine — once activated, it causes Johnny to return to the same place and time on every subsequent use. Johnny, now on the outs with Shelton, makes a series of bad choices and uses to the Item to bail him out each time, eventually gathering a group of temporal duplicates of himself: the Mega Time Squad. But can he settle things with Shelton, and the Chinese man now hunting him down? And is there any truth to the legend that a vengeful demon will strike down whoever wields the Item?

This is an amiable (if profane) film, clever yet not over-complicated in its temporal mechanics. There’s nothing epic about it at all, and in this case that’s to the good. You don’t feel the stakes are overblown at all, or even especially high — technically Johnny’s life is at stake, but the guys in Shelton’s gang don’t feel like killers; legbreakers, maybe, but not killers. Shelton himself, as played perfectly by Brugh, doesn’t seem the sort to take responsibility for a murder. This is fine, as the result is that the level of danger’s enough to keep things moving but not enough to outweigh the humour.

The time-travel element’s explored in reasonable depth, but doesn’t feel exhaustive. It’s a driver of action, not a thing to be developed for its own sake, and that’s about right. There are a couple of spots (notably in terms of how some of Johnny’s duplicates show up in a particular place) that are a bit confusing to me, but this is a time-travel film, and it’s possible a second viewing would clarify the plot mechanics — which anyway are less important than the general drift of the action. And that’s always clear.

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