Black Gate

I went by the screening room early on August 2, the last day of the 2018 Fantasia International Film Festival. It was my final chance to see some of the things I’d missed at the festival, and if I watched three movies in the screening room before heading off to watch the two films I wanted to see that evening at the Hall Theatre, then I’d total 60 movies on the year. And I knew going in what the first film I wanted to see at the screening room was, a film that had gathered a goodly amount of buzz around the festival. On the first day of the festival I’d begun Fantasia 2018 with the revisionist Western Buffalo Boys; now I’d begin the last day of Fantasia 2018 with a different kind of revisionist western.

Five Fingers for Marseilles was directed by Michael Matthews from a script by Sean Drummond. A South African film, it starts in the days of apartheid, when five boys have formed a pact to protect their town from outsiders: the Five Fingers, they call themselves. Then White soldiers show up, and things go terribly wrong. Tau, the proudest, kills a man. Twenty years pass; Tau (grown into Vuyo Dabula, who has had roles in Invictus and Avengers: Age of Ultron) becomes a thief and hardened killer, has a change of heart, is imprisoned, is released, and finally returns to his home, to the small town named Marseilles in emulation of a distant European centre. The Five Fingers are no more; the leader’s dead, another one’s become mayor, another’s the chief of police, another’s a priest. The girl who once was closest to the Fingers, Lerato, is now a woman (Zethu Diomo, Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, The Book of Negroes) running a saloon, with a son by a dead man. And a gang’s trying to take over Marseilles, the Night Runners, led by the mysterious and charismatic Sepoko (Hamilton Dhlamini). Tau wants to put violence behind him and try to be a better man. But can the bad men around him be stopped by any other means? And even if he must again take up the way of the gun, will his childhood allies stand with him? Or can he surround himself with a new group of Five Fingers?

The western aspects are strong in this film. It’s a conscious evocation of the genre without being derivative, romantic, or overtly knowing. It never winks to the audience. But it builds a story around a bad man trying to be better, with a mythic past of violence behind him. The heroes and villains both have the fable-like qualities of good western characters. Not just Sepoko but each of his Night Runners have individual looks. The Five Fingers, meanwhile, are shown early in the film riding their bicycles across the land very like young horsemen — a nod, without being a wink, to the iconography of the cowboy.

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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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