Black Gate

Back to the Wharf (风平浪静, Feng Ping Lang Jing) is a distinctive mixture of social drama and film noir. It’s a Chinese movie, directed by Li Xiaofeng from a script he wrote with Yu Xin, and has a lot to say about the changes Chinese society’s seen over the last several decades — and says it by exploring dramatic themes: the bonds of the family versus mercenary society, for example. Guilt and atonement. The futility of violence. Whatever specific applicability these things have for China, they’re also things that can play to viewers around the world.

The plot follows Song Hao (played as a youth by Zhou Zhengjie and as an adult by Zhang Yu), who as the film starts is a teenaged student aiming at a scholarship. That’s taken away from him for purely political reasons, and, distraught at the sudden loss of his future, he commits an act of violence. This leads to an accidental death, and his father helps him flee. 15 years later his mother dies, and he returns to his home town, where he cautiously tries to resume relations with his father Jianhui (Wang Yanhui), and starts a love affair with his former classmate Pan Xiaoshuang (Song Jia, Final Master), and goes into business with his former best friend Li Tang (Lee Hong-Chi) — all while trying to make amends to the daughter of the man he killed, Wan Xiaoning (Deng Enxi), without telling her the truth of his crime. But Li’s real estate company has plans for the property where Wan lives, and she’s the final holdout preventing a deal. You can see disaster coming.

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The official opening film of Fantasia 2021 was Brain Freeze, a Québecois zombie movie which played at Montreal’s Cinéma Impérial, a classic movie palace dating back to 1913. For a variety of reasons I wasn’t able to attend, but the film streamed on Fantasia’s servers on August 9, and that showing I decided to check out.

Bundled with the feature was a short, “No Title.” The 9-minute animated film’s written and directed by Alexandra Myotte, and it’s about a UFO chaser in 1990 who goes to a small town in Québec following reports of an alien abduction. He finds a blind sculptress, and an unexpected story. This is an extremely well-made movie, with a sharply written and performed voice-over from the always-faceless UFOlogist (Jean-Sébastien Hamel, also the sound designer), and excellent 2D animation that finds very strong images and brings out some of the cosmic implications of the tale. It’s also got some very down-to-earth themes, about art and love, and a killer line about revenge at the end. Add to that, it ties into some actual local history in the town of Saint-Amable, and nicely evokes the pre-internet feel of 30 years ago. It’s a very good piece, clever, distinctive, and funny.

Then came Brain Freeze, directed by Julien Knafo, who co-wrote with Jean Barbe. Near a major Québec city there’s a small island suburb where the ultra-rich are scheming to use chemicals to grow grass in the middle of the winter so they can play golf year-round. The good news for them is that they’re about to succeed. The bad news is that there will be side effects, in the form of zombies.

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My last film of the fourth day of the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival was We’re All Going To The World’s Fair, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. It’s not technically a genre story, unless you give it a highly determined reading, but it is a story about genre. It’s also a coming-of-age story, a story about a girl trying to find herself and work out her own story from the inspiration of genre tales she loves — even if dangers may come with it.

The movie begins with a long take introducing us to Casey (Anna Cobb), a young teen girl sitting before her webcam. She enacts a simple ritual that begins a — game? spell? We’re not sure at first what to make of what she’s doing; then she tells us of the World’s Fair Challenge, where people perform the ritual we’ve seen and, over time, change mentally. And they upload videos as they do, documenting their progression as they change from what they were into something else entirely. We see some of these videos interspersed among Casey’s own recordings, which she puts up on the web documenting her changes, and her hopes, and her reflections. And then we see an older man, JLB (Michael J Rogers), reach out to her claiming to have secret knowledge about the World’s Fair Challenge, and we doubt his good intentions, and we start to worry even more about Casey and where this challenge will take her.

For a large part of the movie we’re not really sure what’s happening. Almost everything we see is mediated one way or another, something recorded by someone for their own reasons — Casey’s video diaries, or JLB’s weird distorted messages, or other World’s Fair videos. What do we take as reality? Is Casey, who talked about how neat it would be to live in a horror story, going mad? Is there a supernatural force involved? Is she telling a story?

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“M*therfucker” (asterisk in the official title, so far as I can tell) is a 13-minute short written by Adam Peterson, who co-directed with Adam Long. The entire thing takes place in a bar, where Brian (Nick Burr) is meeting his old friend Tony (Tyson Sullivan). Tony’s got a secret, which will turn Brian’s life upside down. Indeed, it already has, several times over. This is a science-fiction story in the form of two guys talking, the dialogue quick and snappy and well-handled by the actors. The performances are in fact the highlight of the film, which is worth watching for them alone. The science-fictional idea at the core isn’t handled clearly enough to really bring out the themes effectively — Brian’s faced with a decision to make, but the nature of the choice isn’t established well. There’s something in here about the way in which trying to fix things can make things worse, but I couldn’t see why the relatively amoral character with the power to fix things is bothering to do so. There’s some clever bits of dialogue, and entertaining acting, but the movie’s ultimately incoherent.

The feature that the Fantasia Film Festival bundled with the short was King Knight. It’s a comedy written and directed by Richard Bates, Jr., and concerns a Wiccan coven in California. I was a little worried going in that it’d spend time mocking the religion, but that didn’t really happen to my eye. Instead, the movie presents a very gentle character-based humour based around themes of community and conforming, and learning not to care about fitting in if it means suppressing one’s individuality.

There’s a fairy-tale–style voice-over intro that introduces us to the coven, and in particular its leaders, the life partners Thorn (Matthew Gray Gubler) and Willow (Angela Sarafyan). They’re good mentors and counsellors for the group, and we see them provide wise words to the couples who make up their coven. But then a secret from Thorn’s past comes to light: far from an outcast in high school, he was in fact the class president and voted Most Likely to Succeed. And now his 20-year high school reunion’s coming up.

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