Black Gate

In the waning hours of the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival I sat down to watch The Unknown Man of Shandigor (L’inconnu de Shandigor), a 1967 Swiss spy film directed by Jean-Louis Roy, who collaborated on the script with Gabriel Arout and Pierre Koralnik. The film’s got a new 4K restoration by the Cinematheque Suisse; I’d never heard of the movie, but the description was intriguing, a black-and-white mod odyssey through the weirdness of the 1960s, with nods to Dr. Strangelove and Alphaville, and including Serge Gainsbourg as the leader of a group of bald turtleneck-clad assassins. Was this a lost classic, or an eccentric curiosity? Or both?

The plot of the film concerns one Doctor Von Krantz (Daniel Emilfork, who would go on to feature in The City of Lost Children), an admirer of Dracula prone to observations such as: “I don’t like humanity. Or, I do, but in a jar of arsenic.” The good doctor has invented the Canceler (or Annulator), which can nullify a nuclear explosion. As this is the height of the Cold War, his fortified home has now become the target for spies from multiple different nations. American agent Bobby Gun (Howard Vernon) races with the dastardly Russian Shostakovich (Jacques Dufilho) to get their hands on the device — but the key may lie with Von Krantz’s young and idealistic daughter Sylvaine (Marie-France Boyer), who dreams of a man she once knew (Ben Carruthers), a mysterious man in the city of Shandigor.

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I wrote a little while ago about watching three documentary films bundled together at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival, centred around the short feature You Can’t Kill Meme. There was another set of three documentaries at Fantasia this year, and as the festival drew to a close, I sat down to watch them as well. These two shorts and the short feature Dear Hacker were a bit more diverse in subject matter, but shared themes of technology and power.

First was writer-director Aleix Pitarch’s “Orders,” a disturbing animated short based on a true story. The movie re-creates a horrific phone call that was made to a fast-food restaurant by a man claiming to be a police officer, using actors and an edited transcript of the call (I am not sure where the transcript is supposed to have come from, but the events are clearly based on a deeply disturbing reality). Without going into detail, the story’s a dark working-out of something like Stanley Milgram’s experiments about authority and what ordinary people can be ordered to do. As we hear bits of the phone call, and hear things getting worse and worse, we see everyday images of the day’s work at a fast-food restaurant.

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“Aquatic Bird” is an 18-minute short film from Chinese writer-director Zhang Nan. It weaves together the stories of three interrelated characters — a prostitute (Bird), a man who admires her from a distance (Aqua), and one of her regular clients. The first two are brought together by the light of a green laser pointer; there is a lot of surrealism in this film. It looks very nice, and the script’s very taut — but given the weirdness of the film, I wonder if maybe a bit too taut. To the extent I was able to follow it, the structure worked and built to a solid conclusion. But there’s a lot I did not understand, notably the use of a dream scene, and a peculiar egg of surprising plot significance.

Bundled with it was Midnight In A Perfect World, from the Philippines. Directed by Dodo Dayao, who co-wrote the script with Carljoe Javier, the feature takes place in a near-future Manila where infrastructure’s been upgraded to near-utopian levels. But there are strange blackouts that hit parts of the city after midnight, and you must not be caught out in those places at those times. People disappear, leaving behind only wild rumours about what’s happened to them. Luckily there are safehouses, in which one can take shelter. But there are stories about the dangers of those safehouses, too. The movie follows a group of young friends caught in one blackout, and follow them as they take refuge in a safehouse — then find out one of the group didn’t make it inside.

The first thing to say about this movie is that it captures a striking note of cosmic terror, with a strong inflection of the New Weird (there’s an interesting interview where Dayao mentions being influenced by China Miéville). There are science fiction influences here, certainly, but not in the form of clearly-defined technologies operating in an easily knowable world. Dayao’s said that he worked out the reasons beyond all the unreal elements in the story, but chose not to include them in expository lumps at the expense of breaking up the flow of a scene. In part because of that, the film creates a world which we believe is operating according to rules, however alien, but rules which may be beyond understanding. It’s a little like Lovecraft by way of Laird Barron.

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Hand Rolled Cigarette (手捲煙), from Hong Kong, had its Canadian premiere at the 2021 Fantasia Film Festival. It’s the first film from director Kin Long Chan, who co-wrote the movie with Ryan Ling, and stars Ka Tung Lam (also known as Gordon Lam, a veteran actor and the screenwriter of Time, also at Fantasia 2021) as Kwan, a former member of the British armed forces in Hong Kong. After the British turn Hong Kong over to China, Kwan retires and falls in with organised crime. In 2019, he’s scheming with a turtle smuggler named Pickle (Ying-gor To) to convince his boss Tai (Ben Yuen) to take a deal for black-market turtles — and then a South Asian immigrant thief named Mani (Bipin Karma), who ripped off Tai, stumbles into Kwan’s home desperate for sanctuary. Mani pays well to get a temporary hiding place from Tai’s goons in Kwan’s home. But Tai’s after Mani’s accomplice, his cousin Kapil (Bitto Singh Hartihan), and then there are those turtles to worry about. Violence escalates throughout the movie, and it’s clear that at any moment the bloodthirsty Tai could turn on Kwan.

A story of crime and brutality, the drama and conflict of Hand Rolled Cigarette emerge not just from character but from the society the characters struggle with and against. Most obviously, Mani faces blunt hostility because of his race. The movie’s sharp enough to show some of that coming from Kwan, our protagonist and the closest thing to a sympathetic figure in the film. Kwan’s past in the military, meanwhile, comes into play in a number of ways — to start with, as an instance of a broken promise, as he and his men were not granted citizenship by the country they served.

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“School Radio to Major Tom” (“こちら放送室よりトム少佐へ”, “Kochira Housoushitsu yori Tom Shosa e”) is a bittersweet story that becomes a tearjerker by the end. A 10-minute short written and directed by Chisaka Takuya and set in 1989, it follows Eisuke (Tokuma Kudo), a teen who broadcasts and records his own science-fictional radio drama about a certain Major Tom every morning at his school; one day he comes in to find a girl (Chika Arakawa) who attends night classes has added a part of her own to his story. He responds, incorporating what she’s done, and then she responds to that, and the story takes flight without them ever meeting except by voice. Graduation looms, when Eisuke assumes they’ll finally see one another, but viewers who remember the song that gives the film its title may well expect things to go differently. The movie captures the atmosphere and technology of its era very well (shot on actual analog 16mm film), but more importantly it captures character. And it finds effective parallels between the story the two characters tell and their own lives. It’s a tremendously effective piece of work.

With it was bundled It’s A Summer Film! (サマーフィルムにのって), the debut directorial effort from Sôshi Masumoto, who also wrote the script with Naoyuki Miura. It’s a movie about a film club at a Japanese high school, which is divided in two. Which is to say, club president Karin (Coda Mahiru) is revered by almost all the club as a genius auteur, who loves the romance genre — but the outsider named Barefoot (Marika Itô, who had a supporting role as a punky outsider in the first Kakegurui movie) loves her samurai cinema, and has a script ready to go to make her own samurai film even though the rest of the club’s ready to pitch in to make Karin’s newest crowd-pleasing epic. This is the story of Barefoot’s journey to realising her dream, along with her friends and fellow outsiders, science-fiction fan Kickboard (Yumi Kawai) and aspiring swordswoman Blue Hawaii (Kirara Inori).

Before Barefoot can make her film, she needs a star, somebody just right for the role. She’s mentally rejected everyone she knows — but then a new boy named Rintaro (Daichi Kaneko) turns up, and it clicks for her. She pursues him for the role (literally, in an engaging chase scene), and then gathers a supporting cast and crew to help her make the film she dreams of. There are complications: Rintaro has a secret. And there’s the one-sided rivalry between Barefoot and Karin — Barefoot’s aggrieved by Karin’s success, while Karin hardly notices the existence of Barefoot. Will Barefoot’s movie come together in the end?

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The strangest title of any film at Fantasia 2021 was the Korean short “Digital Video Editing with Adobe Premiere Pro: The Real-World Guide to Set Up and Workflow.” (“그녀를 지우는 시간”) A 40-minute piece written and directed by Hong Seong-yoon, it opens with a scene from a romance movie as a young woman meets a handsome businessman — and then there’s a ghost. And the image freezes. And in a voice-over we hear the director, Seo, explain that his movie’s haunted, with a ghost showing up in crucial shots, and is there any way to edit around those shots? He’s talking to a freelance film editor, Ms. Park, and the movie mostly takes the form of a dialogue between the two of them as they try to work out how to cut the undead while still creating an artistically satisfying film. We see scenes from the film played over again as the editor tries out a variety of tricks, hear the debates between editor and director, and see clever ideas that eliminate the mysterious haunting.

Seo’s work is generic romance, but “Digital Video Editing” is a funny and engaging film, with good performances and an excellent script. It’s a bit of a look backstage at how a movie gets put together, and presents a dialogue that echoes a lot of artistic collaboration. Park, the outsider, has ideas about what to do with the film. Seo, who’s worked on it much longer, has specific things he feels need to come across. But do those things work? One way to look at the ghost is as a kind of spirit of the film, forcing the movie to take a certain form regardless of the intent of anyone working on it. But more importantly, it’s spooky. Add to that the dialogue’s sharp, and the sense of how film works is very strong; this is a very good short.

Bundled with it was Not Quite Dead Yet (一度死んでみた, Ichido Shindemitai). It’s a comedy from Japan, in which Mr. Nobata (Shinichi Tsutsumi), the head of a mid-sized pharma company, tries an unorthodox maneuver to try to find out the identity of a mole in his company: he takes a new drug his scientists have developed, the ‘Juliet pill,’ which will leave him apparently dead for 48 hours. Things don’t go as planned, and Nobata’s enemies strike — but he can still appear as a ghost to his daughter Nanase (Suzu Hirose, Fireworks and Laplace’s Witch), a struggling death metal singer, and with her help might survive to turn the tables. But she’s become estranged from him following her mother’s death, while he’s assigned one of his more self-effacing employees, Taku (Ryo Yoshizawa, of the live-action Bleach and Gintama films), to keep an eye on her. And the mole in the company is still there, now out to make sure Tanabe never revives.

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Out of Hong Kong comes Time (殺出個黃昏, Shā chū gè huánghūn), a film by Ricky Ko about a trio of elderly assassins. Written by Ching Yi Ho and Ka Tung Lam, it’s a character-based drama far more than it is an action movie, though it does start and end with action scenes. It’s also a showcase for some veteran Hong Kong actors, notably Petrina Fung Bo Bo (who the Fantasia program notes tell me was known as “the Shirley Temple of Hong Kong”) and 1950s movie star Patrick Tse; as the title hints, the film is a story about the progress of time and the situation of the elderly.

Decades ago, Chau (Tse), Fong (Fung), and Chung (Suet Lam) were a team of assassins for hire. As the film begins, Fong’s decided to get the band back together. She’s found a new business opportunity: providing quick merciful deaths to the elderly in Hong Kong who have decided to end their lives in a world that they feel has no more place for them. Chau, the martial-artist and knife expert who does the actual killings, is at first repulsed but soon decides that it’s for the best that he provide clean ends for people who will kill themselves one way or another. But then the group’s contacted by a 16-year-old, Tze Ying (Suet-Ying Chung), who sees no future for herself and so is determined to hire their services.

Chau ends up taking her under his wing, only to find out that she has very real problems. Meanwhile, Fong’s son and daughter-in-law are scheming against her. And Chung’s lost his heart to a prostitute (Belinda Yan Zi-fei) who appreciates him as a client but has no desire for a non-professional relationship. These stories weave around each other, making for an elegant plot that shows us the leads as a group and as individuals.

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On the 3rd Day (Al Tercer Día) is an excellent horror film from Argentina, based on the novel 3 días by Gonzalo Ventura. The book was turned into a script by Ventura with Alberto Fasce, and the adaptation directed by Daniel de la Vega. It’s from the same production company that brought the world last year’s The Undertaker’s Home (AKA The Funeral Home), and there are some passing similarities: both are well-shot films that have fun playing with traditional horror elements, and indeed have all the zest of classic horror stories, while also making interesting structural choices and telling a good story in thoughtful ways.

There’s a limit to how much one should describe the plot of On the 3rd Day; part of the fun of the film is in figuring out what’s happening at about the rate the main character does. That character is Cecilia (Mariana Anghileri), who abducts her son from her abusive husband one night and then ends up in a bad car accident involving a strange old man named Enrique (Gerardo Romano), who himself is carrying a curious cargo. Three days later Cecilia wakes up in an old house with no idea of what’s happened since the accident and no idea where her son is. We follow her as she wanders off to find out the secret of those missing days, and in a parallel track of story follow Enrique as he tries to solve some mysteries of his own connected with that night.

We soon get an idea of what kind of story Enrique thinks this is, one in which he’s a hero fighting terrible darkness. But is he right? Much of the early part of the movie revolves around the mania that appears to drive him, implicitly set against with the mystery that grips Cecilia. Enrique’s very certain about many things, perhaps too certain, while Cecilia’s part in the story is defined by her uncertainty. It makes for a good contrast, and the film’s incredibly effective at slowly revealing the truth of what’s going on — not just in measuring out how much to deliver when, but also how to exceed the promises it appears to make about the kind of movie we’re watching. What looks like a suspense film becomes utter horror, and one that goes all the way into a kind of dark romanticism, a gothic tone that nods to classics of German Expressionism.

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Prisoners of the Ghostland was one of the most anticipated films at Fantasia 2021. It unites madcap director Sion Sono (last seen at Fantasia with the feature version of Tokyo Vampire Hotel) with a certain mister Nicolas Cage. You might reasonably expect a full-throttle over-the-top ride. And that doesn’t quite happen.

Written by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai, the movie takes place in a part of the world scarred by a spill of nuclear waste. A village called Samurai Town is ruled by a rapacious Governor (Bill Moseley) who, as the film begins, hauls a criminal named Hero (Cage) out of prison to look for his granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella), who herself has fled the city for the dangers of the uncontrolled territory called the Ghostlands. Hero’s given a deadline and a booby-trapped suit that’ll blow up parts of his anatomy he’d rather keep if he fails to return on time, or if he thinks impure thoughts around the Governor’s granddaughter.

He drives off into the Ghostlands on his quest, and you might expect a long odyssey to follow. Instead he finds Bernice quickly, but also gets taken prisoner by a group who dwell in the Ghostlands. Revelations and subplots follow; there are glimpses of a parallel track of story back in Samurai Town, following the governor’s bodyguard Yasujiro (Tak Sakaguchi, Musashi in last year’s Crazy Samurai Musashi); there are flashbacks to establish Hero’s backstory; and you can see clearly how it’s all going to lead to a showdown back in Samurai Town.

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