Black Gate

Saturday, July 27, was going to be a long day for me at Fantasia. Hopefully a good one, too. I had five movies on my schedule, starting at noon with the animated Chinese fantasy-adventure White Snake (白蛇：缘起, 白蛇：緣起).

Directed by Amp Wong and Ji Zhao from a script by Da Mao, it’s a prequel to the Chinese legend of the White Snake, one of China’s Four Great Folktales. That story was first written down in the Ming Dynasty but originated in the Song Dynasty; the film’s set hundreds of years before that, in the Tang Dynasty. As the movie opens, snakes are being hunted to make immortality drugs for an evil general. A snake demon, Blanca (Zhe Zhang), tries to assassinate him and fails. She escapes, and wakes as an amnesiac in a village of snake-hunters. She’s cared for by a scholar-hunter named Xu Xuan (Tianxiang Yang). They try to uncover Blanca’s past, and in the process struggle with various supernatural forces, the machinations of the wicked general, and the plans of Blanca’s own family.

This a lovely film, colourful and action-packed with fluid 3D animation. It builds a spectacular fantasy world of misty mountains and wide rivers and thick forests and ancient ruins. Then it fills that world with spirits and demons and magic. And engaging heroes. The characters are well-designed and cartoony in a good sense; they move a little like marionettes in the hands of a master puppeteer, not stiffly so much as stylised. To me there’s a slightly classic feel as a result, though I can see other opinions varying.

Importantly, action scenes aren’t stiff in the slightest. This is a film that takes full advantage of animation’s capacities, using its medium to tell a magical story brimming with metamorphoses and impossible motion. Battles are large-scale events defined by supernatural tranformations. Even quick editing rhythms in those set-pieces don’t obscure the story, and still give us time to feel the impact of magic at work.

Which I think is important, as this is to me a literally wonderful film: that is, filled with wonder. It evokes that wonder by having a strong story with solid characters moving through a world of magic, but then also by presenting magic and monsters in a way that emphasises what is astonishing about them. It’s a fantasy story that knows how to present fantasy, which can be trickier than it sounds; it’s not just having characters stand around in shock at what they see. It’s that they, and we, keep seeing new things. The world expands, at just the right rate of change.

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My second film of July 26 was in the big Hall theatre, a science-fiction anime called Human Lost (人間失格). Directed by Fuminori Kizaki, it was scripted by Tou Ubukata based on a novel by Osamu Dazai. The movie’s set in 2036, when advanced nanotechnology has given human beings a lifespan of 120 years but turned Japan into a deeply unequal society, with the wealthy sequestered inside a vast citadel called “the Inside.” Some people, for unclear reasons, metamorphose into monsters: the ‘Human Lost’ phenomenon. A troubled young artist, Yozo Oba (Mamoru Miyano), gets involved with his cyborg friend Takeichi (Jun Fukuyama) when he attempts to break into the Inside, and sets off a complex series of events which bring to light the truth about the Human Lost problem and the future of 2036 — but which also might drive Yozo over the edge of sanity.

Osamu Dazai was one of the most celebrated Japanese writers of the first half of the twentieth century; he died in 1948. I have not read his novel No Longer Human (which has the same name in Japanese as Human Lost), but Wikipedia tells me it is considered his masterpiece. Wikipedia also tells me that an alternate and perhaps more faithful translation of the title is “Disqualified From Being Human,” which is closer to the film title. I mention this because a glance at the plot outline suggests the film is otherwise pretty far from its source. More explosions, to start with.

The film takes the idea of a troubled, self-destructive young painter at odds with a stifling society in some counterintuitive directions. Let me put it this way: I had no idea while watching this film that I was watching an adaptation of a twentieth-century novel about alienation and anomie. I can see some connections, even with only the most cursory knowledge of the book. For example, the biotech that keeps people alive forces them to stay alive; suicide is effectively impossible, which is an interesting twist on certain things from the original story. The future society is something of a straitjacket more generally. Some characters have the same names and characteristics as those in the novel. The story’s divided into “notebooks,” which is a structural choice taken from the book.

There’s certainly a kind of ambition at work here. There’s an unusual feel for a violent cyberpunkish dystopia, a strange pacing that puts an emphasis on Yozo rather than on bigger and wilder battle scenes — for better or worse. The problem is, the movie never really manages to find a connection to something recognisable as real life. The action and futuristic plot points are what draw interest, and Yozo’s not charismatic or interesting enough to be intriguing on his own without reference to the larger plot.

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My first film on Friday, July 26, was a Kazakh work playing at the de Sève Cinema. Written and directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov, Night God is a particular sort of uncompromising. It’s a beautiful picture, but extremely slow, still, and self-consciously meditative. I was deeply moved, for all its studied avoidance of simple dramatic action.

A man (Bajmurat Zhumanov), his wife, and his daughter (Aliya Yerzhanova) arrive in an unnamed town, a post-industrial city ruled by a cadre of state officers. It’s dark and cold, with comets in the sky, and the people live in fear of the coming of the Night God who will destroy the world. The man’s ordered to report to the local TV station to act as an extra, in exchange for which he’ll be given a house; this sets off a chain of serio-comic misadventures that must be called ‘kafkaesque’ if that word is to have any meaning.

A fake bomb’s strapped to his torso as part of a game show. But the bomb turns out to be real. He asks to have it removed. But before that he has to get an imam to sign a document attesting that he isn’t a radical. Thematically, then, there is a faith present in the film implicitly opposing the belief in the Night God; but all along the way the movie’s speaking of the struggle to believe in anything in a world that is feral and, to all appearances, meaningless.

The first thing one notices about the film is its intense visual beauty. It’s a mix of beautiful shadows and beautiful light. Taking place in an endless night, illumination is nevertheless powerful, bringing out colours and detail. We see every crack in every wall, every mote of dust; and this city is filled with cracks and dust. Although apparently shot entirely in studio, the town feels like a real place, looks like a real city coping with decayed industries and a collapse of central government. There are no screens or phones, and it feels right that a television station, the old technology of an earlier age, is central to the story.

That sheer sensory power is important, because the movie’s based mostly on very long takes with no or minimal camera moves. That is, the camera moves enough to give a very subtle sense of personality to the scene; not a sense of threat, as can happen with long tracking shots, but a kind of curious meditative feel, as though the camera is shifting ever-so-slowly to get a better idea of what’s happening. The soundtrack’s minimal, mostly a soundscape of whistling winds and water dripping from some unseen broken pipe. We’re stuck staring at what the movie insists on, and fortunately that is often beautiful in the way that inorganic decay and abandoned things can be beautiful. It has been said that the film has a painterly visual sensibility, and this is true. A statue, a clock without hands, a grated floor with light rising through it, come to feel like powerful statements hinting at a symbolism more profound than can be easily stated.

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On June 25 I went to the De Sève Theatre for the one movie I’d see that day at the Concordia campus. It was called Culture Shock, and while it’s available on Hulu, this was a rare chance to see it in Canada.

It was preceded by a short called “Re-Home,” directed by Izzy Lee. I’ll note for the record that I’m friends with the man who provided the music for the short, though I don’t think that affected my opinion one way or the other. In a future in which a wall along the southern border of the United States has been built, a poor Spanish-speaking woman (Gigi Saul Guerrero, director of Culture Shock) re-homes her baby, giving the child up for adoption to an Anglophone couple. But is something darker going on?

As usual at Fantasia, to ask that question is to get the answer “yes.” The short’s done well, with lots of atmosphere and style, but the twist at the end is the farthest thing from surprising. This feels like a piece of a larger story; either a beginning setting up something more complicated, or the ending of a tragedy that would have allowed us to be more invested in the mother and made her more individual. It’s highly watchable as it is, and certainly doesn’t overstay its welcome at only 8 minutes, but might actually be better served at a longer running time with more plot development.

Then came Culture Shock, which was made as an episode of Hulu’s horror anthology series Into the Dark. Each episode of the show is based on an American holiday, and this one was inspired by the Fourth of July. As noted, Culture Shock was directed by Gigi Saul Guerrero, who also worked on the script by James Benson and Efrén Hernández. She introduced the movie by noting it was a Blumhouse production, and saying that as an immigrant she felt she had a responsibility to tackle this material. She said she hopes it has something to say, and also provides an escape for 90 minutes.

It follows Marisol (Martha Higareda, of Altered Carbon fame), a heavily pregnant Mexican woman desperate to cross into the United States and begin a new life in a country she sees as having more opportunities. A good part of the movie follows her difficulties finding her way northward, showing her challenges as a woman finding out who she can trust and who she can’t; it also establishes the stories of other would-be immigrants travelling with her. When they all reach the border, though, something strange happens. Marisol wakes up in an idyllic American small town out of the 1950s or early 60s, a place obviously unreal. What’s happened to her? And how can she get free of this weird red-white-and-blue image of domesticity?

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There was only one film I planned to watch on July 24, and that was writer-director Johannes Nyholm’s Koko-di Koko-da. It promised to be a strange movie about characters trying to break out of a time loop, and I settled in at the De Sève Theatre wondering at the horror elements implied by the film’s description in the festival catalogue.

It’s a little difficult to describe the plot of this movie without giving away a major swerve at the end of the first act. But: an opening section introduces us to the happily-married Tobias (Leif Edlund Johansson) and Elin (Ylva Gallon). Then we see tragedy strike, and after an interlude with shadow-puppets we skip forward three years to the main part of the movie. Tobias and Elin are on the verge of separating, sniping at each other as they set out on a vacation together. They end up camping overnight in the woods, and in the morning are attacked by three vicious wanderers: the brutal giant Sampo (Morad Khatchadorian), the sinister Cherry (Brandy Litmanen), and a short ringmaster named Mog (Peter Belli). With them is an attack dog. Tobias and Elin are killed — and then Tobias awakes at dawn and the whole thing begins again.

We eventually come to understand what is happening here, and roughly why. The conclusion ties up the loop in an interesting mobius strip of causality. And one of the loops follows Elin instead of Tobias, producing an unusual resolution. But there are problems here.

Before I get to them, I want to note what the movie does right, and how I read what it’s trying to do. To start with, it looks very nice, and it’s shot with a strong eye for point-of-view. The woods are a place of dread, not just dark but cold and damp. The more joyous early part of the movie is bathed in light, brighter in atmosphere, but still with an almost subliminal sense of weirdness.

Character is the driver of the film, and the basic sense of who the leads are is very strong. This is not true of the wanderers, but that’s fine; their purpose is to drive events, to put stress on Elin and Tobias. I am not sure that the dramatic structure really helps bring out the interaction and relationship of those two. But then again the film seems to aim at establishing them less through dialogue and more through a close observation of their actions — not just what they do but how they do it, their every shiver and every wild glance.

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I had one film on my schedule for July 23, an Irish horror-themed comedy named Extra Ordinary. It was preceded by one of the best shorts I saw at Fantasia this year outside of a short film showcase.

Directed by Jason Gudasz, “Place” is a horror-comedy that works well in both its aspects. It opens as a young family moves into a new home, and finds something unwelcome waiting. The place, evidently, is haunted. But the pressures this puts on the family are resolved in an unexpected way. This results in a film that’s spooky, yet that also deftly deflates the tension it raises. The jokes work and set up character points, explaining the conflicts in the family and how the relationship between mother (Emily Green) and step-father (Nick Hurley) doesn’t really work. The images subtly create a tone that works both with horror and comedy, and it ends a series of related vignettes in a satisfying way that ties the 11-minute story together.

Extra Ordinary was written and directed by the duo of Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman. It follows Rose (Maeve Higgins), a driving instructor in her thirties in a small Irish town; she also happens to be the daughter of a long-dead paranormal investigator, and can see ghosts. She’s turned her back on her abilities as a medium ever since her father died during the course of one investigation. Unfortunately, an American rock star named Christian Winter (Will Forte) has plans to revive his career with a diabolic pact, which involves sacrificing the daughter of local widower Martin Martin (Barry Ward). Barry, already haunted by his dead wife, must seek Rose’s help, and hope she’ll return to her ghostbusting ways.

The movie’s a pleasant, entertaining watch that doesn’t do anything especially surprising but does what it does quite well. I described it as a ‘horror-themed comedy’ above instead of a ‘horror-comedy’ because while it’s all about ghosts and ectoplasm and black magic, there’s nothing actually horrific in it. There’s a reasonable amount of dramatic tension, but the supernatural goings-on aren’t used to inspire dread or fear. They’re there to set up gags, and to provide a solid story structure which in turn supports and generates further gags.

It has to be said the plot isn’t too solid in its details. The nature of the pact inspires a deadline in which Rose and Martin race around town trying to get a specified amount of ectoplasm during a night which seems far too long for the amount of activity that takes place. There’s another point where the evil Winter uses magic to locate a vital component of the ritual, only to find out said component is not usable; one therefore wonders why the spell led him where it did.

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I had been planning to head home after the first movie I saw on July 22, Fly Me to the Saitama. But looking at what followed it in the Hall Theatre, I decided to stick around. Bliss was billed as an unconventional punk vampire movie, and indeed director Joe Begos introduced it to the crowd as a “hallucinatory splatter movie about sex, drugs, rock n’roll, and vampires.” Fair to say I was curious, unsure whether to expect something very good or off-the-rails bad. What I got is maybe best described as off-the-rails good.

First came a 13-minute short, “MJ,” directed by Jamie Delaney from a script by Delaney and Coral Amiga. Amiga also stars as Mary Jane, a quiet, isolated young woman who becomes increasingly wrapped up in social media and online hook-ups. It is not long before this obsession turns violent. It’s a well-shot film, with engagingly minimal dialogue. Amiga underplays her part to good effect, letting viewers alternately sympathise with and be appalled by her character.

Then Bliss. Dezzy (Dora Madison, of various TV series including Dexter, Chicago Fire, and Friday Night Lights) is an artist in Los Angeles, behind on her rent and about to get kicked out of her apartment-studio. She’s promised her agent a new painting, but hasn’t completed a picture in some time as she tries to get clean. Then she visits her old drug dealer Hadrian (Graham Skipper) and his pals (one of whom is played by George Wendt, of all people), where she gets a new drug called bliss, which fuels a wild night for her with her friend Courtney. And afterward, everything is different. Dezzy begins to paint again, sometimes without being conscious of what she’s doing, creating a weird hellscape. But her behaviour becomes more erratic and extreme. And bloody.

Also disorienting, even psychedelic. The haze of LA smog becomes the haze of altered consciousness. Dezzy finds her new creativity fuelled by bliss, meaning she has to seek out more and more of the drug to keep going. As she’d drawn into her painting, the people around her — landlord, agent, friends, boyfriend — become at best irrelevant and at worst obstacles to be dealt with. She is the painterly equivalent of a poète maudit, and even if there were nothing else happening in it Bliss would be notable for its depiction of artistic obsession with a woman as the tormented transgressive genius at its heart.

It is a very unintellectual (though not necessarily anti-intellectual) look at artistic obsession, though. There is a lot of viscera, and Madison spends a lot of time naked, including while working at the easel. This ought to feel ludicrous, exploitative, or both; it doesn’t, thanks largely to Madison’s talent and conviction. The film is locked on Dezzy as a character, and Madison carries it capably. She’s got a charisma that keeps the story from feeling monotonous or predictable, even though the outline’s familiar and the sequence of events — Dezzy looking for drugs, Dezzy engaging in extreme behaviour, Dezzy painting — repetitive. Each of Dezzy’s adventures feels like it goes a step further than the last, and Madison’s depiction of Dezzy’s reactions helps sell us on that.

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On Monday, July 22, I was back at the Hall Theatre for one of the movies I was most anticipating. It was a new live-action manga adaptation from Hideki Takeuchi, director of the Thermae Romae films: Fly Me to the Saitama (Tonde Saitama, 翔んで埼玉). The script by Yuichi Tokunaga adapts the comics from the early 80s by Mineo Maya, although apparently the filmmakers had to finish the last two-thirds of the story for themselves.

The film tells a story inside a story. In the frame tale, a family drives from Saitama, a prefecture on the outskirts of Tokyo, to a party in the heart of Japan’s capital where the daughter is to be engaged. On the way, the radio tells a peculiar story about a fabled time when the people of Saitama were oppressed by their metropolitan overlords in Tokyo. They had to obtain special visas to enter; armoured police used facial-recognition technology to pick out any residents of Saitama who snuck through the massive border fences. The good folk of Saitama were second-class citizens at best, exploited labour for the greatness and glory of the glittering city of Tokyo. In this dystopia Momomi (Fumi Nikaido, Inuyashiki), son of the governor of Tokyo, is president of the student body of an elite academy; enter new student Rei Asami (Gackt), just back from studying in America. Momomi falls for the charismatic Rei, but Rei’s hiding a dark secret: he’s actually from Saitama, and is plotting the downfall of Tokyo. This is exposed surprisingly early, setting Rei and Momomi off on a journey that might change the world.

A couple quick notes about the actors mentioned above. First, Gackt is the professional name of a singer who the IMDB assures me is “the most successful male soloist in Japanese music history.” He’s in his 40s, and playing a teenager. Fumi Nikaido is a woman playing a male role; the manga was a boys’ love story, and the movie does faithfully (if briefly) refer to Momomi as male, and keep him in male dress. I have no idea how this plays out in the context of Japanese gender roles, but the point I want to get at is that you don’t wonder about either this or Rei’s age, because this movie gives every impression of being completely, utterly, joyfully uninterested in any of these details. The actors act, as theatrically as possible, and they are committed to their roles, and nobody mentions age or gender, and so we are pulled along into the berserk strangeness that is the story.

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My last screening of July 21 brought me back to the De Sève Theatre for a showcase of animated short genre films from China, Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, a grouping titled “Things That Go Bump In the East.” 11 films in a range of visual styles promised variety. I’d been having good luck with short films at the festival so far, and settled in eager to see what would come now.

First was a 6-minute stop-motion story from Japan’s Shinobu Soejima, “The House Rattler” (“鬼とやなり”). It’s based on Japanese folklore, telling a tale of a spirit who makes the mysterious sounds with no obvious source that you sometimes hear in an old house. In this case, the little demon comes into conflict with the modern world in a surprising fashion. The film makes strong use of sound cues, as you might expect, and the setting of the house haunted by the tiny dweller-in-wainscots is a wondrous mix of shadows and rich gold-brown hues. It has the feel of age and of a place lived-in, and that helps bring out the modern twist at the end.

Next was “The Girl and the Serpent,” directed and written by Wan Jinyue and Du Jinzhi. It’s also 6 minutes long, but has a much faster pace than the atmospheric “The House Rattler.” A snake-demon demands a village produce a maiden sacrifice, but ends up with an unexpected fight. The story’s a striking mix of 2D and 3D animation, with colour being used as a major element in the storytelling. The imagery’s fluid, shifting swiftly as the demon works against the girl both physically and psychically. Nevertheless, she finds the strength to resist. It’s a stunningly designed battle, and an entertaining short.

“Rainy Season” (“장마”), by writer-director Kim Se-yoon, brought a noirish horror-inflected feel to seemingly hand-drawn animation. It’s an intensely atmospheric 4-minute piece about a woman in an apartment during a storm. She’s shooting up, but is interrupted by a flash of lightning and something eerie in the tall building across from her. Alone in her apartment, she grows increasingly paranoid — but then, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean something isn’t out to get you. It’s a well-done piece of suspense.

The 17-minute “Gold Fish” (“Kim-hi,” 金魚), written and directed by Taiwan’s Fish Wang, is the story of a boy in a weird dystopia, slightly steampunk and more than slightly supernatural. The inhuman masters of a a sprawling, bleak city are drinking the dreams of children. Elderly adults are all but immobile, enslaved to inhuman masters. Except one boy has a chance to fight back, and topple the whole of the corrupt society. It’s an expressionistic story with some deliberately crude designs and some excellent colour work. Cool, dark tones contrast strongly with unexpected moments of eye-popping colour. It’s not a complex story, but the scenes that illustrate the different movements of the tale are very well-done, and the tale builds nicely through a series of increasingly surreal images. I felt the ending lacked a little, but it was on the whole a solid and surprising short.

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