Black Gate

For my third movie of July 21 I wandered back to the Fantasia screening room. There, I settled in with a movie from the Philippines: Ode To Nothing. Written and directed by Dwein Ruedas Baltazar, it follows Sonya (Marietta Subong), a woman no longer young who owns her own funeral home in an unnamed town. Alone except for her father, Rudy (Joonee Gamboa), Sonya tries to keep the funeral home going despite debts to local loan shark Theodore (Dido Dela Paz). Then a body is brought to her for burial under suspicious circumstances. Rather than bury the corpse, though, Sonya begins to speak to it, and comes to think that the body of the old woman is bringing her luck — even to treat the body as her surrogate mother. Is the corpse responsible for the sudden influx of business to the funeral home? And even if it is, can you trust the gifts of the dead?

Ode to Nothing is a fascinating film that continually does things you don’t expect, quietly and slowly. That quiet and slowness is a key part of how it works. It’s shot beautifully, in long lingering takes and wide shots, with muted colours dominated by a dull green. A character takes a flight of stairs out of frame, and rather than move or cut to follow the camera stays where it is, focussed on the stairs; and you can tell the movie works because by that point the audience is invested enough to stay focussed on the stairs as well, waiting for the character to return.

Worth emphasising the visual power of the film, because it is so static for so long. I noted the first camera move at about the 19-minute mark, just after the corpse is brought to Sonya, meaning the dead body paradoxically seems to give the film a new kind of life. But Ode to Nothing always gives us interesting things to look at, things for the camera to linger on. Sonya rarely leaves the funeral home, or at least we don’t follow her outside except once, so the massive building becomes a key part of the film. To call it a character in its own right isn’t quite correct; it’s a corpse in its own right, old and slowly rotting away in tropical heat and humidity, every piece of flaking paint caught in deep focus. But it is also a literal home, with odd knickknacks and embalming paraphernalia and floral arrangements Sonya can’t sell and tape players which produce echoes of a Chinese pop song Sonya loves to listen to. And at no point is the place spooky or horrific. Merely sad, and quietly run-down.

Dialogue is minimal — the first word is spoken 9 minutes into the 92-minute film — but movies the story forward nicely. If the film allows things to happen for reasons that are at first obscure, before long it becomes clear who’s doing what why, and it always makes a kind of character-based sense. The story is not especially complex, but is based in character, and those characters are engaging enough that we follow them even when they seem to be doing nothing in particular. We get to know them deeply, without dialogue or particularly dramatic action, just by the way they go about their day, staring out a window or doing dishes.

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For my second film of July 21 I stayed at the De Sève Theatre to watch one of my more anticipated movies of the festival. Each year Fantasia plays a Shaw Brothers film on 35mm — not one of the Shaw classics, usually, but one of their stranger works. The past few years I’ve seen Demon of the Lute, Buddha’s Palm, Flame of the Martial World, and Bastard Swordsman, as well as Five Fingers of Death. This year we got to see The Boxer’s Omen (Mo, 魔), from 1983, directed by Kuei Chih-Hung from his own story as scripted by Szeto On. Technically a sequel to Kuei’s film Gu, the English title hints at some of its influences: a bit of The Omen, a bit of Rocky, and a lot of low-budget exploitation film.

When Hong Kong gangster Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei) sees his brother crippled in a match with a cheating Thai kickboxer, Bu Bo (Bolo Yeung Sze), he travels to Thailand to challenge the evildoer to a revenge match. While there, weird visions lead him to a Buddhist monastery. It turns out that in previous lives Chan and the recently-deceased abbot were twins. This is a problem for Chan. The abbot killed the student of an evil wizard (Elvis Tsui), leading the wizard to then kill him with a spell that will now go on to kill Chan due to his linkage to the aforesaid abbot. Chan learns this from talking to the dead abbot, and after some confusion decides to become a monk to be able to defeat the wizard — but what of his match against the kickboxer who crippled his brother? And what about the wizard’s three living students?

This description of the plot barely hints at how bizarre, dreamlike, and transgressive this film is, but ideally gives an idea of how much scope there is for mystical goings-on. Rituals and spells are depicted with loving care, even when grotesque or indeed outright disgusting. But then a flashback in which the abbot fights the student and master wizards is simply surprising, as the duels involve crystals and puppets and wall-crawling and lurid lighting. On the other hand, an extended sequence shows the wizard’s students preparing a spell of revenge, which involves each of them eating and regurgitating food for the others to then ingest — and goes on from there, creating a demon inside a crocodile corpse, who Chan eventually must defeat. That of course comes at the climax of the film, in an ancient temple in Nepal, when Chan must engage in a magical fight unlike any I have ever seen.

What is most strange about the film is how it doesn’t feel like a straight-ahead exploitation film. Theoretically it should. There’s the gross-out bits, there’s a couple of violent kickboxing scenes, there’s a fair amount of nudity. And yet there’s also something else going on. I’ve seen some writers compare the film to Jodorowsky, and maybe that’s reasonable for the weirdness of it.

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My first film at Fantasia on July 21 was actually two films put together. In 2009 Atsuya Uki released a 25-minute short he’d written and directed, called “Cencoroll,” based on a one-shot manga he’d written and illustrated. The short was well-received, and over the last decade he’s created a 50-minute follow-up. The two movies have now been released as one, Cencoroll Connect (Senkorōru, センコロール コネクト). They work together as one story, but I wonder, never having seen the original “Cencoroll” on its own, whether the first short would have left more room for an audience’s imagination to work.

The story begins with a giant amorphous monster appearing in a town in the north of Japan, where a young man named Tetsu (Hiro Shimono) already has a smaller monster that can change shape, Cenco, as a kind of pet. But Shu (Ryohei Kimura), another young man with yet another creature, has schemes for the giant newcomer. Into this mix comes Yuki (Kana Hanazawa, Night Is Short, Walk On Girl) a classmate of Tetsu who finds out about Cenco — and who turns out to have a unique gift of her own.

That sets up the plot of the first short, which unsurprisingly ends with a massive fight scene. The second (spliced seamlessly after the first) then expands from there, adding new factions, explaining Shu’s background, and giving some new context to the power Yuki displayed. It doesn’t play like two disconnected stories; the first film serves well as an explosive if somewhat long first act, while the second film feels like the logical continuation. I would not have guessed the two parts of the story were created a decade apart.

It’s solid work, well-animated, though at times a bit small-scale. Massive brawls in the middle of a city feel empty, where you’d expect to have more involvement from police or the armed forces (though it has to be said there’s an implied explanation in some of what we learn in part two). Cencoroll Connect makes up for that with fluidity of motion, and the way the inhuman monsters attack and respond and react to things around them in human ways that convey emotion through movement.

I don’t think there’s anything spectacularly original in either the story or the designs, but the animation gives the story a fair amount of energy. There’s an odd lack of colour in the film, or at least an overall cool palette. This perhaps emphasises the prosaic setting for the various monster fights — the film never leaves the city setting for long, and battles take place in city streets and a school rooftop and the tip of a skyscraper. But if the tone of the climax gains from an increasing darkness, visually the movie is overall, if not dull, at least neutral in places where you’d expect it to pop.

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My last movie of July 20 was a horror film from South Africa. Written and directed by Harold Holscher, 8 has elements of the classical ghost story embedded in a larger tale of folklore and tragedy. It’s a period tale, set in 1977, and is set in a farm named Hemel op Aarde: Heaven on Earth.

Not long after the start of the film the run-down farm’s inherited by a man named William (Garth Breytenbach), a failed businessman who wants to start over there along with his wife Sarah (Inge Beckmann) and niece Mary (Keita Luna). Mary, who came to live with William and Sarah after the death of her parents, is happy to come to the farm; she’s an inquisitive girl deeply interested in all manner of subjects, including African myth and insects. Sarah doesn’t care for these things, or for having to live far from the big city. William’s difficulty in getting the electricity running at the farm doesn’t help. Luckily, the White family is given a hand by an older Black man named Lazarus (Tshamano Sebe). William’s soon relying on Lazarus for all sorts of things, despite Sarah’s distrust. And despite the distrust of a nearby village of Black people, who know and despise Lazarus, and who have no use for William, either. Is Lazarus hiding a dark secret?

In fact, we know from the opening shots of the movie that he is. And as 8 goes on that mystery is unveiled; unveiled almost too completely for the film to stay a horror story, in fact. There’s an honesty and directness to the film that’s unusual in horror. There are few jump scares, and few horrific twists. Instead there’s an ultimately character-based story that comes close to being a kind of tragedy. You know why people act the way they do, and what Lazarus wants. You understand the price he has to pay for his actions. And you have sympathy for everyone involved.

It’s oddly colourful for a horror movie, too, rich and shadowed, but not afraid of the bright light of the sun. I found approaching it as a horror film left me wrong-footed; the farmhouse, which seems like a spooky haunted house in the early scenes of the movie, becomes less important narratively and thematically as the story goes on. If the usual haunted house seems to have something to say about (for example) class or power or history or the personality that dwells within it, Heaven on Earth comes to have less and less meaning, as the focus of the story increasingly moves away from the main building. What might have been an icon of colonial power is instead just a place where things happen.

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The evening of July 20 saw me stay at the De Sève Theatre after the Born of Woman showcase for a feature film written and directed by Jon Mikel Caballero: The Incredible Shrinking Wknd. It’s a time-loop story, a subgenre that strikes me as having increased in popularity significantly over the past few years. We’re at the point, then, that a time-loop story has to do something different to stand out. So what does Wknd do?

It’s the story of Alba (Iria del Rio), newly turned 30, who’s spending a weekend partying at a cottage in the country with a group of acquaintances as well as her boyfriend of three years or so, Pablo (Adam Quintero). Alba’s generally thoughtless and lives for the day; despite having spent time at the cottage when she was young, she forgets to bring bottled water to a house with no indoor plumbing. Pablo wants something more, and in an argument one night breaks up with Alba. And then, not long after, reality resets and Alba gets to live through the weekend again. And again, and again; and then she notices the weekend’s getting shorter, and the time she has to live through is dwindling.

I’ll note to start with that the movie’s technically well-done. It looks very fine, with colours that establish moods, and a good variety of visually-interesting natural settings. Iria del Rio gives Alba a charismatic energy while making it clear that charisma’s covering up a certain kind of emptiness; there’s less to Alba than there appears, in a nicely-calculated way.

Narratively, the movie’s clever, almost a necessity in a time-loop story. The dialogue’s solid, and there’s a very nice visual idea (best left for the viewer to discover) that brings out the way the weekend’s shrinking. That twist itself is handled well, giving an increasing sense of tension as well as contrasting nicely with Alba’s tendency to care only about the present.

It gets a little odd in that Alba herself doesn’t reset, which becomes a minor plot point. If she gets drunk in one go-round, say, she’s hungover in the next. This is perhaps a way to talk about consequences, but it raises questions about the mechanism by which the time-loop exists in the first place and whether matter’s actually being transported through time. This is a film largely uninterested in such questions, though, and indeed the lack of concern with why the loop exists and why it works as it does is one of The Incredible Shrinking Wknd’s more frustrating aspects.

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On the afternoon of Saturday, July 20, I passed by the De Sève Theatre for the Born of Woman 2019 series of short genre films directed by women. It was the fourth iteration of the showcase, and in four years it’s become a hot ticket; I nearly didn’t get in. But there was just space enough in the end, and so I was able to see the collection of 9 films representing half-a-dozen countries.

The showcase started with “Lili,” a 9-minute piece written and directed by Yfke Van Berckelaer. An actress (Lisa Smit), Lili, comes to audition for a role. The camera’s fixed on her, the man (Derek De Lint) she’s reading for unseen. He seems receptive to what she brings on her first reading, but has her try the dialogue again, and again, pushing her more and more. You can see what’s coming, and what the reversal will be, but the movie works because the slowly pushing-in camera’s a disturbingly effective point of view, because Smit in particular is very good in her part, and because the dialogue’s cleverly and subtly ironic.

The art of sequencing a short film showcase can be overlooked, but in this case the arrangement of the shorts (most of which, in my opinion, were extremely strong to start with) was perfect. A good case in point was following “Lili” with the melancholic “Sometimes, I Think About Dying,” a 12-minute story from director Stefanie Abel Horowitz from a play by Kevin Armento, adapted by Horowitz, Armento, and Katy Wright-Mead, who also stars. It’s the story of Fran (Wright-Mead), a quiet, depressed woman who makes a connection with a male co-worker, Robert (Jim Sarbh). Will she be able to come out of her shell enough to maintain a relationship?

The movie’s almost unbearably painful in its portrait of a woman lacking in self-confidence. At the same time, Fran’s oddly sympathetic, so that by extension Robert feels like a lifeline for her. The orbit of the two of them is well-crafted, and the film really lands solidly because it knows where to end — not just what point of the story, but what seems like the exact right frame of film to end on.

Then different again was Australian writer-director Adele Vuko’s “The Hitchhiker,” about three women driving through the night to reach a music festival. Jade (Liv Hewson), the driver, picks up a hitchhiker (Brooke Satchwell), in part to distract her friends from innocent questions cutting near to a secret Jade doesn’t wish to reveal. The hitchhiker has a secret of her own, though, which only becomes clear once the friends pull in to a roadside bar.

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On Saturday, July 20, I was down at the Hall Theatre bright and early — relatively speaking — for an 11 AM showing of Ride Your Wave (Kimi to, nami ni noretara, きみと、波にのれたら), an animated feature from director Masaaki Yuasa. I’d seen two of Yuasa’s previous works, Lu Over the Wall and the excellent Night Is Short, Walk On Girl, and was eager to see what was in store this time around. As it turns out, Ride Your Wave, written by Reiko Yoshida, is a solid story that in a quiet way keeps doing unexpected things. It’s a romance, and then it isn’t; it’s a realistic story, and then it really isn’t. It’s a little reminiscent of Night Is Short, but is nowhere near as strange as that movie. Still, it does what it does quite well.

It follows Hinako (Rina Kawaei), a surfer and oceanography student, as she moves back to the coastal town where she lived as a child in order to go to university. There, she meets Minato (Ryôta Katayose), a young firefighter. They embark on an intense relationship — and then things go awry. It is in what happens next that the film perhaps gains its identity, though it’s worth preserving the twist that sets it up; enough to say that the supernatural manifests through water, in a kindly way. The question, then, is where the characters go, and particularly how Hinako will develop as a person.

That sounds vague, and Ride Your Wave isn’t. But it does take enough surprising turns it’s difficult to talk about as a story without giving away things better left to the film. So let me say this: it consistently nails the emotional tones it tries to evoke, and is a solidly-built story with a theme that slowly emerges of Hinako’s personal growth. It is a movie about her self-realisation, her coming of age, and it manages that in a surprising and touching way. It is a movie about sacrifice, and heroism, and letting things go, and it powerfully combines them all in Hinako’s story and background.

(I will note that there is one peculiar note. We learn something about how Minato and Hinako first met, or at least when they first met, that Minato knows but does not reveal to Hinako. It’s an odd choice to have him not tell her this thing, though it’s perhaps true that it comes to nothing. Still, it darkens Minato in a way I’m not sure was intended, turning him into a keeper of secrets, however benign.)

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There’s something about movies that fascinates us, likely because we’re so addicted to dreams we need them even awake. Whether laughing, crying, thinking, or longing, we need these special lenses to show our individual places within the world, to shape, guide, and make us — for a couple hours — want to be more than who we are.

Let’s look at a few movies that do precisely that so well, they transcend their medium.

LIFE

Life perplexes. Life mystifies. It teases, enraptures, amazes, enrages, and ultimately silences. The best films to capture the messy grandeur of life do all those things. The endings may not be clear-cut, the scripts at times largely improvised, characters will behave in ways we might not have predicted, but we love these movies for the heart they provide in an often uncomfortable world.

Amelie

If you’re one who never thought they’d see Amelie featured on Black Gate, welcome to Zig world. Everything is chance, even when we plan. Everything is wonderful, even when we cry. What if you could ensure that a life here and a life there would turn out a little brighter because of something you did? Would you do it? Amelie, by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, is a delightful fantasy of questions accompanied by a sense of wonder, one that reinforces the truth that just because life isn’t tidy doesn’t mean we can’t tidy our corners of it.

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My second and last movie on July 19 was a documentary named for its subject: J.R. “Bob” Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius (a film known in some quarters as Slacking Towards Bethlehem). Directed by Sandy K. Boone, it’s a history of a mock religion which got started more than 40 years ago, and still goes strong today.

It was begun by two bright misfit young men in the late 1970s, when Douglas Smith AKA Ivan Stang and Steve Wilcox AKA Philo Drummond took on aliases and began writing satirical pamphlets outlining the gospel and worldview of the Church of the Subgenius. They swiftly developed a specific tone and weird doctrine, praising the figure of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, a piece of 1950s advertising clip art. “Bob” (there must always be quotation marks around his name) represented a quality called ‘slack,’ which was never really defined except that it was a good thing to have; organised religions, by contrast, did not have slack. At any rate, the Church of the Subgenius developed a complex set of myths around gods, mutants, and aliens, and began selling their pamphlets through the mail. They came along at the right time to take advantage of zine culture as it developed through the 80s, and more and more people wrote away for their strange handmade tracts sending up the whole idea of mythology and religion. Live events followed, including annual “devivals” at which the end of the world is expected and awaited with joy. All the while the Church maintained its basic parodic aim and attitude, and, still in existence, keeps up that attitude in the face of an increasingly bizarre reality.

The movie tells us the story of the Church through a basically chronological structure. There are extensive interviews with Church members, especially the two founders. Ivan Stang is the more voluble, slightly manic with an odd edge, a recurring figure through the documentary that anchors the film. There are also interviews with well-known members of the Church, like Paul Mavrides, Alex Cox, Richard Linklater, and Penn Jillette. And there is a lot of archival footage, some of it taken by members of the Church and some of it footage from TV news shows showing baffled reporters trying to cover a Church event.

There’s a certain amount of care taken to explain to the wired world the zine subculture of the 1980s. The Church of the Subgenius took off in that context, reaching people who risked sending a dollar to a perfect stranger to get something weird in exchange. In the days before the internet, zines were a way for largely-bright and largely-young people to connect with each other, with the Church perhaps one of the odder examples of this alternative culture. Time having passed, it has also proved one of the longer-lasting.

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On the evening of July 19 I sat down in the Hall Theatre for a screening of It Comes (Kuru, 来る), a Japanese horror film. Directed by Tetsuya Nakashima, it’s based on the novel Bogiwan ga kuru, by Ichi Sawamura, with a screenplay by Nakashima, Hideto Iwai, and Nobuhiro Monma. It’s clever and colourful, and at two and a half hours it’s also a sprawling film that justifies its length by twisting in ways you don’t expect. It’s also a success, an entertaining and occasionally chilling movie that builds a universe without being too detailed about the supernatural horror lurking beyond consensus reality.

After a mysterious intro, the film starts with Hideki (Satoshi Tsumabuki) and Kana (Haru Kuroki), an apparently perfect young couple. Various bits of supernatural foreshadowing lead to the birth of their baby girl, Chisa, and Hideki throws himself into becoming the perfect father. But forces from his past are gathering, targeting Chisa. A friend, a professor of folklore named Tsuga (Munetaka Aoki, the Rurouni Kenshin movies) brings him to a disreputable writer, Nozaki (Jun’ichi Okada, Library Wars), and his spirit-medium girlfriend Makoto (Nana Komatsu, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures). But will even they be enough to stop the evil coming for Hideki and Chisa?

This all just hints at the complexities of the plot, best experienced unspoiled. It Comes is an incredibly well-structured and well-paced movie that builds through a good collection of horror set-pieces and quieter character-driven moments to a stunning large-scale climax boasting one of the most fascinating examples of religious syncretism I’ve seen on film. At the very end, it has one of the most charming visual moments I’ve ever seen to indicate that the supernatural’s been thoroughly dealt with.

It is important that it be so well-crafted, I think, because as it builds it goes to some very strange places. The colours are lurid, slowly growing more so. And the film does not hesitate to increasingly explore genre as the film goes on, as well; Hideki and Kana are more-or-less real people when we meet them, and then Tsuga is a perhaps little more than real, and then Nozkaki and Makoto more than that, and then when we meet Makoto’s sister Kotoko we meet a character on another level of genre reality. And yet the tones work. The operatic feel of the high genre strangeness is fused to the everdayness of the young parents. And the story of the baby facing possession is given a weird grandeur by the surreal witchery that must be enlisted to fight the bogeyman threatening the child.

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