Black Gate

One of the lovely things about covering Fantasia is the chance to see genre classics I missed the first time around, often brought back to the screen in a restored version. Again in 2020, notwithstanding its streaming-only nature, Fantasia revived a number of great films from prior years. While my own inefficiency with scheduling meant I ended up missing Johnnie To’s A Hero Never Dies, I saw many of the others, including Wilson Yip’s 2005 movie SPL: Kill Zone (also just Kill Zone, originally SPL: Sha Po Lang, 殺破狼).

Written by Yip with Szeto Kam-Yuen and Jack Ng, it follows Hong Kong cop Detective Chan (Simon Yam), who’s trying to settle a personal score by taking down mobster Wong Po before Chan retires. Unfortunately for Chan, Wong’s played by Sammo Hung. Unfortunately for Wong, the man about to take over from Chan, Ma, is played by Donnie Yen. Mayhem ensues.

Although, in truth, there’s a little less mayhem than you might expect. Yip leans strongly into the melodrama of the story, holding most of the fight scenes for later in the film. Chan’s our main character for the first part of the movie, building up our sympathy for him as we see Wong’s ruthlessness — but then after the introduction of Ma, we come to see things from Ma’s perspective, and we see how Chan’s obsession with Wong leads him not just to push boundaries but to shatter them entirely.

Chan leads a small unit of cops trying to get the goods on Wong; they get their hands on video tape that seems to incriminate him in a murder, but doesn’t tell quite the story they need it to tell. So they cheat, trying to use the tape to frame Wong, even if that means taking out witnesses who know the truth. The cops are dirty, and you understand why they’re dirty, but you’re not allowed to forget that they’re dirty.

This gives the story enough heft, enough moral complexity, that the melodrama becomes more interesting and the story becomes far more than a collection of set-pieces. Add to that some strong performances: Sammo Hung’s alternately sinister and sympathetic, while Donnie Yen gives a convincing portrayal as a basically decent man trying to decide what to do in a compromised world. Watching Yen, in fact, I found it hard not to think what it would have been like to see him as Superman at around that time — a forceful but good man, one who the audience is drawn to emphasise with due to a mixture of warmth and strength. On the other hand, Hung’s playing a fat crimelord who’s actually both a mass of muscle and a skilled martial artist, a man the cops can’t legally touch but whose weakness is the wife he truly loves, and who keeps a psychopathic-but-supremely-skilled assassin as his enforcer. Which is to say I no longer need to wonder what it’d be like to see him play Wilson Fisk.

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There is, or was, or might have been according to some, a movement in Greek cinema that started and flourished in the first half of the second decade of the twenty-first century called the Greek Weird Wave. This movement, if it existed — and Lanthimos himself is skeptical, while others say it’s a thing of the past — was perceived to be anchored by the films of Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari, and characterised by surreal plot situations, precise cinematography and alienated, emotionally muted characters. (It’s quite far from prose weird fiction or even the New Weird, often lacking any element of the fantastic.) Were the Weird Wave is a thing to have ever existed, it would be very tempting to place Rinio Dragasaki’s debut feature Cosmic Candy within it.

Written by Dragasaki with Katerina Kaklamani, it follows Anna (Maria Kitsou), a youngish woman who works at a convenience store and is addicted to Cosmic Candy, a sugary substance the store’s decided to no longer carry. Anna suffers from OCD and, apparently, at least mild depression, ordering fitness equpiment online that she never opens. Then she comes home one evening to find a young girl, her neighbour Persa (Pipera Maya), hanging around her front door. Persa’s father has vanished, and despite herself Anna takes in the extroverted high-energy Persa. Anna’s own father, we learn, vanished some time ago, and the main part of the film is the bonding between Anna and Persa as Anna investigates Persa’s life. She tries to understand what’s happened to Persa’s father and where the girl can live long-term, while at the same time trying not to get fired from her job, and helping Persa prepare for her school pageant.

You can see the outline of some very familiar story structures in the foregoing, and one of the interesting aspects of Cosmic Candy is the way it uses those structures while also occasionally pushing back against them. There is overall a straightforwardness to the film, but it’s pulled into some unusual shapes by Anna’s mental and emotional states, and a mounting tendency to the surreal. Some elements of it struck me as possibly referring to cultural knowledge I did not have (specifically the significance Persa’s school play, in which she plays a figure from the 19th-century struggle for Greek Independence). But the story’s always clear, and told with a distinctive gentleness, a sympathy for all its characters. As it goes on it becomes more surreal, anchored always by subtly powerful cinematography and the alienated Anna’s muted emotional reaction: thus, perhaps, part of the Weird Wave, if such a thing exists.

Technically Cosmic Candy can be said to be a genre story in that there’s a mystery, and a tale of crime seen edge-on. Mostly, though, it’s a story of a mismatched couple coming to bond and shape each other’s world. As such it’s perfectly solid; you see why the two characters are drawn to each other despite their basic differences in temperament, and the adventures and exploits they pull each other into are well-planned and build well — if it’s clear that Persa’s play will always be the climax of the film, an extended road trip the two of them take in search of another of her family members nicely diverts the tale for just long enough, giving us a less expected dimension.

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Wapikoni Mobile is a non-profit organisation based in Montreal that sends mobile film studios to work with the youth of Indigenous communities, teaching them the skills to make movies and giving them the support to produce short films. Almost 200 Wapikoni shorts have won awards or special mentions in film festivals around the world, and many have appeared in previous editions of Fantasia. With the studios on hiatus due to the pandemic, this year the festival screened a collection of 17 movies selected by Wapikoni in a showcase of work created through the program.

I watched the showcase, and was impressed. Every movie had something to recommend it, and most of them had quite a lot. (Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find acting credits for most of the films; but as least I’ve been able to include links to some.)

The first of the films was one of the best, and possibly the most haunting film I saw at the festival all year. The 8-minute “Kakatshat,” by Eve Ringuette, starts in the 19th century with a curse from an abandoned old woman (played, I believe, by Thérèse Vollant), then moves forward to show the curse’s working-out. It’s stunningly well-shot, and, quiet and eerie, captures a profound atmosphere.

Next came “The Guest,” by Nicholas Rodgers. It’s a folkloric five-minute-long story about a man (Philippe Mathon) who takes a small omnivorous furry creature into his house only to find it has more of an appetite than he realised. It’s made in a distinctive kind of stop-motion that gives it a surreal touch; you can see it here. The next movie was also from Rogers, “RUN,” in which a man who’s committed a violent crime treks into a nighttime forest and finds there more than he expected. It’s a solid piece of horror that does some very nice work with soundscapes, and it’s available here.

Next came “Among The Forest,” by Oqim Nicholas. A youth journeys into the woods, pondering a horrible life left behind, and his internal monologue builds to a powerful ending. The writing gives us some particularly nice character work. “TRANSMISSION 01: 34-OD” by Jim Matlock is an experimental video that uses distorted sound and images to fashion a plea for change in the world, creating nice collage effects along the way.

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