Black Gate

I had three screenings I planned to attend at Fantasia on Saturday, July 21. The last would be a showcase of short films, but the first two were features. The day would begin at the Hall Theatre with The Travelling Cat Chronicles, an adaptation of a Japanese novel about a cat and assorted humans. Then would come Da Hu Fa, a 3D animated film from China about a diminutive martial-arts master seeking a lost prince within a hidden valley.

The Travelling Cat Chronicles (Tabineko ripôto, 旅猫リポート) was directed by Koichiro Miki from a script by Emiko Hiramatsu adapting Hiro Arikawa’s novel. Nana is the travelling cat in question, and she narrates the film in question (voice-work contrbuted by Mitsuki Takahata) as Satoru (Sota Fukushi, also in Laplace’s Witch, the Library Wars movies, and Blade of the Immortal), her human, tries to find her a new home. The reason why Satoru must find a new home for his beloved cat isn’t hard to realise, but at least at first the point is that he takes Nana with him as he travels around to some of his closest friends — all of whom are willing to take her in, but each of whom have various practical difficulties. Flashbacks establish Satoru’s relationships, and his travels with Nana become a way into his life as a whole, leading to some surprising revelations and to a devastating emotional conclusion.

The first thing that has to be said about this movie is that it’s the most ruthlessly effective tearjerker I’ve ever seen. The entire second half of the movie played over a theatre full of sniffles and sobs. I thought at first that I’d never heard so much crying at a Fantasia film, then revised that to “any film,” and by the end to “any gathering, funerals and memorials included.” If it’s a tearjerker, though, it’s a tearjerker with real integrity — it’s so effective in large part because it’s a good dramatic film, not because it’s filled with unearned emotion. (I will specifically note that nothing too bad happens to Nana.)

It’s also effective because every character in the movie is genuinely nice. You sympathise with all of them; you see why they do what they do. And what tragedies of their own they have to cope with. Most notably, a character we barely meet, the father of Satoru’s best friend Kosuke (Ryosuke Yamamoto) at first is described as cruel and abusive, but with a few lines here and there and one twist near the end we come to understand him better, come to see for whatever damage he’s inflicted he’s really a man who simply doesn’t understand people. It’s impressive when a film’s able to humanise a character who barely appears in more than a few frames.

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I’ve said that the last two movies I saw on Thursday, July 19, did different things with weirdness: one extremely weird in its way, the other unweird to a surprising degree. As it turned out, the same could be said of the two movies I saw on Friday, July 20. The first (at the J.A. De Sève) was a Russian film, A Rough Draft. The second (at the larger Hall Theatre) was American, The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot. From those titles you might not guess which movie had the weirdness and which didn’t. But that’s the reward of watching things at Fantasia: the chance of the wholly unexpected.

A Rough Draft (Chernovik, Черновик) was directed by Sergey Mokritskiy from a script he wrote with Maksim Budarin, Denis Kuryshev, and Olga Sobenina, adapting a novel by Sergey Lukyanenko. Kirill (Nikita Volkov) is a successful computer game designer in Moscow — until he begins to disappear from the memory of his friends and family. Reality has changed, and he’s no longer part of it. He confronts the woman who seems to be the cause, Renata (Severija Janusauskaite). Kirill, we learn, has become a Functional, a person with superhuman powers; he’s been drafted to serve as a customs officer in a stone tower that’s a gateway between worlds. Mysteries abound. Can he get back to his family and to the love of his life, Anna (Olga Borovskaya)? And will he find the mysterious other reality, Arkan, that is 30 years ahead of our own and thus a rough draft for our own world?

A Rough Draft plays like a film that’s supposed to be a blockbuster. It’s full of big ideas, bright visuals, and the unexpected. Whole universes can lurk behind a door. At every turn it seems like a new concept or gimmick’s being introduced. Which is really why it goes off the rails so spectacularly, in ways an American blockbuster would never be allowed to do. It’s a train wreck, but a fascinating, entirely watchable train wreck. After the movie ended, seven of us gathered in the atrium outside the De Sève Theatre to form an impromptu therapy group trying to work through what it was that we’d just seen. While this felt necessary, it was pointless. It’s not possible to make what’s on screen make sense as a coherent whole. Too many pieces are missing. But I’d very much like to read Lukyanenko’s original novel.

The first act of the film, in which Kirill finds himself being erased from everyone’s memories, is simple enough. We’ve seen this before — a man being wiped out of the world, a man being initiated into a new life with strange and secret powers. It moves well; Volkov brings Kirill’s astonishment across; the mystery’s enough to make us want to see what happens next. And then the chaos begins. We start getting ideas thrown at us hard and fast, and halfway through an explanation of one idea another breaks in on us and we get some of the basics on that and never end up getting the rest of the explanation of the first. Meanwhile another three things have happened.

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Strangeness has many vectors; you can be weird in multiple directions at once. Whichever shape a movie takes, it’s often a good idea to have something strange in it. Something unexpected. You can usually count on movies at Fantasia to have at least one well-developed kind of weirdness in them, but the last two movies I saw on July 19, both at the large Hall Theatre, went in very different directions; one the strangest film (in a certain way) that I’d see this year, and the other imagining a world in which there is nothing unpredictable at all. The first was an odd Hollywood-set detective story, Under the Silver Lake. The second was Laplace’s Witch, an adaptation of a Japanese science-fiction novel, directed by Takashi Miike.

Under the Silver Lake is directed by David Robert Mitchell, whose previous film It Follows was a surprise hit. This is very different from that quiet teen horror film; Silver Lake follows Sam (Andrew Garfield), an unemployed 33-year-old who spies on his female neighbours and has no obvious ambitions for his life. Somehow he attracts a new neighbour (Riley Keough), who promptly disappears. Sam’s half-assed attempt to find her leads him to a loopy world defined by stream-of-consciousness conspiracy theory. There are eccentric minicomics zines that hold the key to a murderous ghoul; a killer of dogs; a king of the homeless; secret messages in pop songs; clues hidden in an old issue of Nintendo Power; parties in assorted strange locations with assorted strange people; multiple trinities of women; and secrets underlying the geography of Los Angeles.

This film’s a maze, in which everything refers to everything else, and occasionally to things outside of the film. It’s about, among other things, a kind of search for profundity in popular culture, and how that search is doomed to failure. It’s about the anomie of a generation of young men. It’s about voyeurism, and women performing for the male gaze, intentionally and unintentionally. It’s about 140 minutes long (to paraphrase one overrated pop singer), but it feels longer, if only because of its intentionally episodic and elliptical structure. It’s sporadically funny, but not really a comedy. It sporadically provides clues, but is only nominally a mystery. It is consistently very well-shot, and very precise in its compositions and mise-en-scene. Mainly, though, what it is, is weird.

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