Black Gate

My third movie on Sunday, July 15, was a France-UK co-production called Cold Skin. It was scheduled to start at 5:10 in the Hall Theatre, and ran 107 minutes. At 7:15, across the street at the De Sève, there’d be a showing of the 1911 Italian film L’Inferno, an adaptation of the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Musical accompaniment to the silent film would be provided by Maurizio Guarini of Italian prog band Goblin, well-known for providing the soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria among many other films. I figured I had a shot at getting in to see L’Inferno, but it’d depend on the length of the line-up. In the meanwhile, I was quite looking forward to Cold Skin.

Directed by Xavier Gens, the screenplay by Jesús Olmo and Eron Sheehan was based on the Catalan novel La Pell Freda by Albert Sánchez Piñol. It follows an unnamed man (David Oakes), presumably English, eventually to be known as Friend, as he travels by ship to an isolated island in the far south where he will take detailed meteorological readings. It is September 1914, and elsewhere the First World War’s begun; on the island Friend finds, there is no other human inhabitant but a surly lighthouse-keeper named Gruner (Ray Stevenson, perhaps best known for his role as Volstagg in the Thor movies). As Friend soon finds out, though, there are humanoid but non-human inhabitants: fish-creatures that come out at night and attack. Friend finds Gruner keeps a fish-woman (Aura Garrido) as a slave, but must live with him and the creature he names Aneris as, night after night, the other humanoids attack Gruner’s fortified lighthouse.

The first thing that must be said about this film is that it looks spectacular. The landscape of the island is harsh, craggy, barren, and beautiful. Friend’s cabin and Gruner’s lighthouse look lived-in and, crammed with detail, fit their period perfectly. There’s a kind of tactile 1914 that comes out of this movie, particularly the early scenes, before that external world is as it were stripped away from the humans. It’s a realisation of the era that seems to owe nothing to Merchant-Ivory or traditional period films; it’s harder-edged, unyielding. The lighting and cinematography are haunting and perfect: there’s a sense of place to the island built by the quality of sunlight, and a character to the interior scenes (and rare underwater scenes) as the light shifts.

The next thing that has to be said is that the acting in no way takes a back seat to the images. Oakes, Stevenson, and Garrido build complex characters and establish complex relationships among them — relationships that build and change over the course of the film. Garrido’s worth particular mention here, as her character is functionally mute yet always comprehensible. But all three capably bring out the dynamics among the characters that drive the plot, notably the tense not-quite adversarial relationship between Friend and Gruner.

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Sunday, July 15, was going to be my first really busy day of the Fantasia Film Festival. There were four movies I planned to see, with a chance of a fifth, depending on how things worked out. The day’d begin at the Hall Theatre; first, I’d see Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura, a lighthearted Japanese urban fantasy. Then would come Aragne: Sign of Vermillion, also from Japan, a horror anime.

Destiny (Kamakura Monogatari, DESTINY 鎌倉ものがたり) is directed by Takashi Yamazaki, helmer of the Parasyte movies, from a screenplay Yamazaki wrote based on the manga by Ryôhei Saigan. The movie follows Masakazu and Akiko Isshiki (Masato Sakai and Mitsuki Takahata), newlyweds, as they move to Masakazu’s home in the small-but-historic city of Kamakura. Masakazu’s a writer, but Akiko’s plans for their household meet a slight obstacle when she discovers that Kamakura, by dint of being “a magnet of mystical energy for millennia,” is home to any number of supernatural creatures: water imps, death gods, ghosts, bad luck gods, the list goes on. A series of episodic adventures show us different facets of the city and its inhabitants while also deftly advancing the Isshikis’ relationship, finally culminating in an extended otherworldly adventure that brings together subplots unobtrusively introduced over the course of the movie.

This is one of the most purely delightful movies I’d see at Fantasia, and indeed one of the most delightful I’ve come across in a long time. Tonally it’s somewhat similar to the Harry Potter films, in the particular kind of cartooniness of the CGI, in the conscious quaintness of the setting’s historicity, in the way the orchestral soundtrack is consciously lush yet awe-inspiring, and above all in the way that minor details turn out to be pieces of a larger puzzle: the way everything sets up everything else, the way the world feels both expansive and interconnected, perfectly machined in retrospect but almost overwhelming with implications as you live in it. There’s a deeper sense of the folkloric here than in Potter, though. I’ve heard some people mention a feel like a live-action Miyazaki film, and in terms of the creative visual design of the many creatures of Kamakura I can see that. But there’s a clearer bad guy here than is usual in a Miyazaki tale (although that doesn’t become obvious until late in the story).

Still, there’s a similar thrill in storytelling, and an equally unusual sense of structure. For example, Masakazu’s not just a writer but an adviser to the police, and a case he’s called on to solve turns out to have a very close solution to one of the stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. But this is not a problem, because the mystery is in fact solved very soon after it’s introduced; yet if it turns out to be an episode with its own quick satisfaction, it’s also a vehicle to set up other plot elements with their own pleasures. Here as elsewhere the film packs any number of sub-stories into its overall tale, creating a world full of incident that miraculously never feels rushed or underexplored, a world full of ideas with just the right emotional heft.

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