Saturday, July 20, 2024

Fantasia 2024.02: Confession '24 and The Count of Monte Cristo '24

I'm not going to reference Fantasia vs Fantasia here every time I hit one of its bits other than to say that, at a certain point, I was considering catching The A-Frame. Glad for what I got, but I hope the other one comes across my path sometime.

Anyway… No guests today, and I did not think to take a photo of the peri-peri poutine I wolfed down as local color. So on to the films, which make an interesting double feature because they somehow have similar pacing issues despite one being very short (76 minutes) and the other being fairly long (178 minutes).

Today's plan: Anime no Benton 2024, Brave Citizen, Mononoke the Movie, and Shelby Oaks


Kokuhaku Confession (Confession '24)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

The film takes a solid tight-space thriller premise as you can get and wrings everything it can out of it and then - maybe because it's so pared down that it needs to be stretched out - doesn't quite know when to stop. There was an "oh come on!" from the audience and the guy wasn't wrong, but it's hardly the first horror movie that has tried to get a couple different endings in, and by the time it gets there, it's done pretty well.

It opens pretty much in media res: Mountaineers Asai Keisuke (Toma Ikuta) and Ryu Ji-yong (Yang Ik-joon) are on their annual trek up the mountain where their friend Nishida Sayuri (Nao Honda) disappeared during their senior year of college 16 years ago, but a storm has swept in and Ji-Yong 's leg is injured. As he urges Asai to save himself, he confesses that he killed Sayuri. It turns out that a cabin offering shelter is very near, and Asai is able to save Ji-Yong, but it's one thing to get something off your chest when you think there are no more consequences, and quite another when it looks like you now have a life to spend in prison.

The set-up is good enough that a filmmaker doesn't necessarily have to get too fancy here. Director/co-writer Nobuhiro Yamashita points out that the pair have left their packs behind, lets the audience get know the cabin where they will spend the rest of the movie, then exploits how familiar the space is afterward. He hurts the pair enough to wince, and to keep things from resolving too quickly - Ji-Yong is hobbled and Asai is somewhat snow-blinded - but not so much that they're seeming to survive fatal injuries so often that the fight doesn't mean anything. It's kind of fun seeing this the day after another film the director has in the festival, since Swimming in a Sand Pool is as far as can be from this, genre-wise, and he's clearly having fun doing all the horror things: There are a few good jump scares, axes coming through walls, and nasty-looking tumbles. It's urgent enough that one isn't necessarily worried about much beyond the present moment, although there is something simmering.

It gives the small cast something to do beyond the physical, at least, with Yang Ik-joon getting to go wild, ping-ponging between sorrow, paranoia, and crazed violence, getting to chew scenery both as he attempts to manipulate his way to safety and eliminate the one person who can now rat on him. Toma Ikuta turns in solid work as Asai, handling the running and climbing and having his eyes bug as an axe nearly splits his head with aplomb, and adding in just enough twitchy nervousness to make later revelations about the relationship between Asai and Sayuri not come out of nowhere.

It's a bit surprising that Nao Honda has what amounts to an extended, almost wordless cameo, enough to make me wonder if there were more flashback scenes or appearances of Sayuri as a ghost or hallucination at some point, but decided that the core of the film was the two men in the cabin with everything else a distraction. That knocked it down to 76 minutes, including some very slow-walked credits, and while I appreciate that there's not padding throughout, the finale does feel less like cool twists than "how we get to feature length". You risk deflating everything that the audience enjoyed this way, but it never really falls apart.

Get past the one groaner moment, which they at least use a bit better than most, and you're left with a pretty darn good duel movie (maybe the best since 2LDK) that doesn't water itself down to hit a certain runtime.


Le comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo '24)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

This adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo likely doesn't set a record for the use of "X Years Later" intertitles, even among movies where it's not a gag, but it does lead to some thoughts about how such things are deployed, and how maybe an adaptation like this - grand enough that it can streamline Alexandre Dumas's novel less than others - highlights just what a tricky thing "X Years Later" is in a movie.

It starts in 1815, with merchant sailor Edmond Dantès (Pierre Niney) rescuing a woman who will only give him the name of Angèle (Adèle Simphal) from a sinking ship. It angers the ship's captain, Danglars (Patrick Mille) but impresses the owner Morrel (Bruno Raffaelli), who fires Danglars and installs Edmond as the ship's new captain. His future set, Edmond proposes to his love Mercédès Herrera (Anaïs Demoustier), a cousin of the family that his father serves and which sponsored him at the Naval Academy, unaware that its scion and his friend, Fernand de Morcef (Bastien Bouillon) also loves her. He is also unaware that Angèle was loyal to the exiled Napoleon, and Danglars intercepted a letter, which he uses to frame Edmond as the same, and Fernand sees the chance to be rid of a rival by refusing to vouch for him to prosecutor Gérard de Villefort (Laurent Lafitte). Edmond is imprisoned for four years before he encounters Abbé Faria (Pierfrancesco Favino), who has been patiently digging an escape tunnel for six, and who gives him the secret location of the treasure of the Knights Templar on the isle of Monte Cristo, a treasure that will allow him to pose as the fabulously wealthy Count. Recruiting Angèle's hidden son Andre (Julien De Saint Jean) and Haydée (Anamaria Vartolomei), the daughter of one of Fernand's foes, he arrives in Paris, intent on destroying the three men who betrayed him, although his thirst for vengeance may blind him to how Albert (Vassili Schneider), the son of Fernand & Mercédès he has Haydée seduce, is an innocent she may find herself not hating.

It's a grand story spanning twenty years adapted into a movie just a hair under three hours, and the first half especially is an absolutely fantastic presentation of the basic premise which everyone knows: It opens with a terrific scene of swashbuckling maritime adventure, builds Edmond up as a tremendously likable hero even as it makes him blind to the developing resentments in a way that doesn't scan as foolish hubris, then knocks it all over and presents the Chateau d'Ilf prison as a specially dehumanizing sort of hell to escape. It's terrific right up to the point where Edmond discovers the treasure.

And then, after 4 years/6 years/1 year later, it starts to feel like filmmakers Alexandre de La Patellière & Matthieu Delaporte (who also wrote last year's two-part The Three Musketeers adaptation) are not just jumping past the repetitive parts, but things of real import. In particular, so much of the second half of the movie rests on Haydée that her just appearing in the story, alternately fully-formed and enigmatic, makes the film wobbly in a way that the first half was too singularly focused to be. de La Patellière & Delaporte have to give exposition rather than show Edmond discovering what has happened to his former friends and adversaries while he was imprisoned and/or creating his new persona, and there are missed opportunities to make him more tragic.

It picks up as Edmond's plans reach their climaxes, at least, in large part because Pierre Niney is a pretty great Count. He sells the young and earnest Edmond and lets the audience see what remains of him as time turns him hard and vengeful, the seed of a sort of self-delusion that allows him to think he is delivering justice rather than revenge. There's something similar going on with Anaïs Demoustier, who makes the audience believe in how the carefree girl of the start grows into a woman wise enough to never lose track of who she was before. And while the way the story is built demands Anamaria Vartolomei fill in a fair amount vai her portrayal of Haydée, she up for it, making her a young woman who has maybe not completely settled into her final form despite events that forge her similar to those of Edmond, intelligent and observant enough to be his conscience if he'd let her, with enough charisma on top of her beauty to pull every scene she's in in her direction. It's a well-cast film from top to bottom, but those three are the ones that make the whole thing work.

The film also looks and sounds amazing, with a bombastic score by Jérôme Rebotier which keeps the energy up rather than exhausting the audience over 178 minutes. There's a great sense of location, especially in the first half, as the ship, Marseilles, the manor, and the prison all feel like they represent something formative for Edmond, and there's grandeur and scale throughout. The two best action pieces are on either end - the underwater rescue feels like the middle of dangerous seas despite likely being a lot of digital effects, and the final swordfight between Edmond and Fernand is a great balance between elegant fencing technique and how people actually trying to kill each other with swords will make it something ugly.

I wonder, a bit, if this might have worked better as a television or streaming series, where every break is an opportunity to pause and reset rather than worry about what one has been missing. There's a whole movie's worth of entertainment here, though, and it may be a bit greedy to ask for more.

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