Thursday, August 01, 2024

Fantasia 2024.06: "Furet", Fly Me to the Saitama: From Biwa Lake with Love, and The Chapel

Pretty short day in part because of previous days not going as planned: Bookworm being sold out on opening night meant I opted for Swimming in a Sand Pool instead, and the science fiction shorts ran just long enough on the 21st that finishing the Nobuhiro Yamashita hat trick with Ghost Cat Anzu wasn't possible, meaning it was easy enough to turn back around and see Not Friends. Pair that with not wanting to risk cascading delays causing Vulcanizadora running late and making me miss Fly Me to the Saitama 2, and I had the whole afternoon free.

First order of business: Another Asian movie!. Well, technically, the first was going into Marshall's and getting some extra socks and underpants so that I could push laundry day to the exact midpoint of the trip, thus only hitting the laundromat once and hopefully not having clean and dirty clothes mingling in the suitcase on the way home. But that mall is right across the street from the old Forum and an easy stop before Customs Frontier.

Second order of business: Poutine!

Honestly, I wish my schedule had lined up so that I could hit Le Grand Poutine Fest for a few days in a row, trying out all the food trucks. This General Tao's Chicken Poutine was good stuff, though.

Then, finally, back to the Concordia campus and a couple of films without guests, which is why I'm throwing pictures of poutine in there. Not that I don't mind a little break after a week.

Not much of a break for the start of the third weekend (or "Week Three", if short weeks are allowed, where I'll be catching the first three episodes of Lantern Blade, Haze, and A Chinese Ghost Story II, seeing what the time/crowd situation is to choose between Jour de chasse and "CineMaposa 2024", and finishing with Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In.


"Furet" ("Ferret")

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Les Fantastiques Week-ends du Cinéma Québécois, laser DCP)

Fantastiques Week-ends is a celebration of local Québécois filmmaking, from features that recently played major festivals like SXSW ot things that are clearly a few friends screwing around with a camera and editing suite, mostly entertaining themselves as opposed to harboring much thought of doing this for a living. "Furet" is one of those, in a number of senses; if it gets broader notice, it will likely be as a novelty: Most of the supporting cast has Down syndrome, which can lead to the feeling of it taking place in some unusual parallel world. I don't think that's what the filmmakers are going for; they're just a bunch of people who have a thing in common getting together to make the sort of movie they enjoy and having a good time.

And it is a pretty good time - the title character (Rémi-Pierre Paquin), nicknamed "Furet" ("Ferret" in English) for his ability to weasel his way out of situations, gets pulled into a plot to rob a bar from the inside, only for a number of things to go wrong. It's goofier than a lot of comedies using that skeleton are, but also feels like a lot of fun: Why make a movie about gangsters if you're not going to put on costumes and make them 1940s gangsters? Use the ridiculous joke. If you can get a celebrity cameo, let him be silly in a way he probably doesn't get to be at work.

Make movies and have fun with it. You might turn out something better than expected.


Tonde Saitama: Biwako Yori Ai o Komete (Fly Me to the Saitama: From Lake Biwa with Love)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 22 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I'll bet, watched back to back, there's precious little difference between the two Fly Me to the Saitama movies and either my tastes have changed or something in the experience was different (it's a movie just made to bring out the weebs going "haw haw, I know that bit!", and that can get me gritting my teeth more than laughing), but this one seemed to be trying a little too hard and leaning on that recognition in the way the first wasn't quite so much. Or maybe it just hit differently tonight. That happens.

The first - well, the first was something, a framing story about a family in a car whose daughter is ashamed to be from the Saitama prefecture listening to a radio drama about the Saitamese throwing off the yoke of their oppressors. The same family is in the car again five years later, daughter Manami Sugawara (Haruka Shimazaki) now grown and pregnant, worrying over the name of the child, when another drama comes on. It starts with princess Momomi Dannoura (Fumi Nikaido) looking to help unite the Saitama by building a railway line that connects its various districts as opposed to just going to Tokyo and back, but facing resistance; husband and Saitaman hero Rei Asami (Gackt) proposes building a beach. To do that, he and his comrades will travel to Shiga to import sand, but the hips are attacked, and they find themselves amid a similar revolution: Shiga is the equivalent of the Saitama in this part of Japan, with Osaka and its governor Akira Kashoji (Ainosuke Kataoka) ruling with an iron fist and revolutionary Kai Kikyo (Anne Watanabe), very much a female version of Rei, opposing him. He's got plans beyond just having Shiga under his thumb, though - a special chemical extracted from Koshinen Stadium can actually turn outsiders Osakan, effectively making all of Japan Osaka… or even the world!

The good news is that a movie so eager to throw jokes against the wall to see what sticks like this will do pretty well even if only ten percent are working for you, and the hit rate here is better than that. There's not a moment that isn't trying to make the audience laugh in two or three ways even if it's also looking to push some sort of story forward. Many of the jokes are very dumb, and many are completely inscrutable if you're not Japanese and haven't been diving into Japanese pop culture even more than the typical manga fan (I certainly wouldn't know someone had started talking with an Osakan accent or using Osakan slang without other characters commenting on it), but the thing is, they at least all look like jokes and are presented with gusto. Nobody is going to miss the gag because it's too dry, ever, and even if something is hard to parse, the comic timing is pretty impeccable, at least with a crowd. By the end, certainly, the filmmakers have locked into a delightfully absurd mode with big laughs.

Both new and returning cast are strong, and not just because the sight of Anne Watanabe and Gackt in near-matching costumes is fun - the same basic outfit that marks Rei as a someone feminine bishonen makes Kikyo a masculine "Lady Oscar" type - and they're both kind of excitable but complement each other in where they're clever and where they're dumb. Watanabe, especially, dives into how a lot of fans are going to be immediately eager to pair them off and has a ball. Ainosuke Kataoka similarly gets to chew a bunch of scenery as a megalomaniac villain who is quite obviously being cuckolded. And it's kind of a shame that Fumi Nikaido's Momomi is not so much relegated to the sidelines as doing her own thing back in the Saitama - she's a riot, and can sell a lot of gags on her own, but it's mostly against minor characters, as opposed to the other stars.

As with the first, the movie is a bunch of fun to just look at, with elaborate costumes that are as big a part of the characters as the performances but an overall aesthetic that can be kind of rickety, like a lot of secondary locations and visuals were built quick and on short notice so that the whole doesn't feel too fancy. When the action gets big and brash, though, the effects work is up to the task, because the filmmakers want the audience laughing at how wacky this is, not at how low the budget must be.

There's a lot that's fun here, but it doesn't always connect. Maybe the very end locks what wasn't quite working for me in - the first film is more self-deprecating while this sequel points more mockery outward, to the point of saying sorry, we don't really think this at the end. There was something kind of weirdly universal even when the first was at its most specific - every city that's not Tokyo or London or New York has that kind of chip on its shoulder (and even then, Queens has it for Manhattan, for example) - so you felt it even if the references weren't your own, but this is often more about the specific stereotypes than the feeling behind them. It may just be a small difference in attitude, but when you're blowing everything up to the scale that this movie is, it can make a notable difference.


La ermita (The Chapel)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

Because these daily reviews have a kind of format, I often wind up copying the previous one, keeping the skeleton, and filling in. Today, this kind of reminds me that The Chapel played in the same slot that had The Beast Within the night before, and some important elements are similar, in that both center on a pre-teen girl whose perspective is an important part of the story. I quite like this one where the other left me cold, and I think a big part of the reason why is that where Beast tried to be a timeless fairy tale, Chapel is contemporary and specific, and its details are interesting and make it easier to identify parallels than something trying to be universal.

The lore here dates back to 1631; with the Black Death raging, the plague doctors rounded up the sick and sealed them in one of the church's rooms, including Uxoa, a little girl who dropped her doll on the way inside and is said to haunt it. Nearly 400 years later, the site has been excavated and recreating the event has been a tourist attraction for decades, in part because medium Ivana Peralta claimed to make contact with Uxoa. This year, one of the locals most fascinated by the whole thing is 8-year-old Emma (Maia Zaitegi), a neighbor of Peralta's who hopes to become a medium herself and is encouraged by the old woman, but for a very specific reason: Her mother Maider (Loreto Mauleón) is dying of cancer. She finds the old woman dead one night during the five-day period when the chapel is ceremonially opened before being resealed, which brings Ivana's estranged, burnt daughter Carol (Belén Rueda) back to town to settle the estate. She's also a medium, but of the cold-reading variety, and resists Emma's entreaties to teach her. But Emma's a very determined girl who doesn't realize how dangerous the forces she'd have to access to talk to the dead are.

I love smart, practical little girls who nevertheless wear cat ears and light-up sneakers like Emma, and Maia Zaitegi is a real delight in the role, making Emma serious and perspective enough to realize what she's dealing with but also light and innocent enough that she doesn't plod through scenes morose. There's determination and curiosity to her that are genuine - a girl like this doesn't really put up a front - that make the moments when sadness overwhelms her or danger creates genuine fear more powerful. The kid is easy to love but is also making things happen in a way that makes sense.

Even with that, it can be hard to make them the actual center of the story and still keep them believable, but it also creates an interesting prism through which to view the adult characters as well. In this case, that's mostly Carol, who is Emma's complement in many ways that make her uncomfortable, and Belén Rueda gets across that Carol knows herself and how other people see her all too well. On her own, she's sarcastic but in a way that suggests she knows she's trying to push people away but doesn't actually want to hurt them. They're interesting to watch together in large part because they're intriguing separately and the pairing is not natural; Carol is well-aware of where the direction Emma is heading leads but also can't help but want to recapture that feeling that there's magic in the world and one's faith matters. Add in Josean Bengoetxea as a policeman that when to school with Carol and is one of the many neighbors looking out for Emma, and there's a trio that look like they should become a found family, but they don't quite fit.

Aside from all that, I like how it plays with faith and belief as well, with Emma motivated by need and possibly harming herself because she's literally playing with fire. The ghost story around the Chapel is terrific, leading to a neat horror-movie finale, but also a commodity, and the way the filmmakers will trick the audience into thinking they're seeing something from 400 years ago but reveal it to be modern recreations is clever: This is all malleable and convincing, and the balance between comforting and exploiting those who need the assurance these stories provide is never fair, whether coming from the official church or a fake psychic.

It's an idea that burrows in and takes hold in part because director Carlota Pereda and her co-writers don't try to abstract what Emma and Carol are dealing with but explore it, while still giving the audience creepy plague-doctor monsters and a phantom who lures an innocent into danger. It's smart and scary and makes all its pieces work together.

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