Long hair, late nights and a lot of basement geeks – that’s Montreal’s Fantasia Fest. It’s like everything North American alt. pop culture always claimed to be, but bilingual. French and English speaking fan boys and girls queue up for hours to squeeze into cult screenings from self-proclaimed weirdos. Films like Birdemic: Shock and Terror, The Violent Kind, The Human Centipede, Rubber and the terrifying A Serbian Film all have an audience here.
Fans flock from all over, happily handing over $600 for the full three weeks to catch the likes of Mutant Girls Squad from Japan as much as Disney nemesis Don Bluth, who was in town for The Land Before Time. Rumour has it that demand for the screening of Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is predicated to be so high that a tout snapped up 500 tickets like it’s a Lady Gaga show. And that’s without an appearance from director Edgar Wright who, by the way, would devour this festival.
Fantasia is an annual feast of genre films made by underdogs who rule the underground. Take the blood-stained premiere of I Spit On Your Grave (which will be at FrightFest in London next month). Steven Monroe’s remake of ‘the most notorious revenge thriller of all time’ caused controversy when an audience member fainted during its screening. But when a here-unnamed journo tried to snap the guy’s blood on the cinema walls, the festival organisers nearly kicked him out. They like exploitation, but only if it’s in the movies…
Neverlost was praised by Fantasia’s general manager and co-director of international programming Mitch Davis as a ‘no-budget miracle that showed up and knocked my socks off.’ However, the film, which enjoyed its world premiere at Fantasia last week, was a disappointment. Keen to evoke his heroes, Canadian writer-director Chad Archibald has instead created an amalgamation of Mulholland Drive and Requiem for a Dream. The inconstant, sentimental script offers one-dimensional characters plagued by weak dialogue with the production values of a soap.
The plot pivots around the double life of failed scriptwriter Josh Higgins (Ryan Barrett). Awake, he is married to a brunette bitch whose constant nagging turns him onto sleeping pills. As he dreams, he is reunited with his blonde ex Kate (Emily Alatalo), who, in his waking life, was burned alive by her own dad. But, while Josh dreams, Kate’s arsonist father reappears to ruin this life too. The film flickers between each of his lives which get progressively worse until his only recourse is suicide. Then Kate – who only has two emotions – weeps and the credits roll.
In everyone’s defence, the film had apparently been re-cut at the eleventh hour for inclusion in the festival. But that’s the luck of a draw, you never know what you’re going to get with programming as diverse as this. Perhaps with more time and more money, Archibald will emerge with a genuine miracle at a future festival.
Far better was Hungarian mind-melter, 1. Based on a story by Solaris writer Stanislaw Lem, it centres on a rare bookshop whose entire library has been replaced by multiple copies of a hardbound tome called 1. The book contains nothing but numbers. The mind-boggling data is revealed to signify man’s achievement, from the amount of deaths by human hand per minute to the percentage of successful conceptions in relation to copulation. The data proves deadly to society. As soon as people read the streams of figures, their minds unravel at the meaninglessness of life. A grizzled detective sets out to unearth the book’s mystery authors in order to keep society together, but in the end, is helpless to its power.
Pater Sparrow’s film looks gorgeous. Boasting a metaphysical plot, surreal imagery (floating dolphins, shelves of identical white books) and dreamlike, sepia tones it is like Caro and Jeunet taking on Jorges Luis Borges and every bit as complicated as that sounds. Catch it if you can.
Despite the significant industry buzz surrounding Simon Rumley’s follow-up to The Living and the Dead, the Canadian premiere of Red White & Blue was not a sell out. More fool Montrealers, as it was by far the best of the festival. If you like the laissez-faire losers who lurk in Richard Linklater’s films – and aren’t adverse to a decent throat-slitting scene – then this new-wave horror is for you.
Taking a three-act structure more literally than most, it’s a ‘slacker revenge thriller’ that keeps you guessing to the gory end. More akin to a teleplay than a straight up genre film, it’s a craftily-edited slow burner set among the dive bars of Austin, Texas.
Skinny hipsters work part-time jobs, play in garage bands, drink, fuck and sleep ’til noon. Unhappy Erica (Amanda Fuller) has made casual sex an obsession, barebacking a new guy nightly. Pock-marked and clad in denim cut-offs and dirty white cowboy boots, she seduces Franki (Marc Senter) over some beers. Franki is a sensitive guy with a terminally-ill mother with whom he lives. He and his bandmates The Exits devour Erica, feasting on her flesh as they fuck in a (consensual) foursome. Afterwards, she showers vigorously, expecting never to see them again.
Then she meets Nate. A former military man who escaped Iraq with honourable discharge, Nate longs to be close with Erica. She spurns his advances claiming she doesn’t ‘want a boyfriend.’ But that’s not the whole story. Erica has a secret.
Raped at four by her mother’s boyfriend, Erica inherited HIV along with a life-changing distrust of heterosexual relations. Subverting the female-as-victim role, she wreaks revenge on the world by utilising her body as a lethal weapon – spreading her disease to any guy who’ll have her. But, as her disease impacts the men who encircle her, Erica finds herself at the mercy of casual lays turned psycho-killers all too ready to avenge their ‘sins’ in the bloodiest fashion.
Though it offers a gory crescendo that won’t disappoint Fantasia fans, much of this film’s violence actually takes place off screen. Diegetic deathnotes and gaffer-taped screams accent the audience’s own fears as the camera pans away from the action. Bar a visceral throat-slit and a nasty yank of a spinal cord up and out through the hairline, Red White & Blue is actually pretty art-house.
Initially we track Erica’s cruddy, emotionless life. Wide shots shrink her already-tiny frame as she walks to and from work, parks and bars leaving you cold and uncomfortable. Her face is bland, her lifestyle inexplicably punishing. But Rumley veers on the right side of art and didacticism, feeding in non-linear plot lines that keep you guessing as to her actions.
Plus, there’s a hip, freshness about it all, partially due to a hot cast and a maintained low, natural light but more thanks to location. Though a Brit, Rumley captures Austin’s vibe with gusto. Shots of Fantastic Fest and the Alamo Drafthouse cinema make their way into the frame, neatly name-checking co-producer Tim League while capturing the aspects that make Austin so cool. Linklater would be proud.
At World’s End is a Danish black-comedy set in the Sumatran forest by director Tomas Villum Jensen. Prudish psychologist Adrian (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) is flown to the jungle in order to determine whether a fellow Dane, who has just murdered a group of nature documentary-makers, is mentally fit for trial. He claims to be 129-year-old explorer Severin Geertsen who stays young by eating the leaves of a unique Sumatran flower. But as his doctor, Adrian becomes a target in his own right as evil gangs probe him for the plant’s whereabouts. Bespectacled Adrian turns unlikely action hero in order to keep his patient-doctor confidentially and save his own skin.
As he shoots his way out of jail, inadvertently freeing Severin, the unlikely duo are joined by Adrian’s excitable secretary who completes the silly Danish trio. Decked out in a form-fitting red dress and military boots, she is willing eye-candy, (think Willie in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone) but Adrian is a virgin and not interested. Their will-they-won’t-they relationship is a running gag, exemplified by an ending which does not surrender to saccharine stereotypes.
This ’80s-hommage offers silly action-adventure with some pretty jaw-dropping scenery and a constant stream of bleakly comic lines. Extra points for a seriously funny finale.
LWLies would like to thank the festival organisers and Tourism Montreal for hooking us up with flights, hotel and fun non-film activities like surfing and jet boating in the St Lawrence river!
FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2010 – PART II (text) by Georgie Hobbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
