FANTASIA 2011: Critic's Notebook
by Steve Dollar 
Montreal's
Fantasia Festival turns 15 this year, a sweet milestone for a grassroots event that now sprawls across three weeks every summer with an international array of horror, sci-fi, action, Asian, comedy and suspense flicks. There's a deep focus on the auteur, as well as the often cultish actors and crew behind fabled genre classics?oldies like
The Wicker Man and
Shivers were honored?plus guys like special-effects master
Tom Savini hanging out, generating mayhem through their sheer badass aura.
The festival, which runs through Aug. 7, is huge enough to practically consume a huge chunk of the recent New York Asian Film Festival, for instance, purely as one of its many sidebars. Taste-wise, it's also exceptionally catholic, embracing everything from mumblegore (Adam Wingard's
A Horrible Way to Die and
What Fun We Are Having: 4 Stories About Date Rape) to wildly out of print Oz-ploitation sagas like
Ted Kotcheff's beer-drenched Outback insanity
Wake in Fright. It's not just blood, beasts and babes with big boobs?although there's plenty of that, too, and not just at the celebrated strip clubs of Rue St. Catherine, conveniently around the corner from the festival venues at Concordia University.
Opening weekend's big to-do was the world premiere of the new horror anthology
The Theatre Bizarre. Produced by Severin Films co-founded David Gregory, it's the first of a new cycle of multi-director omnibuses to hit the festival circuit. Coming soon will be
Paris, I'll Kill You and
The ABCs of Death, a series of fatal vignettes spelling doom in alphabetical order, with a busload of directors to shoot each of 26 four-minute segments.
Bizarre is a bit more modest. Its gang of seven includes aforementioned wizard of gore Savini, Richard Stanley (
Hardware), Buddy Giovinazzo (
Combat Shock,
Life Is Hot in Cracktown), Montreal stalwarts
Karim Hussain and
Douglas Buck, Gregory himself, and
Jeremy Kasten (who shot the wraparound story, starring
Udo Kier as a life-sized puppet that comes to life in a creaky old moviehouse).
No one really expects too much from anthologies?at least, I don't. But part of their appeal is to see how economy of form inspires novel twists of storytelling. Most of these vignettes revolve around the emotional complexities of male-female relationships that, sooner or later, must see the romantic cede to the plasmatic. As a character puts it so eloquently, "Your penis and my vagina do not get along." The consequences of such a flawed equation are stunningly realized in Giovinazzo's short
I Love You, told in a flashback as a Euro Guy named Axel (Andr� Hennicke) wakes up on a bathroom floor with a nasty gash in his hand. The confrontation with his departing lover Mo (Suzan Anbeh) proves lethal in its corrosive candor, as every last shred of illusion is stripped away and male pride is left to simmer in a bucket of vitriol. It's so brutal and over the top, it's hilarious. But then... psych-out!
The "gotcha" is a bit more predictable in Gregory's confectionary
Sweets, in which actress
Lindsay Goranson (
Plague Town) plays a woman with compulsive eating habits who's given the sugar-tooth to her latest boyfriend, whom she's now trying to dump. No need to spoil any surprises, but it's fair to say the episode takes gluttony to disgusting levels of conspicuous consumption, evoking bits of
Peter Greenaway and
Dusan Makavejev in what can be described as surrealist excess. Ironically, it's probably the most thematically tight entry of the seven stories.
The domestic plight of
Phase 7 (
Faze 7) is as drastic, if treated with a light, deadpan touch. Coco (
Daniel Hendler) and Pipi (Jazmin Stuart) are out shopping when the supermarket is suddenly beseiged with an onslaught of desperate shoppers. They're oblivious to all but themselves as they drive back to their apartment building. Pipi is very pregnant, and she likes to nag Coco about every little thing, so they don't notice that the streets have turned into a scene out of a
George A. Romero flick. Nicol�s Goldbart's Argentine plague comedy doesn't reveal too much after those glimpses: Most of the story unfolds in the confines of the apartment building, which is sealed off
[REC]-style by a team of feckless disease-control bureaucrats. The tension develops between the couple over seemingly minor details (Coco's facial hair, his failure to buy enough light bulbs), even as the building's neighborly "committee meetings" turn into vigilante search-and-destroy missions, led by a downstairs occupant (Yayo Guridi) who's secretly a survivalist obsessed with George H.W. Bush's new world order. The film's deftly modulated tone strikes a perfect balance between dry absurdity and ballistic overdrive.
Retreat, the debut thriller from UK director Carl Tibbetts, shares a general premise: a couple is trapped in a house after news arrives of a viral outbreak. But the house is an isolated inn on a remote Welsh island, and the couple?played by A-list actors
Thandie Newton and
Cillian Murphy?have come back to sort out some deep-seated marital conflict that has her madly typing away confessional prose on a laptop and him gazing moon-eyed in passive confusion while chopping up a lot of wood for the rustic fireplace. Thank God
Jamie Bell shows up. The former
Billy Elliot is all grown up now. He rips a page from the
Christian Bale Handbook of Psychotic Behavioral Technique for Screen Performers, and basically makes the movie worth watching. The narrative arc keeps you guessing, though not too hard: Is this stranger the military operative he claims to be, with a horrifying tale of a contagion suddenly sweeping Europe? Or is he some kind of crazy neo-Nazi thug come to get his kicks terrorizing a proud, hurting woman and her wimpy asthmatic dude as they circle each other failing to confront Their Issue? Is there even a virus? Why won't the ham radio work? Must Newton always play the same role she had in
Crash? Can we just re-watch
Straw Dogs instead?
The trauma is as absurd in
Another Earth, a movie that practically jumps the shark from the jump. High school honors graduate Rhoda (
Brit Marling) drinks and drives to celebrate her impending bright future when she spies a miracle in the night sky: a parallel planet Earth that has suddenly materialized out of the ether. Too distracted to watch the wheel, she plows head-on into another car, driven by a brilliant (aren't they always brilliant?) composer John Burroughs (
William Mapother). The accident kills his child and pregnant wife, and leaves him in a coma. Rhoda trades in her next four years studying astrophysics at MIT from a jail cell, and gingerly comes home from the hoosegow wracked with guilt. She takes a job as a school janitor, still obsessed with Earth 2. When a hip-hop radio DJ (DJ Flava, "as himself") announces a contest to fly to the new planet, sponsored by a Richard Branson-style billionaire, she leaps at the chance, writing an eloquent poetic entry that she narrates in the soothing, hypnotic voice every living child longs to hear tell them a bedtime story.
There are enough (not nearly as unpredictable as they should be) twists to pause the recap here, and Marling, who also co-wrote and produced with longtime friend, director Mike Cahill, is a column unto herself?with a second Sundance discovery, the superior
The Sound of My Voice, also coming soon. The thing about
Another Earth, though, is its fearless shark-jumping does nothing to dispel the film's deeply affecting tone of hopeful melancholy and transcendent longing. Well-crafted for an effort that wears its low budget on its sleeve, the drama unabashedly plays its strongest cards?Marling herself, radiant even in janitorial scrubs?and ever-so-gentle interactions between grievously damaged human beings that have a disarming ring of truth. It's as emo as it wants to be, an Oprah Winfrey Network movie of the week for hipsters, if you want, and so what? It's also garage-band
Kieslowski.
Posted by ahillis at July 23, 2011 12:45 PM
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