AFFF 2007 Wrap Up

Dealing with pain

This year seemed especially good for the fantasy genre. In Pan’s Labyrinth and Special fantasy is used to escape the horrors of reality. And in the Fountain and the 4th Dimension it’s used to deal with the loss of relatives. Before I get back to these films I first want to discuss Broken, where pain is dealt with in a more direct manner. Broken (Simon Boyes & Adam Mason, 2006) is not a fantasy film but an example of the kind of hardcore horror that is being exploited in Hollywood at the moment since the success of Saw and some critics have dubbed ‘torture porn’. With a not very coherent storyline and a series of bloody horrific set pieces, it’s easy to see why some might call Broken just that. But that doesn’t mean it’s all bad. With modest means it’s inventive filmmakers have created a memorable piece of horror about a man living in the woods who kidnaps and tortures women to turn them in to mentally broken slaves who can do his gardening and dishwashing. It won’t hold up under mainstream scrutiny but it’s recommended viewing for all horror buffs.

How remarkable then the mainstream success of a film that contains violence of at least the same level as Broken, Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006). This film is part fantasy rooted in old European folklore and part a story about the rise of fascism in Spain at the end of the Second World War. Capitan Vidal is a ruthless man who is hunting the last resistance when his new wife Carmen, pregnant with his son, comes to live with him at his outpost. Carmen already has another child, Ofelia, who has a passion for fairytale books. Her new stepfather represents all the horrors of war and he has no real love for her or her mother, so she escapes to these older worlds she has read about. Del Toro gives both worlds a realism of their own and while the combination might not work entirely (you would want to show the fantasy sequences to kids, but the scenes with Vidal make this not advisable to say the least), the message that humans often do evil beyond anything a mischievous faun could contemplate rings very true. In Special (Hal Haberman & Jeremy Passmore, 2006) there are no bloody horrors to escape from, just the loneliness and feelings of inferiority of a single man in a big city who spends his uneventful days as a parking attendant. His kind of literary escapism comes from superhero comics. When he joins a trial program for a new kind of anti-depressant he immediately starts to feel special and heroic. This fun concept becomes very dark and realistic through the incredible performance of Michael Rapaport and convincing style of the movie. The camerawork reminds of a Dardenne brothers movie. Sometimes this feels a little forced, but it mostly enhances the tragedy of the mental breakdown of its central character.

On a side note, that big city loneliness is one of the true horrors of the modern world was shown crystal clear in the Bothersome Man (Jens Lien, 2006). This is one of the most absurd visions of ‘the afterlife’ that I have ever seen. A man arrives on a bus at a petrol station in a desert where he is welcomed by a man who takes him to a town were he is provided with a home and work. Everybody is really nice to him there: he doesn’t have to work really, he meets a women and she immediately wants to live with him and so on. But there is no taste, no joy, no feeling and no love in this perfect world, and worse, no escape. As proven by a scene in which he throws himself in front of a subway and gets run over many times until his bloody pulp is left to pull itself together and head back home to his ever smiling wife. Truly one of the most amazing things I ever saw, a culmination of both the horror and comic genius on display throughout the movie and it had the audience in shock and stitches at the same time. The style of the Bothersome Man reminded me somewhat of certain Japanese authors (Toshiaki Toyoda, Kyoshi Kurosawa), but the Scandinavian ‘scene’ has it’s own tradition of intelligent and artistic genre cinema and the last few years it’s stronger than ever. This was the second year the black tulip was given to a film from Denmark after Pål Sletaune’s Naboer last year.

Mental time travel

The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky, 2006) was another fantasy highlight. It’s being compared to 2001: a Space Odyssey but it’s not really a science fiction film actually. Basically the story is about a cancer researcher who is losing his wife to the same sickness he is trying to cure. He has a hard time dealing with losing her while a cure seems within reach, and she has to show him, again through fiction, a path to acceptance. She is writing about a Spanish conquistador looking for the tree of life in South America and leaves the story for him to finish after she dies. Which he can only after travelling into the very heart of… the universe? His soul? Maybe into the fountain of life itself. The story switches convincingly between these three identical desperate searches in past, present and beyond. Similarly temporally disjointed was the 4th Dimension (Tom Mattera & David Mazzoni, 2006), a film made by two directors (director duo’s seemed to be a trend this year) who were clearly inspired by Aronofsky (and David Lynch). But in the Q&A session after the screening they didn’t come across as being pretentious about their influences and they put enough personal ideas and experiences into this film to let it stand on it’s own. The story about a prodigy child who turns into a mentally troubled adult who doesn’t quite live in the real world is maybe not as moving as that of the Fountain, and the film didn’t score well with the AFFF audience at all, but I really liked the style and the mood. Also there is some amazing camerawork for a film shot on video and the locations used are also interesting. They fought for over a year to get permission to shoot in a mental hospital in their neighbourhood that has been abandoned for years and has become the subject of quite a few urban legends in the mean time, and I think they were right to do so. These guys have it in them to become as good and well respected as their influences.

Grim places

Mood and location, as well as leaps through time, are also of great importance in the Abandoned (Nacho Cerdà, 2006). Cerdà’s feature debut after gaining a large cult following with his two shorts Aftermath and Genesis, turned out to be a failure in the eyes of a lot of people. I guess they were disappointed because they were looking for a good story. And indeed the ghost story of the Abandoned, while it has one or two pieces of originality, is not very impressive; or good for that matter. But that’s not the point of the movie at all. Cerdà’s strengths are his great eye, and ear, as he has shown in his shorts, and here he uses images and sound to create an amazing and constant feeling of dread. It reminded me a lot of the Silent Hill games (and movie). Thankfully the Abandoned doesn’t rely on a lot of cheap shocks like most ghost horror movies and instead goes for this grim atmosphere, created with a darkly beautiful cinematography and noisy soundtrack.

Talking of dark visions: through the impressive camerawork of Fung Yuyen-Man the city of Hong Kong that is seen in Dog Bite Dog (Cheang Pou-Soi, 2006) becomes as grim a place as the Russian ghost house from the Abandoned. It is a visual representation of the nihilistic message that is in the heart of this ultra-violent crime-drama. It all starts out as a fairly standard cop vs. thug story that just isn’t very enjoyable because all it’s protagonists seem to be complete sadistic bastards. But then you slowly realise that the real goal of this movie is to go way beyond that, en route to an over-the-top finale that is deliciously melodramatic and an amazing piece of pitch black comedy. There might be shadows of Gaspar Noe here (I felt his influence also in Pan’s Labyrinth) but I can’t think of another movie quite like this one.

A few disappointments

To wrap this up I want to briefly discuss three movies that could have been so much better. Maybe I am just to cynical to like a good natured ‘gothic’ fantasy like Angel-A (Luc Besson, 2005) about a guy who is helped out by and then falls in love with a guardian angel, but this came across as hardly anything more than a young boys wet dream. The main mistake of the movie is that all it’s characters are flat and cartoony. I like supernatural beings taking human form just as much as the next guy, but they should enjoy eating an apple (like Death in Neil Gaiman’s the High cost of Living comic) instead of smoking cigarettes just because it looks sexy. And the criminals of the story behave even less realistically then the angel.

For all the craziness on display and all the kungfu, sex and splatter promised in Mad Cowgirl (Gregory Hatanaka, 2006) it’s is a very dull movie. It wanted to be a Quentin Tarantino grindhouse epic but clearly Hatanaka is no Tarantino. You also shouldn’t expect a lot of cool fight scenes in the Finnish wuxia epic Jade Warrior (Antti-Jussi Annila, 2006). There is one fight/dance about halfway through that I found really beautiful, but most of the screentime is spend telling a not very interesting story in a badly structured way. I will give Annila a second chance though as he told the audience at the Q&A that he wants to make another wuxia in China after he has made a low budget horror film that is going to be so horrible that nobody will want to watch it, first. You’ve got to love that Finnish humour!

Films seen (with my score out of 10):

Pan's Labyrinth (9)
The Fountain (9)
Paprika (9)
Special (9)
The Bothersome Man (8,5)
The Host (8)
The Kovak Box (8)
Dog Bite Dog (7,5)
The 4th Dimension (7,5)
The Abandoned (7)
Re-Cycle (6,5)
Broken (6,5)
Jade Warrior (6)
Mad Cowgirl (6)
Angel-A (6)
The Invisible (4)

Note from Ardvark: this concudes Peter's recap. Thanks again Peter, great read as always!
Link to the AFFF website: