Tag Archives: Coming of Age

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FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: GHOST CAT ANZU (2024)

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化け猫あんずちゃん

Bakeneko anzu-chan

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DIRECTED BY: Yôko Kuno,

FEATURING: Voices of Noa Gotô, , Munetaka Aoki

PLOT: Abandoned in the sleepy beach town of Iketeru, 11-year-old Karin finds herself in the care of Anzu: a 37-year-old, human-sized “ghost cat” with a penchant for pachinko and speedy scootering.

Still from Ghost Cat Anzu (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Seeing as we’ve certified a charming tale of someone pulled into realm of the spirits, I’ll suggest we include this differently charming tale of the spirit world slacking around amongst us people. Also, there are too few children’s movies on the list, and never enough giant cats.

COMMENTS:

“Whoa, that’s one big frog.”

Gah! Who are you?

“I’m Anzu, a ghost cat. Who are you?”

I’m a giant frog monster. Ribbet-Ribbet!

And so it goes in Iketeru, the idyllic waterfront village where a young girl finds herself ditched by her deadbeat dad who has some complicated debts he needs to take care of in Tokyo. From this pedestrian kick-off, directors Kuno and Yamashito rise to an impressive challenge: crafting a laid-back, deadpan, almost ‘ world in a whimsical, Ghibli-style animation.

Karin is cynical before her time. Beyond her difficulties arising from the ne’er-do-well father, we learn that she lost her mother at the age of eight, and has been under the guardianship of a grown man barely more mature than she is (perhaps even less so). In many ways, her circumstances don’t change when she is introduced to Anzu, a human-sized—and very human-acting — cat, who can perceive and interact with the spirit world. Anzu helps Karin’s grandfather maintain the small local temple, as well as a taking few odd jobs around town. He travels by scooter, though an early brush with the law strips him of his beloved transport.

Mythical Japanese beings emerge for a cocktail party hosted by Anzu, and Karin meets a Hag, a giant mushroom-man, a stone-form baby Buddha, the “giant frog monster” mentioned earlier, and more. Anzu’s slack sensibilities keep him from ever working too hard (he is a cat, after all), but he is a good friend: he feels bad after gambling away Karin’s earnings at the local pachinko parlor. It’s all so very natural, despite the entities in question. Frog and friends get jobs at the golf course whose woods they inhabit. Karin teases the two local boys (self-proclaimed creators of a “Contrarian” club). Grandfather oversees the temple. And so it goes.

But most of all, Karin misses her mother, and she undertakes a daring escapade into the underworld, with the considerable assistance from the God of Poverty, who is bamboozled into the task by Anzu. Entering through the crematorium’s out-of-order toilet while on a day-trip to Tokyo, Karin, Anzu, and the god visit the underworld hotel, and their capering unleashes demons and the God of Death onto the surface. The film lays on silliness and peculiarity thickly, and the picturesque animation maintains a perfect tension with the near-flippant attitude suffusing Kuno and Yamashito’s collaboration. Strange spirits, it seems, are all around us. And they’re just about as lazy as we are.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Combining live-action filming with frame-by-frame rotoscoping, it crafts a surreal, dream-like world. With its colorful art style and quirky characters, Ghost Cat Anzu explores profound themes of grief, family, and spirituality in an approachable way for both children and adults alike.” – Naser Nahandian, Gazettely (contemporaneous)

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN (2006)

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DIRECTED BY: Cam Archer

FEATURING: Malcolm Stumpf, Patrick White, Max Paradise,

PLOT: Logan, a junior high school student, explores his own identity and sexuality, developing a crush on a slightly older “bad boy”.

Still from "Wild Tigers I Have Known" (2006)

COMMENTS: The administrators are good at irrelevancy; the mother is good at volatility; the classmates are good at bigotry; and Logan is good at maintaining his solitude. He watches old movies, listens to late-night radio, and thinks. He thinks about death, he thinks about his peers, and lately he’s been thinking a good deal about Rodeo, a cynically charismatic, older schoolmate. Cam Archer’s feature debut, Wild Tigers I Have Known, is above all thoughtful. As it meditates on its protagonist, the narrative flow is meandering, with Logan approaching daily challenges and joys and starting to form an underlying identity.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this movie should have hovered closer to “barely endurable” for me. However, it did not. (Had this been from a French filmmaker, I blanch at the prospect of my tirades about entrenched boredom and hack-handed pretension.) The variation in its filming style helps. Shots of Logan’s quotidian activities—unpleasant locker-room encounters, sudden outbursts from his mother, the respite he finds in old media—are intercut with more abstract cinematic representations: of memories, sexual fantasies, and day-dreams. The gauzier surrealism of these interludes occasionally bleeds into the realism of this boy’s life, but never smothers it.

Mostly, though, Wild Tigers I Have Known succeeded in maintaining my active interest because of its charming leads, genuine tenderness, and fitting ambiguity. It is unclear just what path Logan embarks upon, appropriate for someone of his age. Is he gay? He claims otherwise. Is he something different? Maybe. His relationship with an older boy hovers somewhere between friend and lover (never made quite clear), and Logan’s self-awareness evolves as the background metaphor (beware the mountain lions) plays out like an iron fist in a velvet glove.

Perhaps more than anything else, the closing shot won me over. This genre is (understandingly) populated by movies with depressing overtones and even more depressing endings. Wild Tigers I Have Known has a good share of setbacks for Logan, and ambient cruelty. But there are lights in his life, and though he may not quite know who he is or what he’s after, his dreams and memories begin to merge, if only a little, by the end. Cam Archer explores a slice of life before leaving his character to develop away from our prying eyes. Logan bids us a fond farewell, waving gaily at the camera before traipsing over the crest of a hill.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A surreal, fragmented masturbatory fantasy whose vision of adolescence borrows elements from Elephant, Tarnation, Mysterious Skin and Donnie Darko…”—Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Henner,” who called it a “Strangely told coming-of-age story” with “Strong imagery and lots of dreamy stream-of-consciousness scenes.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Wild Tigers I Have Known [Blu-ray]

Wild Tigers I Have Known [Blu-ray]
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CAPSULE: ASTRAKAN (2022)

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Astrakan can be rented on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: David Depesseville

FEATURING: Mirko Giannini, Jehnny Beth, Théo Costa-Marini, Lorine Delin, Bastien Bouillon

PLOT: An orphan boy struggles to adapt to life with his foster family.

Still from Astrakan (2022)

COMMENTS: We never would have picked Astrakan, a French drama about a foster child, for coverage on a weird movie site if we hadn’t read that the ending took a sever swerve into the surreal. I hereby inform the reader that, if you stick out 90 minutes of ultra-realism, you will be rewarded at the end with an intoxicated 10 minute digestif. That ending, an aggressive montage of sometimes disturbing and reconfigured memories, presumably distorted under sketchy amateur hypnosis, provides a dreamlike nightcap to a litany of childhood sorrows. If you are strictly searching for a weird movie, you may want to abstain; but if you enjoy solemn, impressionistic art-house dramas with a tart finish of strangeness, Astrakan may be for you.

Astarkan delivers its drama matter-of-factly, as a series of slice-of-life scenes that often omit key context. Like many child actors, Samuul (Mirko Giannini) underplays most of his scenes, which in this case fortuitously serves his character. His blank face and slow, deliberate movements mask his inner thoughts, appropriate for a script that withholds information and forces us to draw our own conclusions. Samuel is psychologically, and physically, constipated. He writes down secrets and buries them in hidden places. Samuel’s abuse is clearly signaled, but not extensively detailed; we aren’t privy to its severity, although at one point we know his foster mother fears that the bruises on his thigh may get him taken away by the state. That mom, played by Jehnny Beth with a troubled sense of economic reality struggling with maternal instinct, does grow attached to Samuel—but not quite attached enough to provide him the minimal protection he would need to thrive. But his foster parents do provide him with a home, gymnastics lessons, a ski trip, a bit of dear pocket money, and occasional scraps of tenderness—and who will take care of Samuel, if not them? The foster system is an imperfect compromise, but what is the alternative?

Astrakan was shot on film in rural France; the bright blue skies and verdant fields of its pastoral setting contrast with the troubled darkness of Samuel’s existence. In keeping with the hardcore realism, the story is told with no non-diegetic music, until Bach’s “Agnus Dei” (“lamb of God”) comes in at the finale. Although it’s not explained within the movie, the movie’s title comes from the pelts of an exotic breed of black sheep, which must be killed when young, before their wool loses its dark color.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Having established his skills and careful competence over 90-odd minutes, Depesseville then elects to showcase different facets of his talent in what amounts to an extended, dreamlike, impressionistic coda…”–Neil young, Screen Daily (festival screening)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LA TETA Y LA LUNA (1994)

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Teté and the Moon, The Tit and the Moon

DIRECTED BY: Bigas Luna

FEATURING: Mathilda May, Biel Durán, Gérard Darmon, Miguel Poveda

PLOT: Frustrated at losing access to his mother’s chest following the birth of his baby brother, young Teté becomes enraptured with Estrellita, a dancer who comes to town as part of a traveling show; he competes for her attentions with her husband as well as a lovestruck young man.

Still from Teta y La Launa (1994)

COMMENTS: Part of the charm – and also the frustration – of the coming-of-age film is that it relies on the point of view of someone too young to fully understand the world around them. An innocent, unburdened by years of maturity and perspective. We watch them with a combination of longing for their ignorance and sympathy for their embarrassment.

La Teta y La Luna doubles down on this by handing over the narration to its central character, Teté. Not a grown-up Teté looking back at his youthful folly with rueful hindsight, mind you, but the boy himself, speaking in the past tense but still deep in the thrall of his adolescent, unearned bravado. When he confidently tells us that he “devastated” a foe’s motorcycle, we can see for ourselves that he’s lamely kicking it to no effect. So he would seem to be an extremely unreliable narrator indeed. Except when it’s surely our eyes that deceive us. For when Teté informs us that every woman in a bodega is offering her breasts to him, what we see is exactly that. How could this possibly be? Surely this is wishful thinking to the greatest extreme.

For you see – to paraphrase Loudon Wainwright III –  Teté is a “tit man.” Ever since his newborn brother arrived, the pleasure of suckling at his mother’s teat has been denied to him, and he has been in search of a replacement. (The title pulls off a neat double meaning, referencing both the main character and his overriding obsession.) So the one thing we can trust absolutely is that he immediately settles upon Estrellita, the beautiful dancer who has just come to Teté’s small oceanfront village.

He’s hardly alone in being drawn to the comely ballerina, which complicates our understanding of the film’s point of view. Teté’s teenage rival, Miguel, is nearly sick with longing from the moment he encounters Estrellita and begins to sing to her with a voice that should earn him a gig fronting the Gipsy Kings. There’s nothing ironic or misleading about his pain. Meanwhile, Estrellita’s husband Maurice is given all the hallmarks of parody: despite looking like a grizzled and silver-maned biker, Maurice’s talent is as a modern-day successor to Le Petomane, and Estrellita makes love to him on their trailer waterbed and collects his tears in a jar while he makes her eat a baguette which he wields in place of his manhood. He’s ridiculous even as he cuts a dashing figure, but again we don’t doubt what we see. If we can take Miguel and Maurice at face value, who’s to say that Teté isn’t exactly what he presents to us?

So let us now turn to the object of all their affections. Mathilda May has already distinguished herself in these hallowed halls as a beautiful actress who is willing to put her full and uncovered beauty on display, and that reputation is certainly burnished here. If we are to believe Teté, she is ready and willing to provide him with access to a veritable firehose of milk from her bared breast. Luna’s camera is as in love with Estrellita’s chest as most of the male characters. But this objectification becomes extremely awkward in the face of Estrellita’s increasing discomfort. She dotes on her husband, and he responds with jealousy and resentment. She shows her unease with Miguel’s repeated declarations of love, but loses agency in the face of his increasing threats of self-harm. And we never even get to see what would logically be her concerns with Teté’s blunt and inappropriate requests. (For Teté, none of this appears to be sexual, but it surely is for her.) For the princess at the heart of this fairy tale, there’s a worrisome ignorance of her needs and fears. La Teta y La Luna is obsessed with Estrellita’s chest, but not much with the heart that beats underneath.

The film wraps up with a happy ending for everyone, most significantly for Teté, who gets to feed from both Estrellita and his own mother, a conclusion that bears no resemblance to anything approaching reality. The tone throughout is bright and charming, but it’s a strange and selfish lesson this tale delivers: “Persist and you’ll get what you want, fellas.” It’s a tale as old as time, but maybe it’s time for a rethink.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Completely perverted, totally surreal, but irresistibly charming.”– Henrik Sylow, DVD Beaver (DVD)\

(This movie was nominated for review by Wormhead, who called it “a surrealistic spanish/french film by Bigas Luna.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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CAPSULE: BEAUTIFUL BEINGS (2022)

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Berdreymi

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DIRECTED BY: Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson

FEATURING: Birgir Dagur Bjarkason, Áskell Einar Pálmason, Viktor Benóný Benediktsson, Anita Briem, Snorri Rafn Frímannsson

PLOT: A pack of violent misfits take a bullied boy into their gang on the rough streets of Reykjavik.

Still from Beautiful Beings (2022)

COMMENTS: When you grow old and think back on your childhood bullies, you realize that they were bullied themselves, most likely by their own parents or siblings. The hate and scorn was nothing personal; they were only transferring their own pain onto someone conveniently weaker than them. Of course, that idea never crosses your mind when you’re a victim of bullying, and wouldn’t comfort you if it did. Because the foursome in Beautiful Beings are, for the most part, both bullies and victims, we can sympathize with them and forgive them as they indulge in childish cruelties.

Iceland consistently ranks in the top ten in the World Happiness Report, but even paradise has an underclass. Violence is ever-present in the lives of these working-class children from broken families. The film begins by following the misadventures of pimply 14-year old Balli, much-abused by his peers and living with neglectful single mom in a what his friend calls “a bum house.” But the story soon changes focus to Addi, who has a modestly better life. He’s a member of a three-member gang under the erratic but benevolent leadership of Konni, nicknamed “the Animal” due to his fighting prowess and uncontrolled ferocity. Although he’s also from a single parent home, Addi’s mother is caring and stable, if a little embarrassing in her devotion to mystical rituals, yoga, and dream-interpretation. After Balli is beaten so badly he makes a local hand-wringing news broadcast about teen violence, Addi’s empathy is slowly and slyly roused. He convinces the others to let Balli into their clique—helped by the fact that they can use Balli’s half-abandoned home as a club house when the boy’s mother is away for days on end. The others gradually come to accept Balli, but their individual troubles start to pile up, all brought to a boil by the reappearances of absent (and unwanted) family members.

As the film progresses it flirts with the supernatural. Addi discovers that his mother’s precognitive gifts may not be all in her head—and that he’s inherited them as well. At about the midpoint of the film (with a push from magic mushrooms) his powers manifest themselves: he sees demonic shadows, finds his fingers drilling holes in his torso, and dreams of racing down a skyscraper with Konni. The visions are scarce, but set up the idea that Addi can see into the future, creating third act suspense whenever he gets a “bad feeling.” His precognitive abilities symbolize his superior intuition, setting him apart as the character who is in this world but not of it… the one who’s able to see what’s wrong with this picture and thus, perhaps, able to glimpse a different path. That’s not much to grasp onto as far as the film’s weird credentials go, but it’s just enough to get it into 366’s sights. (The movie also flirts with teenage homoeroticism—e.g. some casual sensuous hair caressing—without really exploring those feelings, making it  LGBTQ-adjacent as well as weird-adjacent).

Other critics have pointed out—and I can’t really argue—that Beautiful Beings breaks no new ground in the “coming of age” genre, and that its visionary aspect is mostly just window dressing. Nevertheless, I think the movie’s ample strengths outweigh a certain lack of originality. Technically, it’s nearly flawless. (It was Iceland’s submission to this year’s Oscars, although it was not shortlisted.) All the performances, especially from the young central quartet but including the extended families and the surrounding teenagers, are excellent. The cinematography plays with yellow sunlight and sepia shadows; perversely, the camera focuses on dirty fingernails, the dusty corners of Balli’s hovel, or an industrially bleak warehouse rooftop overlooking the harbor, only occasionally emerging onto a majestic beach to remind us of the beauty of the wider world these boys rarely have the chance to appreciate. The bottom line is I found myself engaged with these characters and empathizing with them through their travails, which is all you ask of a film of this sort.

Beautiful Beings is currently in theaters; we’ll update you when it’s more widely available.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Here, with a combination of drifty realism and jolts of the fantastic — Addi has strange dreams and visions, which add unfruitful mystery to the narrative — he persuasively conveys the feverish intimacy of adolescent friendship, with its vulnerabilities and inchoate desires.”–Manohla Dargis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)