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2022 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: “BACK AGAIN”, PART ONE

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Montréal 2022

Guess who’s back—back again?

Giles is back: tell a friend.

7/14: Polaris

The Facts:

  • It is very cold
  • It is the year 2144
  • Languages have fallen out of fashion
  • Little girl has supernatural powers
  • Young woman has (probably) superterrestrial origins
  • I observed no men in this merciless snowscape

Polaris works more than it doesn’t, and why it doesn’t work for me is hard to pinpoint. Perhaps it is too bright? (But no, that’s an appropriate choice for a film set so far north and with so much snow.) Maybe the ferality of the people is off? (Eh, so long after societal collapse, that makes sense.) That green goo found throughout is a bit “much”? (Again, as a catch-all symbol for Earth’s empoisonment, it is up to the task.) Carthew crafts moments of powerful emotion, genuine wonderment, and striking brutality, making this an interesting choice to kick off our return to “normal”; worthy of another look by a different eye than mine.

7/15: Cavalcade of Perversions: A Regular Little Orgy

There was something about sitting in a darkened theater full of people, witnessing a middle-closeup of an emission on screen, that felt, I dunno—”cosmopolitan.” In one way I was not surprised by the string of erotically-charged (and in a few cases, outright explicit) short films being so up front, but in another way I can’t shake the feeling that the organizer for these various Cavalcades (there are two more to come, so to speak) would be happy to tilt the festival more towards poetical pornography.

But the films: there were nine in total, and while each could suffice with its own writeup, we’re on a byte budget. “Aspirational Slut”, “Pretty Pickle,” and “SOS Extase” all showed sex can be fun and funny, as well as be gen-yoo-ine film films, with “SOS” proving that absurdism, sex, and cinematography fit hand in (leather) glove. The last also wasn’t above some visual word play, giving literal manifestation to the term “leather fetish.” It wasn’t all fun and games, though. “Creature” was proof-in-celluloid that a women-loving-women cinema can be eye-droopingly boring while crushing you underfoot with a melodramatic bombast that, if pushed half a notch further, would have landed squarely in parody. The men-loving-men-eroticism of “Exalted Mars” (featuring that big-screen emission I mentioned) stood neck-and-neck with the yawn-inducement of “Creature”—but at least was more tranquil about it.

Top prize for most unabashed fun (and gayness and sex and &c.) goes Continue reading 2022 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: “BACK AGAIN”, PART ONE