Anti-colonialist heroes ride into the sunset at the Fantasia Film Festival

While being in the room for the launch of a buzzy new movie
is undeniably thrilling, one of the most exciting (and underrated) side effects
of cramming dozens of movies into your eyeballs as quickly as possible—which,
when you get down to it, is what a film festival is all about—is watching
cinematic trends coming together in real time. One intriguing new trend in
world cinema that was especially evident at this year’s Fantasia is that of the
postcolonial Western. In broad terms, that means films that self-consciously
adopt the aesthetics and tropes of classic American (or Italian) Westerns—black
hats and white hats, dusty frontier towns under siege, high-noon shootouts—with
one key difference: This time, the villains are white colonizers, and the heroes
are indigenous people protecting their land.

Mohawk, which debuted at last year’s Fantasia, fits into this category in
spirit, if not exactly in genre-formula letter. This year, two films that
played at the festival are as pure as examples can be: Five
Fingers For Marseilles (B+),
a South African film that debuted at last year’s Toronto International
Film Festival and is set for a U.S. release in September, and Buffalo Boys (B-),
an Indonesian film that had its world premiere two weeks ago at Fantasia. Of
the two, Five Fingers is by far the
more artfully made film, though Buffalo
Boys may have the edge in terms of action choreography.
They’re both extremely violent—and defiant—tales of exiled heroes who return
home to defend their ancestral lands, and both self-consciously play with
Western clichés, to varying degrees of success.

Five Fingers For Marseilles takes a more
nuanced view, opening with a scene reminiscent of Issa López’s excellent Tigers Are Not Afraid as five black
children, hiding out in a cave above their hillside town—itself uphill from a
white settlement, the Marseilles of the title—tell each other epic fairytales
in which they are the “five fingers” who defend their community from apartheid
forces. Then this fantasy becomes dangerously real when one of the boys kills
two white cops, and is forced to flee as a result. Twenty years later, that
boy, Tau (Vuyo Dabula), a.k.a. Lion, comes home to find that his old friends
have been split along lines of power, and that the post-apartheid New
Marseilles may need to be defended from the
five fingers this time around.

Director Michael Matthews and cinematographer Shaun Lee shoot
the rocky, sun-baked hills and valleys of northeastern South Africa with an eye
toward scale and epic grandeur, with strikingly beautiful results. (Nighttime
scenes are also gorgeously shot, with film noir-influenced use of bright
directional light and deep shadow.) Matthews also succeeds in his direction of
the talented cast, balancing archetypical characters and complex motivations to
give the final showdown a sense of tragic inevitability. In particular,
ruthless gangster Sepoko (Hamilton Dlamini), a.k.a. Ghost, is a Western villain
for the ages, his milky eye and gold teeth adding a chilling undercurrent to
his low, husky growl. He’s a perfect foil to the heroic Tau, whose life in
exile has transformed him into a silent, badass Man With No Name type. At
times, the film is so mythic
that it strains credulity, but if you’re a fan of spaghetti Westerns, you
know that’s part of the deal.

Buffalo Boys, meanwhile, hails from Indonesia, where
it’s the first Western to be produced in that particular country. Indonesian
genre cinema has had a strong presence on the festival circuit this year: A
horror film from that country, Satan’s
Slaves, earned positive marks from our writers at the Overlook
and Cinepocalypse film
festivals. Like that film, Buffalo
Boys uses slick, mainstream Hollywood filmmaking styles to
tell a story particular to Indonesian culture, relocating the Western to
19th-century Java, where two brothers, Jamar (Ario Bayu) and Suwo (Yoshi
Sudarso) have returned from exile to reclaim their father’s sultanate from
sadistic Dutch colonial governor Van Trach (Reinout Bussemaker).

Unlike Five Fingers
For Marseilles, Buffalo
Boys isn’t terribly concerned with sweeping vistas or
slow-burn character development. Its primary function is simply to entertain,
which in practical action-movie terms means lots of brawling and lots of blood.
Sudarso, who’s worked as a stuntman in many American productions,
including Logan and Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., shows great
skill in both departments—particularly in a brutal barroom fight that ends with
a Van Trach flunky impaled on a buffalo skull, prompting the audience at
Fantasia to break into spontaneous applause. On a sheer popcorn-entertainment
level, the film is great fun to watch. It’s also heavily indebted to the
B-movie tradition, from which it derives its core mission of prioritizing
heavy-duty firepower over airtight storytelling. Director Mike Wiluan
reinforced this philosophy at the post-screening Q&A, where he answered a
question about the current wave of Indonesian action by saying, “It’s all about
innovation in violence.” There’s a thesis statement if we’ve ever heard one.

And although it’s not a Western, the
reinterpretation of Hollywood storytelling techniques by international
filmmakers manifests itself in a particularly fun way in Champion (B), a
South Korean take on Over The Top that also exists in a
cinematic universe where arm wrestling is a massively popular televised sport.
Impossibly beefy, immensely likable Train To Busan star Ma
Dong-seok (billed here as Don Lee) stars in the Sylvester Stallone role, a
Korean-American former bouncer named Mark who travels back to his birth country
to compete in an arm wrestling tournament at the behest of his friend
Jin-ki (Kwon Yul), who plans to make a boatload of money throwing matches with
his hulking bud. Mark is a man of integrity, however, which means it’s time to
fire up the Rocky-style inspirational sports movie
machine.

Typical of South Korean
films, director Kim Yong-wan infuses the story with plenty of melodrama in the
form of a subplot involving Mark’s search for his birth mother, who gave him up
to be adopted by an American couple when he was a very young child. The story
remains lively and straightforward despite these mawkish detours, however, and
although I couldn’t help but giggle at one particularly silly training montage,
that same guilelessness is so incredibly charming that I caught myself getting
a little misty-eyed as Mark gave a monologue on his Korean identity 20 minutes
later. In short, it’s cheesy as hell, but it works. If you’ve been missing the
goofy earnestness of ’80s action movies, then we’ve got good news—they
haven’t gone away, they simply changed location.