Fantasia 2010: Metropolis – Restored Original Cut & Festival Recap

The Fantasia Festival’s 2010 edition, its 14th, was a resounding success, with more sellout screenings than ever and special events that can only be considered coups.  One of those special events was The Complete Metropolis – Restored Original Cut that was screened before yet another sold-out crowd at the 3000-seat Place-des-Arts and featured a new score composed by renowned silent-film composer Gabriel Thibodeau and performed live by a 13-piece orchestra.  

Metropolis, with 25 minutes of previously lost footage and now as close to director Fritz Lang’s original 1927 vision as ever, was a visual and aural treat to watch on the big screen with live musical accompaniment.  Entire new sequences have been added back into the film and help make for a more complete experience, although even before this version came to light the film had been hailed as a sci-fi masterpiece ahead of its time, influencing such modern classics as Blade Runner, Dark City, and Escape From L.A.  In fact, it may be justified to say that any post-1930 science fiction film was directly influenced by Metropolis.  Adding to the charm of the film is the (typical of the silent-film era) over-emoting of the cast, particularly the two leads, Gustav Fröhlich and Brigitte Helm. As Freder, son of the richest and most powerful man in the city, Fröhlich is all melodramatic and seems to want to hug everybody he’s in the frame with.  For her part, Helm shows versatility in having to portray two very different characters: Maria, a sympathetic ‘prophetess’ intent on moving the social classes closer together and an evil robot trying to destroy Freder’s father and all the progress that Maria has made with the working class. Helm’s arched eyebrows and devilish grin as the robot are in stark contrast to her soft features and pleading looks as Maria.  A fine performance, indeed. For all the sci-fi artifice, though, Metropolis is really just a retread of the age old class struggle story and the need for the mind (upper class) and the hands (working class) to work together in order to achieve societal harmony.  The true delight on this night was Thibodeau’s new score performed live by a 13-piece orchestra.  Running the gamut from soft melodic moments to sheer sci-fi cacophany and all points in between, the score worked on every level and Thibodeau’s enthusiasm during the performance and the orchestra’s professionalism were rewarded with three curtain calls at film’s end.

Audience enthusiasm was not reserved for this final night of the festival alone, either. From the Asian fare that gave the festival its name 14 years ago to new works from veteran horror filmmakers, the crowds lapped up every little bit of genre goodness there was to be had. Among the many highlights this year were festival favorite Hikari Mitsushima’s performance in Sawako Decides (she’s now won best actress at the fest two years in a row), Noah Taylor playing against type (and winning best actor kudos) in the psychological and violent thriller Red, White & Blue, and the twin first feature barrage of Eli Craig’s hilarious horror send-up Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil and Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film. Say what you will about A Serbian Film‘s abrasive subject matter and starkly depicted brutality, but in a year when the fest’s spotlight shone on subversive Serbian films and succeeded in displaying the talent and social awareness of the filmmakers, A Serbian Film is nothing if not an important film in that country’s history and is sure to leave a lasting impression on anyone who can sit through the entire thing.

Among this writer’s highlights of Fantasia were Christopher Smith’s Black Death, a film as much about religious faith as it is about the plague, and spending an evening at a local watering hole discussing film with Stephen Huff, director of the short film Lambs (winner of third prize as the audience’s favorite short film), while Christopher Smith and Neil Marshall (Centurion) held court at the next table. And of course there’s Stuart Gordon and company’s wild weekend in Montreal, where they didn’t stop from the midnight screening of Re-Animator for its 25th anniversary through two performances of Gordon and Jeffrey Combs’ one-man play Nevermore: An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe as well as Gordon and co-screenwriter Dannis Paoli giving a master class on adapting Lovecraft for the screen at Montreal’s Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. It’ll be hard for organizers to top this year’s edition of the Fantasia Festival, but with next year being its 15th, it’s bound to be bigger and better than ever.