Fantastic Fest ’17: Tiger Girl

This could be awkward. Tiger and “Vanilla the Killer” are all about laying smack-downs on grabby, harassing men. Devin Faraci, the social justice warrior accused of sexual assault is allegedly exactly the kind of guy they are out to punish. Yet, their film will be screening against a background of noise and controversy generated by news the festival organization tried to quietly slip Faraci back into the organization through the back door. It is fair to say people were not happy. Tiger and Vanilla would know how to handle this problem, but getting their own lives together is an entirely different matter in Jakob Lass’s Tiger Girl (trailer here), which screens during the 2017 Fantastic Fest.

Vanilla wanted to be a cop, but her first attempt at the physical exam ended badly. While waiting to re-apply, she signs on as a trainee with a well-equipped security firm. She is still pretty mousy, so she needs to be saved from the cloddish Theo (a successful police academy applicant), whether she admits it or not. Fortunately, Tiger is on the scene, thanks to a borrowed taxi cab. Around the second time Tiger saves her from a thuggish punk, Vanilla starts to realize this could be the start of an empowering friendship.

Soon, Vanilla snags a security uniform for Tiger, which gives them a virtual license to harass yuppies and misogynists. Vanilla practically idolizes Tiger, so it hurts when her two squat-mates-slash-lovers refuse to accept her. Suddenly, Vanilla is in no mood to accept perceived slights, spurring her to sabotage her somewhat promising security career. Just as she starts escalating her violent antics, Tiger begins to rethink her anti-social behavior.

Frankly, Tiger Girl could have been a challenging film about growing up and accepting the benefits of the social contract, but it is undone by its problematic conclusion. For the sake of crowd-pleasing, Lass more or less accepts Vanilla’s reckless attacks on innocent passersby.

Regardless, it is quite a showcase for the ferocious talents of Ella Rumpf, who previously made quite an impression as the older cannibal sister in Raw. As the tough but vulnerable Tiger, she physically resembles a young Kristen Stewart, but her command of her craft is much more advanced. She truly commands the screen. Obviously, Vanilla has to be meeker and more impressionable, but the extreme disparity between the fiery Rumpf and the Maria Dragus’s hollow-on-the-inside Vanilla hardly seems unfair.

There are several fight scenes interspersed throughout Tiger Girl, which is presumably why it was selected by both Fantasia and Fantastic Fest. However, fans will be disappointed Lass cuts away from a fight with a high-kicking martial arts-trained gallerist, played by the striking (in both meanings of the word) Helga Wretman. Ultimately, it does not add up to as much as Lass hoped, but it certainly announces Rumpf as a major talent to contend with. Earning a qualified recommendation, Tiger Girl should be quite an ironic screening experience when it plays tomorrow (9/24) and Monday (9/25) at this year’s Fantastic Fest.

Fantastic Fest ’17: Darkland

Ziad is a doctor, so he has prestige within the Danish establishment. He can also patch up wounds, which will be helpful for his second career as a street vigilante. Unfortunately, he doesn’t take street-sweeping seriously enough until it is almost too late in Fenar Ahmad’s Darkland (trailer here), which screens during the 2017 Fantastic Fest.

As the first-generation son of Iraqi immigrants, Zaid has triumphantly integrated into Danish society. His thuggish younger brother Yasin, not so much. After a heist goes down badly, Yasin comes looking for help from his long-suffering brother, but Yasin turns him away. The next time Zaid sees him, the comatose Yasin is in need of a plug-pulling. His pregnant pasty white girl friend Stine tries to comfort him, but he is determined to flagellate himself with guilt. He is also increasingly frustrated by what he perceives as a lack of urgency on the part of the police to find his brother’s killer. Of course, he attributes this to anti-immigrant xenophobia rather than the fact Yasin was a bottom-feeding recidivist street criminal.

Eventually, Zaid will become so consumed with rage, he looks up a few old friends who will help outfit him as a body-armored vigilante. It is never exactly spelled out, but we eventually deduce Zaid’s past is more checkered than the image he presents. Soon he starts attacking the criminal network of Semion, the local kingpin obviously responsible for Yasin’s death. Unfortunately, Zaid is too dilettantish about his payback, giving Semion ample time and space to strike back. All you kids at home need to remember your revenge isn’t finished until there’s nobody left to kill—and also, you should stay in school and study hard.

Darkland is indeed stylishly noir, thanks to the vision of Ahmad and the cinematography of Kasper Tuxen. However, it is the sort of revenge movie that is too embarrassed by its genre to let us experience the vicarious payback in peace. Instead, it keeps shoving messages down our throat about how violence never solved anything, even though the whole of recorded human history suggests otherwise.

Still, Borgen and Game of Thrones alumnus Dar Salim is searingly intense and darkly brooding as Zaid. It is a quiet but muscularly physical performance. We never accidentally overlook him as he blends into the walls, that’s for sure. Ali Sivandi also makes a worthy nemesis for him as the flamboyantly sinister Semion.

Darkland offers up a zeitgeisty guilt trip, but it still has the elements of a gritty genre picture, so it is hard to guess whether Denmark will select it as their foreign language Oscar submission. Currently, it is one the three-film shortlist, with the final decision due today. It has considerable merit, but it could have been even more compelling if it were not so misguidedly determined to be politically relevant. Recommended for fans of violent street crime dramas, who don’t mind the periodic swing into social criticism, Darkland screens this Friday (9/22) and next Wednesday (9/27), as part of this year’s Fantastic Fest, assuming they still have enough people on staff to show the films.