They take place in a vaguely futuristic time, just a handful of years away.
A decade, at most.
They imagine an imminent future in which it will be possible to resurrect our dead for a few hours or completely change its face to the consumer's taste.
They project societies marked by conflicts between opposing groups and by nostalgia for a better time that we did not know how to appreciate as it deserved.
The new futuristic cinema presented at the Berlinale imagines futures dominated by a series of neuroses that perhaps aggravated the pandemic,
a memento mori
from which we are still recovering, despite pretending that everything is fine.
While mixed reality glasses and cryogenization became an imminent reality these days, the festival reacted by imagining paths that seem impossible, until the day the world decides to follow them.
This is always the case with science fiction.
More information
The Berlinale on the war front: how the conflict between Israel and Palestine weakened the film festival
Futurist cinema has always talked about the present, but rarely has it done so in such a transparent way.
In the new film starring Gael García Bernal, set in the near future, mourning is no longer a mandatory experience, but a voluntary one.
New technologies allow our loved ones to be temporarily resurrected, only in different bodies, provided by citizens in exchange for remuneration (the new sex work?).
Another End
, directed by Piero Messina, takes place in a multilingual and transnational society, but dominated by lack of communication and converted into a gigantic non-place, as if several modern plagues had devastated it.
García Bernal plays a widower—a character that abounds, perhaps not coincidentally, among the films at the festival—who agrees to spend a few extra days with his partner, who died in a brutal accident, and thus prepare for his death. .
In the film, weighed down by a permanent drive towards the intense and the slick, the simulacrum and the real experience are now almost the same, and the suppression of pain at all costs has become a categorical imperative.
Any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence.
In 'Another End', the simulation and the real experience are already almost the same, and the suppression of pain at all costs has become an imperative.
Any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence
Closer to the postulates of the B series, only revisited in an
indie
key - it produces A24, the Miramax of our time, only without Weinsteins in sight -,
A Different Man
also imagines a time not far removed from ours, in which that a facial surgery has been invented that changes the lives of those who undergo it.
This is the case of Edward, a man affected by neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes facial deformities, as well as permanent exclusion from his professional and emotional life.
By undergoing this treatment, the disfigurement ends, women throw themselves at him and he achieves the success that had eluded him, but his insecurities do not disappear.
Maybe the problem wasn't his face, but him.
Directed by Aaron Schimberg, it is the Kafkaesque story of a normal man who becomes a monster, despite appearances indicating otherwise.
It is a gothic tale about beauty and moral ugliness, with brilliant and hilarious moments, but also a certain narrative muddle in the final stretch, which perhaps weighs down what could have been an extraordinary parody about an obsession with physical perfection that is not new. , but perhaps it is increasing (which is saying something).
Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve and Adam Pearson, in a scene from 'A Different Man'.Faces Off LLC
L'empire
, the latest from Bruno Dumont, also takes place in a future suspiciously similar to the present.
A French town where nothing ever happens becomes the scene of a galactic battle between two extraterrestrial forces fighting for control of the Earth.
One wants to cause a new apocalypse and the other, to establish a kingdom of peace.
Dumont, a professor of Philosophy who became known in the nineties with austere films acclaimed in Cannes such as
L'humanité
, reinvents his cinema with this
traditional
remake of
Star Wars
, governed by an identical conflict between good and evil, which is admirable for its absolute shamelessness: the spaceships are reconstructions of Gothic churches and the locals, played by non-professional actors, walk down the street with their laser swords, like regular Jedi knights.
The subtexts abound: the fight between clans with incompatible political projects is reminiscent of the present, as is the general psychosis in the face of the disappearance of the world as we would have known it, increasingly less hypothetical.
But, after a suggestive start, the film falls into an austerity that prevents any enjoyment.
Only perplexity remains, which may not be enough.
Actor Brandon Vlieghe, in an image from 'L'empire'.
If futurist cinema has approached naturalism, perhaps it is because reality is already a full-fledged dystopia.
The emergence of covid demonstrated this, when many had the feeling of living inside a fiction.
For director Olivier Assayas, that feeling hasn't completely ended.
His new film,
Hors du temps
, combines two registers that anyone would have avoided alternating: the lyrical commentary on the director's childhood, narrated by himself, in a house on the most bucolic outskirts of Paris, and the light comedy about the first confinement filmed in that same country home.
Perhaps it is Assayas's least modest film, which exposes part of his intimacy, his conflictive relationship with those close to him, his bourgeois attachment to heritage and his pronounced neuroses, which he does not treat with the sarcasm necessary for them to work on the plane. funny.
The film unravels what was our reality for months, with its inflexible rules of social distancing, its ephemeral worlds of plexiglass, industrial quantities of antiseptic and words that we are quick to forget.
And it reminds us that, at that time, the Pfizer laboratory predicted that the pandemic would not completely disappear until 2024. Perhaps that is why cinema begins to commemorate that time from which we did not emerge better.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_