'The Congress'. What a nothing sort of title that is. What a nothing sort of poster. Both are instantly forgettable, void of anything denoting genre or content. It's such a shame, because this is a little gem of a film that everyone should be talking about.
Maybe they should have called it 'Trip Your Tits Off' as it is a difficult film to describe without coming across like a stoner. I'm going to dig deep into my big bag of movie review cliches and pull out the two biggest things I can find.
"You should see it on the big screen whilst you can." You should, you really should. Not so much because the visuals are overwhelming (which they are) but because if you see this on a small screen, or a laptop or a phone or whatever you use these days you'll feel compelled to fidget. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's boring - it isn't, but you just need to...you know...watch it. No distraction, no escape, just let it slowly seduce you and work its hypnotic power.
"You're best seeing it without knowing anything about it." I went to a matinee performance without any preconceptions . I was just interested because it was labeled as sci-fi, which it is, i in the same way as 'Solaris' is sci-fi - it's not robots, or superheroes or talking raccoons - it's philosophy...man. I was blown away by it. It's not an easy watch, it will make you use your brain and you will need a short period of reflection afterwards to process it all. You know, like proper ideas, like proper cinema.
Amazing, beautiful, intelligent actress Robin Wright plays an amazing, beautiful, intelligent actress called Robin Wright who may or not be a bit like Robin Wright. You still with me? Good. So far so meta. Robin Wright is the wrong side of forty and picky about the roles she chooses. In a system where female A-listers have a window of about 4-5 years that makes her just about obsolete. But she is an icon. Fortunately for the movie studios, technology has now reached the point where actors can be rendered convincingly on screen using computer models. 'Robin Wright' can now be digitally preserved as a perfect, flawless marketable brand to be animated in the movies forever. Her every emotion and action can be crafted by the CGI back-room boys.
Although reluctant, she makes her Faustian pact with the corporate devil and commodifies herself in order to give her son, who has a rare mental disorder, the very best medical care. Normally, I'd balk at this as an obvious plot contrivance designed to appeal to the emotions and push things forward but it is a little bit different here. Her son sees and hears the world differently to everyone else, which fits in with the major themes of the film, so it gets a pass.
The price of the contract is that Robin cannot ever act or perform anywhere again, ever.
Jump forward twenty years.
Robin returns to the studios and then something both wonderful and awful happens.
She becomes a cartoon character
in a cartoon playground
a psychedelic fantasyland
part Yellow Submarine
part Tex Avery
part Studio Ghibli
The studio, Miramount, is now the exclusive maker of dreams, controlling all emotions and desires through the use of mind altering hallucinogens. Anyone can be who they want to be and so there is an endless array of avatars derived from shared memories and pop culture reference points. What do these people do? They hang around in a virtual world watching each other in an endless feedback loop. They literally animate the world around them. It's a Second Life / twitter existence taken to the logical extreme.
Worse still, for Robin, is the fact that the studio has betrayed her. Whilst she has remained a superstar and is still forever young on the screen, her likeness is used in exactly the kind of crap she despises: adolescent sci-fi fantasies. She has become 'Rebel Robot Robin', a super-heroine battling robots in films that exist only to regurgitate tropes from earlier classics. Imagine if Cate Blanchett were doomed to appear in Zack Snyder movies until the end of time.
It gets even worse. Her 'Robin' essence can now be distilled into a chemical formula that be consumed as readily as a milk shake. Effectively you can now drink your favourite celebrity and use them for whatever purpose you can imagine.
It's one total mindfuck of a set up and builds up to the inevitable choice that Robin will have to make. Will she succumb to the immersive fantasy or kick against it? Will she choose the blue pill or the red pill?
It's one hell of a trippy ride which I suspect will be met with indifference and then emerge in ten years time as a cult classic. Go see it now if you can. It's a visual and mental feast and a bang on the money satire.
Go and see it because one of the ideas that it postulates is that the death of cinema is the beginning of the end of everything. You don't want that. You don't want to immerse yourself in a cinema that just spoon-feeds you superhero fantasy crap for the rest of your days. You don't want to exist in a world where social media and celebrity are the only things that matter.
Do you?
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