Sunday, August 21, 2011

Illusion, Infatuation, and Ineptitude


From the opening sequence—an animated one—of his second feature film L’autre Monde (Black Heaven), where white snow flakes shower down from a jet black sky, French director-screenwriter Gilles Marchand makes it quite apparent that his film will deal with duality. As if to drive home the point, a platinum blonde appears on screen, dressed in black, whose strands of hair are in stark contrast to the dark cityscape. From intra-sequence contrast, the director then deftly segues to the next scene—set in a warm, sunny seashore in the south of France; as opposed to the cold, gloomy setting of the preceding one.

It is here that we meet the young protagonist of the film, Gaspard (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), his fiancée Marion (Pauline Etienne), and his two friends: Yann (Pierre Niney) and Ludo (Ali Marhyar). Frolicking in the sea, while jumping into the clear blue water, little do Gaspard and Marion know that soon they will find themselves knee-deep in murky waters. Inside a pool locker, the duo finds a cellphone. Their curiosity gets piqued when they pick up a call from the curiously named ‘Dragon’ and also take a look at a number of images stored inside the cellphone of a heavily mascara-ed blonde named Sam (Louise Bourgoin).

Deciding to play detective, Gaspard and Marion arrive at the place where Dragon had decided to meet Sam. They keep following the mysterious couple only to lose them at a quarry and rediscover them sometime later, trying to—what appears to be—carry out a suicide pact. While rescuing Sam, Gaspard also finds a DV camera, which, he surreptitiously slides into his pocket. 

At home, while watching the video recording, Gaspard finds himself slowly getting enamoured by the beguiling blonde, Sam. He also learns of an online game called ‘Black Hole’, which seems to hold the answers to a lot of questions about Sam, Dragon, and their partially botched suicide ceremony.  

After picking up the basics at a gaming zone, Gaspard buys a copy of ‘Black Hole’. Taking advantage of the anonymity that any such game provides, he decides to create an avatar for himself, named Gordon, which is diametrically opposite to him in real life. Slowly, but gradually, as he delves deeper into the virtual world of ‘Black Hole’ he starts picking up the tricks—how to survive and how to fight. A chance encounter with another character leads him to ‘Heaven’—a tall building that unsurprisingly touches the sky and is guarded by an all-seeing eye.

In the real world, by a quirk of fate, Gaspard meets Sam once again, only to find that she is called Audrey and has an over-protective brother named Vincent (Melvil Poupaud). In a perilous drag-racing sequence, involving an inebriated Ludo, Gaspard gets a glimpse of the violent streak in Vincent. Meanwhile, he is hopelessly attracted towards Audrey. Sourcing her out in ‘Black Hole’ he finds her avatar Sam is a singer. Under the guise of Gordon, he interacts more and more with Sam in the virtual world, who explains to him its ways. Gaspard is told that when a character dies in the ‘Black Hole’ s/he goes to a place called ‘purgatory’, from where it is extremely difficult to return but for which Sam has a particular fondness.

As Gaspard’s avatar finds himself bewitched by Sam, in real life he becomes more and more distant from both Marion and his two other friends. He even connives in the cyber universe to ensure that Audrey gets closer to him in the real world. Blinded by Sam’s lure, he is ignorant that there exists a truly dark side to the ‘Black Hole’. It is a game that its players use to have a fatal influence on other players in real life. 

L’autre Monde had all the ingredients to be a true ‘breakout’ film (it was screened at the breakout selection of the midnight section of Cannes in 2010). But towards the latter half, the film simply falls apart. What could have been a searing indictment of the isolation, anonymity, and deceit that are so often associated with the gaming culture ends up being a hackneyed effort at intermixing real life with virtual reality. It fails equally in treading new ground when it comes to depicting our age-old fascination with the unknown and the unattainable.

While both Marchand and his co screenwriter Dominik Moll should share the blame for allowing a promising storyline to peter off into triteness, a part of the fault also lies with the actors. Like the game itself—which bears an uncanny resemblance to ‘Afterlife’ and has a visual aesthetic reminiscent of ‘Tron’—the major characters are all good to look at but have very little substance. Louise Bourgoin’s character had the potential of cementing its place in the film firmament as a neo femme fatale. Unfortunately, the similarities only remained superficial. Similarly, even though it would have been easier for us to sympathise with the jilted Marion, some of the lines she mouths (a particular gem was: ‘There are two kinds of people. Some are nice, others aren’t’!) make one balk.

The biggest culprit has to be Leprince-Ringuet. Where Gaspard should have been multi-dimensional as a character, Leprince-Ringuet paints him in really broad strokes, much like the way Gaspard uses a paintbrush on the walls of his apartment’s hallway.

Like any online game, the success of a film that deals with one, should also hinge on its replayability. That is obviously not true for L’autre Monde. Even more ironical is the fact that as a film dealing with duality, it succeeds in making the virtual space of ‘Black Hole’ more real than the flesh-and-blood characters that inhabit its real world.

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