Messofanego
Banned
It's only been an hour since I finished seeing The Congress as part of the BFI London Film Festival with my sister. It was her birthday, so I guess this could be considered a gift for her and she loved it as much as me.
As some of you might know, Waltz with Bashir is my favourite movie of all time. So of course, I was hyped to see the next movie from the same director, Ari Folman. The trailer for it looked great, I wanted to be immersed in that animated world, but I was wary of the acting in the live action and wasn't sure if it could have the emotional impact of his previous movie.
After having seen it, this is possibly the best sci-fi/fantasy movie I've seen from this generation.
Comparisons: It's like a mix of Being John Malkovich, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Matrix, and Synecdoche New York.
If Ari Folman stopped making movies now, he ended on a high note. He doesn't need to make anything else. If you liked more thoughtful and emotional sci-fi like The Fountain, Solaris, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this is a no brainer. Mindblowing, profound, and tragic. After it finished, I had completely forgotten my other favourite movies of the year! It's packed with a lot of ideas. What a new Hollywood could bring with the digitisation of actors, what if every part of a celebrity became a commodity that you could literally drink and transform into, the humanity we lose in dream worlds, and how powerful motherhood can be. I came very close to tears at quite a few moments, pretty much the last 30 minutes were really emotionally devastating.
Robin Wright (a failed 45 year old actress), Danny Huston (head of Miramount Pictures), Paul Giamatti (my favourite character actor), Harvey Keitel (Robin's agent) were all fantastic. There's one brilliant scene in which Harvey Keitel and Robin become a mess by the end, where he is trying to convince her to go through as many emotions as possible for the scanning process to be completed with a personal anecdote on how he's always been the inner demon agent commodifying a person's weaknesses for gain. A big reason why I was so emotionally involved was because of the music (you can hear it in the trailer), which was composed by Max Richter who also scored Waltz with Bashir.
If there was a possibility to own this movie right now, I'd easily pay upwards of £50-100 because I want to see it all over again. If another well-known director had made this, Oscars and other awards would be dropping at his/her feet.
The first act is pretty much build-up to the animated zone of Abrahama. The real world has a very muted colour palette, so when you get to the animation which is the majority of the movie, it's like BOOM HOLY FUCK MY EYES THE GOGGLES THEY DO NOTHING! Waltz With Bashir had a more graphic novel rotoscope art style, here it's a "looney toons playground". I was not expecting this huge a jump from Waltz with Bashir which was on a much smaller scale, animation-wise. They go all out on the surreal imagination from the backgrounds and landscapes to the human characters. The characters specifically, it was like the "where's Waldo" of early 80s famous figures in animated form. There is one character cameo that had everyone in the audience laughing (you'll know by the teeth).
One of the strongest scenes is when Robin is in the animated hotel of Miramount Pictures, and she sees what she looks like in animated form for the first time. She's a middle-aged actress, and looks are unfortunately the most scrutinised part of the job. She imagines herself looking much older and it keeps on getting worse until she bashes her head into the mirror. It made me think, if you could be in an animated world where you imagine you appearance, body image issues (especially women's) would raise through the roof as all your fears would manifest right in front of you that would just make you break into a thousand pieces.
What sets this movie apart from other movies' depictions of virtual worlds is, the point of no return. Especially live action ones like Inception, The Matrix, or eXistenZ are still believable where I can't see many people completely losing their whole life to such a plane of existence. Here though, with the vivid animated world, I could see the brain not being able to accept all this audiovisual stimuli. Where you can hallucinate anything. So, being able to escape back to the real world would be much harder. We talk about how the future would be like with Oculus Rift and other virtual reality advancements, this movie is the ultimate cautionary tale for that.
It can be a hard movie to follow because of all that is going on, so it'll be ideal for rewatches. I can't wait to see it again with a general audience. And with that...
