The director of ‘Amy’ and ‘Senna’ delivers a genre-bending documentary set in the future which tackles the biggest challenges endangering our present. It’s eerily remarkable.
ADVERTISEMENTDo you dare to imagine a future where “chairwoman” and despotic Barbie Ivanka Trump is celebrating her 30th year as leader of a fascist police state in “New San Francisco – Capital of the Americas”?
Chances are you’d rather not – especially when the image comes with haunted waxwork Jared Kushner by her side. However, it’s a hypothetical reality that Asif Kapadia (Senna, Amy, Federer: Twelve Final Days) is willing to imagine. Granted, it’s the cheekiest, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it frame of 2073, a small dash of humour in a film which doesn’t give you much to chuckle about.
Set in a dystopian future of our own making, 2073 is Kapadia’s genre-bending futurist documentary that includes dramatized segments which take place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Imagine Children of Men with Judge Dredd patrolling the streets alongside a swarm of drones, and you’re pretty much there.
In these segments, Samantha Morton is our narrator through inner monologue. She is a mute woman forced to live underground alongside her fellow survivors since ‘The Event’, which took place in 2034. She winds up her torch every day to scavenge through the rubble of the surface we once knew as civilisation.
We’re told that ‘The Event’ « wasn’t just one thing – it was a slow creep,” with Morton’s character recalling how humanity once had the chance of avoiding the apocalypse.
And wouldn’t you know it – humanity blew it.
We’re depressingly predictable like that.
Broadly inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée – which also inspired Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys – it features contemporary news footage interspersed with interviews and a depressingly familiar rogues gallery: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orbán, Priti Patel, Rodrigo Duterte… Essentially, the ideal dinner party guests if you’re Abaddon, the angel of the abyss, and your idea of the perfect knees-up is a collective of raging sociopaths who care more about power for their cliques than the common good. Throughout, they illustrate not only the disruption of democracy but the collapse of faith in institutions that once held up to its values.
These prolific plutocrats and despair mongers are joined by tech bro billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, to further illustrate that nowadays it’s not about facts any more. It’s about emotions and the distortion of a shared reality.
Kapadia deftly knits together the rapid-fire clips of real-life footage with dystopian sci-fi to create a unique state-of-the-world hybrid. It’s a cohesive and terrifying whole, revealing that the news archives we see are essentially a “I hope someone finds this” message sent from the future to warn us.
The effect is incredibly unsettling – especially when it’s very recent footage like social media posts of police brutality, wild fires and the war in Gaza.
Audiences may have seen a lot of the footage used in 2073, but Kapadia covers an impressive amount of ground in 85 minutes. 9/11; Brexit; Charlottesville; the weaponization of social media; the erosion of the human capacity to absorb and fight back when bombarded with so much misinformation and abuse; the planetary-scale trashing of ecosystems leading to catastrophic natural disasters… This compilation of our shittiest hits may strike some viewers as choir-preaching and lacking in subtlety. However, this is by design, as humans have proven themselves to be severely lacking when it comes to subtlety. When these images are edited together and framed within a cause-and-effect structure, as opposed to isolated incidents that often disprove Darwinism, understatement is not required. Its absence is the point.
Through mapping out the events that caused our incoming downfall, Kapadia has crafted a very scary cautionary tale in a haunting time capsule, proving that humanity is sleepwalking towards mass extermination if we continue to ignore the signs and indulge in complacency. All to the sounds of Antonio Pinto, who delivers one of the best scores heard in Venice this year.
“Is this a science-fiction movie?” asks Nobel-prizewinning Filipino and American journalist Maria Ressa, one of the film’s interviewees.
ADVERTISEMENTNo, it’s not.
Neither is it a documentary.
As the trailer for 2073 informs us, it is a warning – an eerily plausible one that’s not worth ignoring. Chances are you won’t see a more urgent, provocative or haunting film this year. And considering we’ve only got 10 years until ‘The Event’, this really should have been selected for Venice’s main Competition selection.
2073premiered at the 81st Venice Film Festival in Out of Competition.
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