Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Reality is Black and White



It is generally not a good idea to see things in black and white. It makes for over-simplification and polarisation – a metaphor for religious politics and population control – you’re either wrong or right; good or bad.




Paris 2054 Renaissance is a starkly black and white movie.
The script is pretty ropey and the plot is wafer thin.
I love it.




Director Christian Volckman has employed motion capture technology to give the characters realistic movement, meticulously hand drawn in high contrast black and white with filmed backgrounds of Paris graphically enhanced to portray a future city.




Renaissance ends up as a kind of techno cyberpunk film noir; a moving work of art; an animated sci-fi adult comic book consisting of a gazillion highly detailed frames, each embellished to a level of beauty befitting the French auteur.






At times I found myself so enthralled as to be watching without bothering to keep up with the plot (a conspiracy around scientific discovery of the recipe for immortality). In places the script is so bad as to be wholly remarkable: lines like “I, like Farfarrah, grew up in The Casbah” and “Without death, life is meaningless”.




In fact, where the clumsy dialogue fails, the visuals say it clearly.
  • An opening shot of a wrinkled eye zooms out to reveal a perfect face on an animated billboard advertising ‘beauty, fitness and longevity’ for the corporate giant Avalon
  • A Dali inspired superimposition of two faces, one through the glass and one reflected, to form one.

I guess this movie will not be for everyone since its attraction is almost purely visual – I guess it's a boy thing - but then, things are never that black and white.

2 comments:

JoeBlogs said...

Black and white is the most stark image though.

Anonymous said...

good take man... i saw this flick last night for the first time via movies on demand. definitely a nice break from the norm. i've been searching for ours online trying to find out the name of that driving techno track used in the nightclub scene at the beginning. i MUST have it!!! please help!

-Zee

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