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In stark 3-tone
motion-capture animation, French director Christian Volckman
describes a noirish future and a tough detective's struggle against
corporate age control.
It's
Paris in 2054 and the city of ancient beauty has changed. 21st
century skyscrapers overlay centuries-old architectural masterpieces
and the old tunnel system is being supplanted by an overgrowth of
streamlined plazas. But, the update isn't limited to the cosmetics
of buildings and infrastructure. Far worse is the growing threat of
political domination by Avalon, the ever-present company that seems
to want to rule more through brainwashing than political debate.
Their reach is everywhere they find a need as they search for the
scientific secrets behind eternal youth and beauty.
Call it a cultural takeover through age control.
22-year old Ilona Tasuev (Romola Garai), a beautiful semi-genius
about whom little is known outside the fact that she's a prodigy of
the company's great geneticist Jonas Muller (Ian Holm), is as
self-confident as they come. But the belief in her own
invulnerability that makes her think she can walk isolated streets
and alleys at night by herself proves her downfall when she's
kidnapped. Spirited away to a digital world controlled by an evil
genius who is wise to all her wiles of intelligence and anti-hostage
psychology, she is, to all intents and purposes, disappearred.
Her sister Bislane (Catherine McCormack), whose sensuality comes off
the screen, wants to find her as desperately as Avalon and its
scummy CEO Paul Dellenbach (Jonathan Pryce) does. Leading the search
from the standpoint of law enforcement is our hero, one Barth¨¦l¨¦my
Karas (Daniel Craig), a Paris cop who has built a reputation for
finding people and dealing with criminal trash with a no-nonsense
approach to justice that's all his own but respected by many. We see
his most recent exploit in a prologue designed to sell us on his
unquestioned set of skills. He's the man for the job, even though
all his avenues of interrogation lead to so many dead bodies. It
becomes a clash of powers, with the decent cop frustrating and
bamboozling the big brother power that's become the virtual state.
Faced with insidious, power hungry sociopaths running a board room
that virtually amounts to government, with organized crime and with
highly secret genetic research that may have discovered a miracle
man has sought since before Adam and Eve, Karas and Bislane struggle
to find the trust in one another that might allow them both to
combined resources in order to find Ilona and survive the mysteries.
With a script by Mathieu Delaporte, Alexandre de La Patelliere and
Jean-Bernard Pouy, director Volckman calls in the troops of
animation and motion capture to render a visual style that is
noirish enough to enhance the character of the story. What better
way than to go for a stark, nearly uncompromisng black and white?
While I'm just guessing here, the film appears to have been
photographed as live action, with the image then reduced to the two
tone values of a xerox print, that is, black and white. No
intermediate tones, no gradations, no what a printer would call
"halftones." A third value does appear in some scenes, but only as a
background screen to suggest a mirror image (see this photo of two
people and their mirror images) or a window behind the actors. So,
where in most scenes the shadow side of a face will blend into the
black background and the lit side into the white, sometimes the full
outline of a face is visible by separation against a mid tone
"screen."
Here, for an example, is a publicity shot of Romola Garai and its
rendering (first into greyscale then into high contrast) into the
2-tones of black and white:
But, that's not the only compromise from a pure 2-tone style. It's
apparent in some instances that the eye on the shadow side of a
character's face has been drawn in--driven by the need for facial
expression.
The quality of the performances are unhindered by the technique, and
come across as uniformly excellent. The visual approach should be of
interest to anyone who has ever been in a darkroom or manipulated a
digital image. As a movie device, it serves a story that seems
appropriate--a futuristic other world, providing noirish obscurity
to a noir sci-fi with a technique somewhere between live action and
animation. But there's a novelty factor that works both for and
against the effectiveness of the whole. Novelty doesn't compensate
for a bit much obscurity in the storytelling.
While I fully appreciated it for its audacity and intrigue, I'd be
surprised if it plays well outside the arthouses. Its audience reach
is more of a kind with the rotoscoped, imaginative "A Scanner
Darkly," but by sticking closer to mainstream taste in subject and
action values, "Renaissance" is likely to have a better chance for a
longer shelf life. Any sense of accomplishment is very much in the
eye of the beholder. I expect it will launch a wide set of reactions
into critical orbit.
From
Suite101
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