like a dream, like a bubble

Margarita 2022-02-04 08:09:26

The title is the ending song of "Big Buddha Plath" that suddenly reminds me. By the way, the Israeli films do not treat themselves as outsiders at all, they are all in English and all filmed in the United States.


Although the title of The Congress is translated into "Futurology Conference", it is a proper dystopia.

The first time I watched an Israeli movie, the heroine looked familiar, but the movie revealed that she was Jenny in "Forrest Gump", but the years left traces, which can be regarded as a comparison with the actress's career.

The first half of the actors perform, the second half becomes a fantasy world of animation, and then briefly pulls back to reality, and finally returns to fantasy. This style of interspersed (repeated horizontal jumps) between live-action shooting and flat-style animation is a bold attempt by the film. The first half tells that the heroine Robin Right has long been out of breath. Faced with the request of miramout (yes, it was used to black Paramount) to scan and digitize her, she refused at first. Because in this way, as an actor, the right to choose what to play and how to play will be lost. Then, as her son Aaron, a young man obsessed with flying machines and kite flying, deteriorated, she finally relented and went to McLaren for a scan. Here comes a small climax of the first half-

Standing in a hemispherical frame surrounded by flashlights and cameras, the heroine is wearing a, er, autumn coat, and begins scanning the outer manifestations of various emotions. Listening to her agent's story, she went from smiling to laughing, to Muran, and finally to crying. This series of emotional changes is entirely due to the agent's eloquent description of his career, and he is indeed an expert who understands people's hearts. Every time the mood changes, the flashing lights shrouded in 360° will be like the blinking of billions of eyes, glowing with light. This is a cage for actors, and it leads to a sense of liberation. Since then, the profession of physical actors has died out, replaced by digital actors who are eternally youthful. Actors no longer need to devote themselves to performing and creating works, but animators build character models, and the actors themselves can count the money while lying down.

If this is still the future within reach, the second half of the film begins to switch to an animation style.

The heroine drove her 2013 sports car to Alabama to attend McLamont's futurology conference. After inhaling a liquid in a receptacle, which should be hallucinogens from the back, the world turns into a colorful and fantastic flat animation - the highway turns into a meandering rainbow, and the fields on both sides become undulating and rolling. In the ocean, the long whale jumped from one side over the head to the other side into the water, and the heroine's sports car also turned into a galloping motorboat. Various events in the futurology conference led to the first encounter between the heroine and the animator Dylan. The animator has been in charge of creating movies with digital White for twenty years. He has to figure out the actor's frown and smile. Over time, he fell in love with the female protagonist, White. Later, in the opposition conflict against McLamon's large-scale use of hallucinogens, the heroine inhaled too much and could not be treated, and had to be frozen for 20 years.

Twenty years later, the heroine woke up, only Dylan came to her side. The world has been fully digitized and is no longer limited to Alabama. People can become whoever they want through different medicines. The skyscrapers of the New York Metropolis have huge flowers on the top, and the bustling pedestrians in the streets include Jesus, Avalokitesvara and Venus. People finally choose Full embrace of hallucinogens. Dylan took White to re-understand this bizarre world, helped her regain her son's feelings, and at the same time expressed her sincerity, so they fell in love. They inhaled the potion, their arms turned huge into wings, and flew to the field under the setting sun.

But the heroine wants to find her son, and I don't know if her son has also entered this paradise composed of hallucinogens. Although Dylan was in pain, in front of his lover who had been waiting for forty years, he offered the only way out of this world - a capsule. Before the heroine chose to swallow it, he asked the heroine to promise him that he would never find him in reality. When they part, it is forever. The heroine cannot find Dylan again by inhaling the ampoule again. People inhale the medicine of the desired image and release pheromones to let others see what they want to be, so each image is a re-projection of the subconscious. Entering this psychedelic world, you can no longer find people in reality .

The heroine swallowed the capsule and woke up, and found that everyone in the real world was ragged and dull-eyed, all immersed in the effect of hallucinogens. Such a sight is startling. She found the doctor of the year, but learned that her son had gone to that psychedelic world six months ago. She realized that she would never find her son again. Aaron is no longer blind and deaf in that world, but lives the way he wants. She chose to return to the psychedelic world, become her own son, and spend her son's life. The film ends with the animated version of Aaron flying a kite and looking back. Similar to the beginning of the first half, it is also the film's return to the family tone. Regardless of reality or fantasy, the heroine misses her son.

There are a lot of things that are not clear about the film, but what I want to discuss is the meaning of the film. It is obviously unacceptable to me for a vision of a future where the whole people are drugged and fantasized, so I say this is a dystopia. Unlike in The Matrix, where everyone lives in a world arranged by the Matrix, in this fantasy world, people are still interacting with "real people", but everyone will appear in front of others in the way they imagined. Entertainmentism may bring about the digitization and personal customization of actors. Everyone can customize the actors they want, the performances they want, and even become a part of them according to their preferences. The boundaries between life and performances are blurred. Do people give up "real" life in order to indulge in beautiful fantasies?

View more about The Congress reviews

Extended Reading
  • Cristina 2022-03-17 09:01:10

    Michelle Gonrigatakovsky, and a little bit more Wes Anderson and Terry Gilliam, have created such a work beyond the times. It is not known whether the free and ethereal perspective comes from human beings. Maybe the film itself belongs to In the future, but we can still be moved by the emotions and think about the insinuations. Maybe we should really be glad that we still exist in a world that we can feel.

  • Ellen 2022-03-26 09:01:15

    The style of the film is completely different from Stanislav Lem's original work. The director has no intention of using the spectacle society where image consumption is prevalent to satirize the utopian society envisaged by idealists. reforms and changes in human civilization. From a certain point of view, the seemingly separated second half is actually about future entertainment - especially the "excessive" development of movies, that is, from virtual production to spiritualization of images, we don't know what movies will be 40 years later What will it be like, will it play out in everyone's head like in the movie? Real and direct projection of desire through psychedelics? Can you lose your "self" while you choose freely? "Futurology Conference" explores the entertainment methods of the future world through alternative methods, and shows the existence of dystopian society through bizarre animation, which is both yearning and terrifying. At the end, the mother has experienced the life of a child who has not met for 20 years through free choice, proving the meaning of "self" in the spiritual abode of the dying human beings.

The Congress quotes

  • Robin Wright: Does that make sense? Or is this just in my mind?

    Robot: Ultimately, everything make sense. And everything is in our mind.

  • Jeff: We at Miramount, want to... want to scan you. All of you - your body, your face, your emotion, your laughter, your tears, your climaxing, your happiness, your depressions, your... fears, longings. We want to sample you, we want to preserve you, we want... all this, this... this thing, this thing called..."Robin Wright".

    Robin Wright: What will you do with this... thing ? That you call Robin Wright?

    Jeff: We'll do all the things that your Robin Wright wouldn't do.