In the film “Amy,” the Oscar winning docu-drama on the pop legend Amy Winehouse directed by Asif Kapadia (and also in sections of biographical documentaries- Senna and Diego Maradona), there is an emotional cadence created by the British director as though the subject’s tragic fate was already sealed from the outset. Perhaps “2073,” his latest hybrid documentary is in a sense an evolution of such instinct, where there is a mix of archival footage, computer graphics and speculative fiction that attempts to rewind the moment of disaster to a future scenario where such occurrences are used to warn against a bleak future and the accompanying currents of doomism that are bringing that future closer.
The truth is, what works rather well as a lethal biographical rise-and-fall routine as seen through a lens of movie-making tends to be somewhat ineffective when deployed in a more expansive way to explain the rather bold and dramatic prediction of an imminent societal collapse. The question then emerges: who is likely to come out in such numbers that will be enough to dissuade the doomsday scenario that has been so effectively portrayed in ‘2073’ when as the title of the film suggests, virtually all factors that lead to collapse have in one way or another already taken place-vesm
The only unexpected thing is that the global meltdown that is too massive for us to recover from will have turned us into hefty scavengers in basements beneath a barren shopping mall 50 more years into the future. Drones will instead be circulating the waste-filled streets of what once was a city TRES.
37 years from ‘the Event’ and Ghost (Samantha Morton who should have gotten some more immersive dystopia than this one) is a scavenger, who lives in a basement of a shopping mall where she’s often surrounded by drones sweeping what remains of San Francisco. Grim and close to having no means of communication other than one incident with an ex-college professor (Naomie Ackie), Ghost, who has a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” in her hands, speaks through a voiceover while showing how destructed and untidy the stocks of a derelict Bloomingdales are- voluntary advertising for the bottom-tier department store TJ Maxx.
“It’s too late for me,” she pronounces with undue documentary authority, “but perhaps it is not too late for you”. Quite paradoxically, this perception leads to the idea that she has self-awareness and is well aware that she is speaking to people from a past time, stylized time-leap that requires no logic as in ‘la jetée’.
Defying the visual paradigm of the documentary form with aplomb, however, Ghost skilfully captures the tragic nuances of her subjects’ lives, working class, immigrant women, by telling their stories through a collage she pieced together from her grandmother’s accounts, couched in a fast-paced montage of selected clips from viral content and news coverage, set to the overbearing lens of Antonio Pinto’s score.
At times the scenes are doctor’s cuts, like, “Chairperson Trump Celebrates 30th Year in Power” which is the slogan written on ballooning Times Square’s advertisement screens while making a nasty jest of Ivanka who would be 92 years in the year 2073 and by then the image of the ‘leader’ is not expected to matter anymore.
But pronounced also Kapadia and the co-writer of the movie Tony Grisoni see many events in the world which are horrible enough without any dramatization: buildings getting washed away in storms, wildfires, violence by police and dissidents, concentration camps for Uyghurs and a video of Mark Zuckerberg getting reminders to blink his eyes. And familiar from a news today, the same regime villains are ever present speaking in passionate hatred and scaremongering – Modi, Xi, Maduro, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Orban, Putin – they all have come.
Musk and Thiel, Murdoch and Bezos, Then come Priti Patel, Nigel Farage, Steve Bannon. But most sessions of the movie for instance depict how these calling for the end times factors and individuals are interlinked to each other clearly and without rigor making a tedious round putting out a dozen or more events that simply serve as ‘disasters’.
Thus, in assuming the role of the vexing ambiguities, prominent critics like Rana Ayyub, Carole Cadwalladr, and James O’Brien make their predictions, fittingly describing them as per many 2024 Cassandras. In particular, Kapadia has a weakness for the dazzling connection-the-dot arguments of Filipina journalist Maria Ressa, issues why we are not simply watching A Thousand Cuts by Ramona S. Diaz, which deals with Ressa and covers many of the same themes as 2073, just without the cluttered and distracting narrative structure.
Although private visual agitprop propaganda is rarely intended to trigger someone’s rational reasonable nature, it is a perfect word to underline Kapadia’s very one-sided argument. It is far too easy to lose sight of good motivations when a photograph of a dead, toddler face – down in the wet sand of a Greek beach, which is a graphic image that would be expected to accompany Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish is included, with one of the ephedrine bumps of Pinto’s soundtrack. Or the direct references to sci-fi classics (Blade Runner & Voight-Kampff test) which only further exaggerate and dull down yet another hopeless visual prediction of humankind’s fate waiting for them ony in films.
Toggling between – news reports and predictive statements to shock us with the truth and to impress us with a utopia that of course does not and cannot exist, the outcome is Tantamount – the film accomplishes neither.
Rather, this type of argument has become one of overwhelming whataboutism, which is likely to stifle if not energize any action towards any of the many listed methods of our annihilation. Swept up in the overwhelming depression that “2073” instills, one can’t help but think Ghost was correct — it is, in fact, already too late.
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