Chas’ blog – The Congress
The Congress (2013)
French-Israeli live-action/animation/science fiction drama
Written & directed by Ari Folman (2008 Oscar-nominated for Waltz With Bashir)
Running time 122 minutes
I’ll admit that I approached this movie without knowing what to expect… Folman has made a movie about what happens when an actress throws herself to the mercy of the studio system. As soon as the premise was out there I was reminded of the 2001 animated film Final Fantasy: The Spirits within and James Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster “Avatar” in which animated characters are created by scanning real life actors and manipulating their images digitally. Even at the time of the earlier movie this was forecast as a potential future option in films. However this film takes the possibility a step further. To the storyline- an aging out-of -work actress(Robin Wright playing a character based on herself) accepts one last job though the consequences of her decision affect her in ways she didn’t consider. She agrees to sell the film rights to her digital image to Miramount studios (Miramax + Paramount) in exchange for an astronomical fee but she must never act again and she is forbidden from appearing on any kind of stage. The studio promises to keep the new 3D Robin forever young…she will always be thirty-something and a stunning beauty in the movies. She signs on the dotted line.
Then the film jumps ahead 20 years and turns two-dimensional and the action becomes harder to describe: Robin is invited to a Futurist Congress hosted by Miramount- Nagasaki the successor to her old Hollywood studio. It is now the exclusive creator of of the cinematic dream- world that controls all our emotions from love and longings to ego and deathly anxieties. The computer programmers have evolved into chemists and pharmacists who will declare the next stage in the chemical evolution… FREE CHOICE Every viewer can now create movies in his own imagination…Robin Wright is now a chemical formula that any person can consume and then stage whatever story they desire.
This is pretty radical stuff to my taste and I hope it doesn’t do for Folman’s career what “Cool World” did for that of Ralph Bakshi. “The Congress” rises on the strength of Robin Wrights’s powerful performance and in 2013 it was selected as best animated festure film at the 26th Europeon Film Awards.
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