TIFF.20 – From here to the end of the line. The Pink Cloud and Apples
I can’t help but notice how annoying this “pandemic film” label has become, which we are sticking onto most films released after we have barricaded ourselves in our homes, where every little crumb of sci-fi constructed on the possibility of an Apocalypse is the film which completely encompasses the domestic experience of the Covid age. Two of the films which had to suffer this particular filter of interpretation are, surprisingly enough, debut films that have been crisscrossing festivals lately, even though they are both written and produced in pre-pandemic times: one is Apples, directed by Christos Nikou, a militant descendent of Yorgos Lantimos’ cinema, to whom Cate Blanchett attached herself as a producer; the other is The Pink Cloud by Iuli Gerbase, a hot pink Brazilian film starting off from an absurdist premise (how else could I call the fact that a handful of people end up spending the rest of their lives in the place where a toxic storm left them stranded?). I am not discussing the probability or plausibility of these premises, despite the fact that this is where most errors in scriptwriting are born: there’s a toxic cloud that’s killing people in The Pink Cloud, yet somehow it’s impossible to build an entire underground city during one’s lifetime, especially one that perfectly mirrors the one where you used to live? Similarly, Apples rests on the insufficiently explored notion of collective amnesia – people seem to just suddenly and randomly lose their memories, while doing the most mundane tasks (driving their cars, eating, sleeping in the bus), and most of them are struck by the tragedy when they don’t have their ID cards or cellphones on them, and are thrown into the lion’s den smack in the middle of the 21st century. I’m not going to complain any further about this – especially because I wholeheartedly believed in the characters’ shifting visages in What Do We See When We Look at the Sky, Alexandre Koberidze’s love fantasy, showcased in the same main competition at Transilvania IFF. In the following, I will spend less time discussing these films’ visionary nature or their premonitions regarding the pandemic which we are experiencing and more about how these worlds function at a larger level- strictly speaking from this angle of the pandemic, these worlds are as thin and boring as they can get; their true goals are character studies, transformations, and bruises.
Journalist and film critic, with a master's degree in film critics. Collaborates with Scena9, Acoperișul de Sticlă, FILM and FILM Menu magazines. For Films in Frame, she brings the monthly top of films and writes the monthly editorial Panorama, published on a Thursday. In her spare time, she retires in the woods where she pictures other possible lives and flying foxes.
