Review: 1
[So, yes, I am still catching up on Fantasia Reviews, but now in hindsight, the Camera Lucida program was very much a highlight of the festival, featuring the most challenging and quirky genre films including Rubber, Sell Out!, Air Doll, and this film from Hungarian production designer turned director, Pater Sparrow. Along with the Serbian Sidebar, there were lots of tasty and unusual treats that stretched even the already offbeat tastes of the massive Montreal genre festival in its 2010 edition.]
So this is one possible outcome when a film, here a science fiction think-piece, is based on an essay? That essay (or rather a short story taking the form of a piece of criticism) was penned by eastern bloc author Stanislaw Lem perhaps best known as the author of book used for Andrei Tarkovsky's Solyaris (an adaptation the author was not particularly happy with, albeit it is one of the key films of science fiction cinema). I wonder what Lem, if he were alive today would have to say about 1. Would he like the ponderously dense wordplay within the film a hybrid of voice-over narration, expository information overload and satirical potshots at a variety of societal institutions including book publishing, news-media and shady governmental secret police. 1 is a curious beast because it does make attempts to 'show-don't-tell' but cannot figure out any coherent way to do so, so it ultimately has to talk-talk-talk, while cross-cutting to surreal imagery. As if Louis Buñuel and Terry Gilliam co-directed a run-on sentence. One will note connections to dystopian mind-fucks along the lines of Brazil, Ghost in the Shell or Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash albeit without the whimsy or kineticism in any of those works, perhaps the more apt comparison would be to Oshii's follow-up to Ghost in the Shell, Innocence, a film that also gets swallowed by its own linguistic pretensions.
The story is simple yet intriguing. A rare book-store located somewhere in urban Hungary, and considered one of the top of its kind in the world, has all of its antique and unusual books replaced hundreds of copies of a single, thick white tome emblazoned with a bold "1" on the spine. Apparently it contains a mathematical representation a collective experience of the entire planet for a single minute. Much like the mathematical representation of God in Darren Aronofsky's pi, if you can read and grasp that, you are pretty much driven nuts. Or are you merely perceiving things on an entirely different way? The book store owners and lone customer are arrested by a paranormal branch of the secret police and questioned by who is arguably the lead character of the film, a pragmatic police office with a weary face and hawkish nose played pitch perfect by Zoltán Mucsi. Do I say that because he is the voice of reason in a crazy world, or because the characters name is Phil Pitch. I am hoping the former. Yes, the former. As interrogation proceeds, the book spreads out into the wide world causing all sorts of chaos, or perhaps this is all in the imagination of the questioners and the questioned. Pears, sex and statistics become symbols for the great, messy human experience as any form of traditional narrative stalls to question perception.
Not unlike Bruce McDonald's Pontypool, there is a sincere attempt to take the Python's Funniest Joke in the World and visualize it as mental collapse. My hang-up with the film is that 1 has to continually explain the punch-line. I do not deny there are a lot of interesting ideas on display in 1, and it is gorgeous to look, but perhaps it should have stayed on the printed page instead of a film. Despite that reading the esoteric hardback within the story will end up driving you crazy, I am willing to bet the book is indeed better than the film.
So this is one possible outcome when a film, here a science fiction think-piece, is based on an essay? That essay (or rather a short story taking the form of a piece of criticism) was penned by eastern bloc author Stanislaw Lem perhaps best known as the author of book used for Andrei Tarkovsky's Solyaris (an adaptation the author was not particularly happy with, albeit it is one of the key films of science fiction cinema). I wonder what Lem, if he were alive today would have to say about 1. Would he like the ponderously dense wordplay within the film a hybrid of voice-over narration, expository information overload and satirical potshots at a variety of societal institutions including book publishing, news-media and shady governmental secret police. 1 is a curious beast because it does make attempts to 'show-don't-tell' but cannot figure out any coherent way to do so, so it ultimately has to talk-talk-talk, while cross-cutting to surreal imagery. As if Louis Buñuel and Terry Gilliam co-directed a run-on sentence. One will note connections to dystopian mind-fucks along the lines of Brazil, Ghost in the Shell or Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash albeit without the whimsy or kineticism in any of those works, perhaps the more apt comparison would be to Oshii's follow-up to Ghost in the Shell, Innocence, a film that also gets swallowed by its own linguistic pretensions.
The story is simple yet intriguing. A rare book-store located somewhere in urban Hungary, and considered one of the top of its kind in the world, has all of its antique and unusual books replaced hundreds of copies of a single, thick white tome emblazoned with a bold "1" on the spine. Apparently it contains a mathematical representation a collective experience of the entire planet for a single minute. Much like the mathematical representation of God in Darren Aronofsky's pi, if you can read and grasp that, you are pretty much driven nuts. Or are you merely perceiving things on an entirely different way? The book store owners and lone customer are arrested by a paranormal branch of the secret police and questioned by who is arguably the lead character of the film, a pragmatic police office with a weary face and hawkish nose played pitch perfect by Zoltán Mucsi. Do I say that because he is the voice of reason in a crazy world, or because the characters name is Phil Pitch. I am hoping the former. Yes, the former. As interrogation proceeds, the book spreads out into the wide world causing all sorts of chaos, or perhaps this is all in the imagination of the questioners and the questioned. Pears, sex and statistics become symbols for the great, messy human experience as any form of traditional narrative stalls to question perception.
Not unlike Bruce McDonald's Pontypool, there is a sincere attempt to take the Python's Funniest Joke in the World and visualize it as mental collapse. My hang-up with the film is that 1 has to continually explain the punch-line. I do not deny there are a lot of interesting ideas on display in 1, and it is gorgeous to look, but perhaps it should have stayed on the printed page instead of a film. Despite that reading the esoteric hardback within the story will end up driving you crazy, I am willing to bet the book is indeed better than the film.
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