A tester's dream. Review of ”Zoe”
The current film distribution season seems to be telling us:"Read books". But if it's worth getting out to the movies anytime soon, let it be Drake Dorimus's Zoe. A love story awaits you from the winner of the most relevant festival of our time "Sundance" with an interesting cast and an interesting message.In the story, Zoe (Lea Seydoux) and Cole (Ewan McGregor) work in a corporation whose goal is to save people from loneliness. The work is carried out in several directions at once. The first is the traditional compatibility analysis, and here if you decide, be prepared for the fact that the numbers do not lie. The second is drug treatment with a drug that causes a short-term illusion of falling in love. And the third is the creation of synthetics, perfect partner robots. Such developments always lead to eternal questions: what is the present and what is the program, who is better programmed, people or machines, and who is more prone to bugs.  Drake Dorimus won the 2011 Sundance Grand Prize for the relationship melodrama Like Crazy. Then he shot the picture "Full Breasts", also about relationships, in the way of which there is a certain public morality. His next film, Equals, with an excellent acting duo (Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult) was taken into the main competition of the Venice Film Festival in 2015. What do you think it was about? Yes, again about relationships, this time against the backdrop of Orwell's dystopia with a touch of Shakespeare. At the end of last year, his "Novelty" came out, and again about relationships, but already in the days of tinder and propaganda of diversity. Apparently Dorimus has already eaten the dog on this topic. All of his works have received conflicting reviews from critics, but none of them can be called a failure. In his tapes, he and she each time in a new scenery, before a wide variety of serious questions on the topic of the day and with faith in a happy ending. This is where love truly rules the world. Most importantly, Drake's approach is overwhelmingly honest.  Be careful, spoilers are possible! The surrounding reality is what creates the genre in his cinema. Contrary to the monotony of the subject matter, the entire filmography listed is a solid spectrum from melodrama to utopia and cyberpunk. Despite the already well-known and boring movement in recent years towards humanizing gadgets on the one hand and programming people on the other, "Zoe" in this encyclopedia of relations is not the most passable chapter. Zoey secretly takes a compatibility test with her boss and finds out that she is a robot in love with her own creator. The creator will be very pleased with this fact, read - himself, and eventually decide on new tests. He himself will become a tester of his new toy. In the film, after the obligatory tragic disagreement of the lovers, the viewer is shown their memories of a happy time together. The interesting thing about them is that they are not interesting at all. These are banal idyllic pictures of shared happiness - someone is on someone's lap, looks in love, smiles, romantic moments, laughter, in general, a traditional clip. But both the robot and the human have identical memories.  Our consciousness in the age of advertising and Instagram is predictably tuned to the banal. The banal is safe, understandable, beautiful, because it is considered beautiful. Why, even Lev Nikolaevich said that all happy families are equally happy. If happiness lends itself to description (isn't that what Dorimus does all of his film biography?), Then it is programmable. This story explores the possibility of building artificial happiness, since some kind of roulette always comes out with the unintended. True, even here the case, as always, is on the alert. It is he who is able to spoil the most perfect illusion. Such ideas are not so absurd in our time, when biohacking, mindfulness and other useful human tweaks and updates are on the crest of the wave. The pharmacological plot line is also interesting: pills instantly become a drug, lead to the fact that without them it is no longer possible to feel. Only robots do not suffer from this addiction. Well, this is clearly a painful topic for a director who is so addicted to his own plot. It is worth noting the supporting role of Christina Aguilera - it was difficult to find a more accurate fit into the character. Here, not without irony, she plays the last model of a doll from a dollhouse, which means a legal brothel. The model complains that she needs repair for a long time, and dreams of a change in fate. And her story is the most authentic in the film.  Other robots are too similar to humans, because, despite possessing the entire known palette of feelings, they suffer from an inferiority complex, simply because they are robots. Moreover, the machines are monstrously incredibly sincere and straightforward. They don't know how to lie. It’s time to remember the plot - the numbers don’t lie, zeros and ones too. But what is unexpected in the film is that the people here are completely honest. This is the main drawback of the story: any fantasy admits only one big lie, everything else must be real, otherwise the viewer simply will not believe in the authenticity of the story. In "Zoe" everyone around is wonderful suffering people, devoid of vices and preoccupied with one single problem - loneliness. There is an error somewhere in this code. In the finale, Zoe's robot will turn out to be much more human than its creator and will even cry unexpectedly without having this function in the program. And this final miracle should atone for everything, including the final humanization of machines and the dehumanization of people. In this case, while there is still something human in us, it would be nice to encode it. The Topic of Article: A tester's dream. Review of ”Zoe”. |
