A film by Piero Messina
With: Gael García Bernal, Renate Reinsve, Bérénice Bejo, Tim Daish, Amina Ben Ismaïl, Philip Rosch, Dami Olukoya, Kathleen Hagen
Set in a near-future when a new technology exists that can put the consciousness of a dead person back into a living body, in an attempt to ease the grief of separation, providing a little extra time to say goodbye.
Our rate: *
It’s a science-fiction film like many others, from Total Recall to AI, La Belle Epoque, Inception and any other story that likes to send its hero into a parallel world where he can revive his memory, observe his own consciousness and go on living. But here we have yet another uninteresting romantic plot, which plays on psychology rather than psychology itself, which plays on science fiction rather than adding anything to it, and where the male gaze is constantly asserting itself when it seems to us that romance would have benefited from enhancing its secondary – female – characters. Almost everything revolves around the male character, played by an unremarkable Gael Garcia Bernal, who finds himself reliving important scenes from his past with his wife with an unknown call-girl (Renate Reinsve) who looks like she’s straight out of Blade Runner. More adolescent than dizzying, we wonder why this film was selected for the Berlinale competition. We only hope it wasn’t the final twist that made us think that the narrative really should have explored other possibilities…