Director Ari Folman is best known for Waltz with Bashir, an unnerving personal documentary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre done, done entirely in animation. The Congress is his latest work, a film combining live-action and animation and in which Robin Wright plays a version of herself as an aging actress who agrees to be scanned in order to make a digital copy of herself. Needless to say, this makes it a must-watch in my book.
Unfortunately while the film takes some time to set up this hook, focusing particularly on Wright’s own doubts over whether or not to give up acting forever in order to relegate the job to her digital copy, it doesn’t follow through on it. The actual meat of the film actually concerns another, seemingly unrelated, development in which humans use chemical aids to perceive the world in any arbitrary manner. In this film, this is rendered as the animated sequences. To its credit, it shows some impressive ambition in extrapolating events as far out as it does even if I don’t feel that it’s particularly original or plausible.
The far future scenario it paints is essentially that of most of mankind living as lotus-eaters. The dream worlds that their consciousnesses inhabit seem to be largely self-generated fantasies, including interestingly their individual identities, though it appears that due to air-borne “pheromones”, dreams can intersect and dreamers can interact with one another. I don’t quite get how the dream worlds map to reality. Clearly the physical bodies still need to be fed and looked after and far from being comatose, they do seem ambulatory. Why would any company have any financial interesting in bringing about this state of affairs? It’s just one of the many things that fall apart if you try to analyze this film.
As befits the director who made Waltz with Bashir with its theme on the subjectivity of memory and individual experience, the intent here is clearly to make poetic, rather than logical, sense. But the best that I can say about it is that it is interesting in that it throws up a whole bunch of messages and images. There are hints of intriguing stuff like the community that Wright’s daughter Sarah ends up in and how they are supposedly some of the last people to still bring children into the world. Plus I really liked how the doctor at the end emphasizes that everyone is in their own little worlds and it’s impossible to find them or even know who they are, even though presumably finding the physical bodies should not be too difficulty.
Overall I was very disappointed with this as it promises so much but in the end delivers so little, all of it disjointed and thematically unsatisfying. For example, one of the best scenes is Wright’s agent, played by Harvey Keitel, telling his story of how he got to become an agent. But it has nothing to do with anything else and the agent never appears again the story. Even visually, it is unimpressive. I found myself more immersed and interested in the live-action sequences than the animated ones. It’s an intriguing project to be sure, and a brave one on the part of Robin Wright, but ultimately not a successful one in my opinion.