Who decides what constitutes a bright future? One without animals (but with ants), one in the utopian North (or dystopian South?), one predetermined by your mother and your neighbourhood – or one that you, finally emerging from your shell, choose for yourself?
Is A Bright Future science fiction? Usually that conjures images of advanced technology set in the future. Here we have cathode ray tubes and cassette tapes.
Yet we’re not simply in, say, the eighties either. We have a dystopia – familiar territory for science fiction – and we certainly have peculiar technology. Like those small speakers emitting animal sounds: a dog, a bird, a cat. They hang from lampposts or sit beside your bed as replacements. Because those animals, they’re gone.
So they say.
They say many things. But who ‘they’ are remains rather unclear. No idea whether A Bright Future unfolds in a dictatorship or even some form of democracy. The amusing thing is, this isn’t troubling at all. However bizarre and strange the situations and events in A Bright Future may be, they’re all immediately comprehensible. I suspect it’s because people react to them as we typically react to everything that is, in essence, utterly absurd in our world: that’s just how things are.
The animals have simply gone extinct (except for the ants). There are simply few young people left. You simply never leave your own neighbourhood. And those youngsters who score highest on the (peculiar, strange) tests, we simply send them North. That’s how these things go.
You don’t seem to return from the North. It has something to do with productivity, general utility, and living in isolation with ‘your plant’ – you’re given the seed for it. But it’s not really about what the ‘North’ actually entails.
It’s far more about everyone congratulating you when you’re chosen while simultaneously impressing upon you that it would enormously disappoint your mother and your neighbourhood if you didn’t go – and that you’re thus, hidden beneath congratulations and bonuses and cake, subjected to enormous group pressure where no one could even imagine that you might personally think differently about it.
Retro-futuristic speculative fiction is probably a better description here than science fiction. And yet it somehow feels as though this is the world we’re increasingly becoming. A Bright Future occasionally resembles Van Warmerdam or Roy Andersson or Kaurismäki, but more weird than funny (though apparently funnier if you’re Uruguayan) – rather like the Greek Weird Wave around 2010. But everything also feels remarkably comprehensible. We all know group pressure and psychological exhaustion. Just as we recognize that small core of stubborn resistance, like an irritated baby or adolescent, that begins to glow deep inside and grows unstoppably larger – until no law or rule can withstand it any longer.
Martina Passeggi plays the protagonist magnificently. She’s originally a dancer, not an actor, and she makes almost everything clear through her posture, her place in space, her movements. “I always said: I must make use of the fact that Martina can do everything with her body,” according to director Lucía Garibaldi, and so they improvised. Which led to, amongst other things, one of the most physically fluid drunk scenes in cinema history. Backwards cambré, anyone?
KEES Driessen
LINKS
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XccgXTpvEjo, A compelling Tribeca interview from Film Fest Report with director Garibaldi, who describes the project’s origin in her frustration at not being able to walk around freely at night – despite her love for doing exactly that. A world you love, but that isn’t safe for you: this theme indeed permeates A Bright Future.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPCJIB1f7jk, A dance education is by no means a bad foundation for an acting career. Especially when you later need to fly through the air in a spider suit, for example. I had no idea that Tom Holland once started out as Billy Elliot and was therefore amazed by his performance on Lip Sync Battle as a combination of Gene Kelly and Rihanna.
- https://movieswetextedabout.com/a-bright-future-review-an-deliciously-absurd-and-intriguing-sci-fi-film, You can also interpret A Bright Future more politically, like this review that sees the ‘North’ and ‘South’ as the Global North versus the Global South. We are, after all, in Uruguay. ‘The so-called third world countries look to the northern hemisphere as the land of prosperity and intellectual development. This collectively shared belief is not based on factual analysis, but on centuries of colonialism and soft power propaganda that portray the South as inferior to the European and North American continents.
