Dir. Gerald McMorrow, France/UK, 2008, 98 mins
Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green, Sam Riley, Bernard Hill
Review by Carol Allen
Set as it is in two parallel worlds – the futuristic Meanwhile City and contemporary London – this sci fi is an imaginative though not totally successful examination of the effect of imagination on the perceived reality of "real life” and raises the question, which one is most "real"?
John (Phillippe) is an outcast in the world of Meanwhile City, a society ruled in a rather His Dark Materials way by the fact that everyone by law must subscribe to a faith, however weird. He is a non-believer and a hooded vigilante, whose mission is to kill the religious leader who abducted and killed a little girl. Meanwhile in London as we know it, there are three people who are unaware of each other's existence but whose destinies are somehow linked with each other and with John. There's Emelia (Green), a flaky art student of Goth appearance, working on a video project around her own suicide attempts. Milo (Riley) is unlucky in love. He's just been jilted but still carries a torch for his childhood sweetheart Sally, whom he meets again as an adult (also played by Green). And Esser (Hill) is a father searching for his traumatised war veteran son, who's gone AWOL from a mental institution.
The two worlds are beautifully imagined and well shot inside a predominately grey blue palette, dark for Meanwhile City, somewhat brighter for London. The former is a dark and elaborate fabrication in comic book tradition of exaggerated Victorian Gothic with policemen resembling the "Peelers" of that era only wearing dark glasses. It's a world where wacky religions flourish on every street corner – there's one for example based on the strict observation of washing instructions, another calling itself the "Seventh Day Manicurists". The London of our world is convincingly observed with a good use of deliberately everyday locations. The four main characters are all reasonably engaging, although Emelia, through no fault of the actress, is somewhat irritating and occasionally unintentionally funny in her self-dramatising poses. And there's an interesting supporting cast, including Susannah York as the mother Emelia loves to hate, Kika Markham as Milo's mother and Richard Coyle as Milo's best mate, while some of the other characters crop up in both worlds under different names.
This is an intriguing film, though some will find it bordering on either the pretentious or even daft, while the resolution, when it comes, is not totally unexpected and a touch sentimental. But if you can go along with the premise, it does raise the disturbing question, how much of what we perceive as objective reality is real and how much is it distorted by what's in our own heads?
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