SHAKEN, BUT NOT STIRRING
Great mix of ideas, cute robots not enough to make this a love story we care about
A blind man in the North African desert gets to deliver the theme of Eye on Juliet, when he claims that technology is the root of all evil. But the joke’s on him, because the “young man” with the odd voice leading him to the nearby road is in fact a remotecontrolled robot hexapod, running security for an American oil company in the region.
The hard-to-classify sort-of romance stars Joe Cole (Green Room) as Gordon, a U.S.-based drone operator who controls the cat-sized hexapods and uses their amazingly efficient Arabto-English conversion capabilities to converse with the locals. It even translates chuckles.
Usually talk is limited to “This is a restricted area.” But Gordon, whom the opening scene unnecessarily shows us has just had a messy breakup, becomes obsessed with Ayusha (Lina El Arabi), a young woman from the
local village planning to escape to Europe with her true love before her parents can marry her off to an older man she barely knows.
Smitten but also trying to be helpful, Gordon tries to assist in her flight, a mission decidedly outside the hexapod’s mission parameters, and possibly beyond the audience’s credibility gap, even for a film presumably set in an alternate near-future. (“These bots are so f---in’ vintage,” someone says of the hexapods.)
Montreal writer-director Kim Nguyen’s last film was Two Lovers and a Bear, which similarly married extreme locations (Canada’s Far North), possible romance and an unusual counsellor; a polar bear, voiced by Gordon Pinsent. But trying to root this Gordon’s quest in reality raises more questions that it answers, not least the role of American cultural hegemony in foreign romance.
And in spite of Ayusha’s talk about the difficulty and danger of reaching Europe, the stakes somehow never quite seem real. And to Gordon they’re not — about the worst that can happen to him from the comfort of his drone-control office is unemployment, and you sense he never really liked that job anyway.
Nguyen has stirred together a great mix of ideas in this film, but without much focus. Is technology encouraging insincere and insubstantial relationships, as Gordon’s experience with a new dating app suggests?
Or can it literally bridge continents and language barriers to bring people together?
The film veers one way, then the other.
There’s no doubt that the hexapods are mighty cute supporting characters, however. If Eye on Juliet was a bigger-budget release, we could expect to see their spindly spider bodies on toy-store shelves by Christmas. As it is, they’ll have to remain in the realm of fiction.