Social media hits big screen at Sundance
It’s hard to remember the thousands of years of human civilization before Steve Jobs and Apple held their legendary 2007 product reveal for the iPhone, but in the subsequent decade, the iPhone, and its many clones and competitors, have changed not only our means of communication, but also revolutionized our connection to human society, and the nature of our attention span in the process.
Take in any televised sports event, or news broadcast, there are streams of different information flying at us simultaneously. Our brains have rapidly rewired themselves to be able to take it all in at once — and grow restless when we don’t have this kind of rogue wave of data intel coming at us from all directions.
Filmmakers, ever in tune with the forms of societal communication and storytelling, have gradually latched on to this new medium, and some have whole-heartedly embraced it. Unless you intend to set your film on a remote outpost, if you make a movie concerning contemporary teens, you don’t have a choice.
In Aly Muritiba’s Rust, a pair of high-school students in Brazil, sunny Tati (Tiffany Dopke) and melodramatically tortured artist Renet (Giovanni de Lorenzi) get a chance to hang out on an overnight class field trip to an aquarium. Spending a raucous evening with their mutual friends, they slip out together at one point and roam around the now closed water park, talking, flirting, and eventually kissing. But to Tati’s consternation, she has lost her phone in the process. Enlisting their friends, they make a clean sweep of the park to no avail.
Upon returning from the trip, Tati discovers to her horror that someone did find it, and has posted a salacious sex video she took of her and her ex-boyfriend to the rest of her class. Soon enough, she has become the object of ridicule and scorn in her school (typically, her ex-boyfriend is merely lauded), but when she confronts Renet, whom she suspects has had her phone the whole time, he acts offended by the accusation and storms off. With no one to turn to, and the scandal only getting worse as the video gets posted to a Brazilian porn site, shattered Tati is forced to take matters into her own tragic hands.
In the film’s second section, we focus on the aftermath for Renet,
who is whisked away by his father, sister, and cousin to the family’s modest vacation home on the beach for the weekend. Renet seems alternately troubled and loose throughout the weekend, but it becomes increasingly clear that despite his protests, he actually did have something to do with the video’s release, which eventually weighs his conscience down enough to finally do something about it.
As far as the film is concerned, having to spend the last hour in the sole company of the vastly irritating Renet doesn’t bring depth to the character so much as growing annoyance at his surly attitude and his seeming lack of empathy. Muritiba’s observation about the nature of guilt in the smartphone era isn’t without its insights, but her protagonist is too insufferably annoying to take seriously as an empathetic figure, no matter his conscience.
Even so, Renet seems like a veritable St. Francis compared to the four protagonists of Sam Levinson’s execrable Assassination Nation, a film that tries so desperately to capture the current teen zeitgeist it hurts your teeth to watch.
After an extended tease sequence, where the lead protagonist, Lily (Odessa Young), informs us in quick visual succession, all the things we can expect to see over the next hour and a half (“Male gaze!” “Homophobia!” and such), the film brings us the rest of her posse, consisting of three other like-minded souls Sarah (Suki Waterhouse), Em (Abra), and Bex (Hari Nef), a transgender girl.
When someone starts hacking important town officials’ online accounts, releasing the embarrassing contents for the world to see, the girls, like everyone of their friends in high school, find it hilarious. But when the school principal gets hacked, losing his job in the process, and the hacker starts to turn on the rest of the town, including the now-panicked students, general pandemonium ensues.
Soon, it’s revealed that Lily has been conducting a mostly online affair with her neighbor (Joel McHale), the married man of a young child she used to babysit. Much like Tati, Lily is made the object of contempt and derision, but when other students start getting hacked, and Lily is falsely accused of perpetrating the attacks, the town forms an unruly, murderous mob to go after her and her friends. Like
Purge, with a similar love of animal masks, bandannas, and cadres of high-powered weapons, the film quickly morphs into survivalist fantasy, with violent, blood-soaked battles eventually resulting in the four girls forming their own rampaging army, draped in red leather jackets and sporting an array of advanced weaponry.
Levinson’s film isn’t even satire, exactly; and it doesn’t provide much of a sense of humor about itself. Clearly, it wants to be taken as a semi-serious diatribe about feminine empowerment — Lily has a series of monologues on the nature of the customary role of females in an established patriarchy of cut-throat brutes — but even the film’s more strident polemics get washed away by the tidal wave of blood and gristle. It’s fine to have women taking it to the establishment, striking a blow for feminist ideology, even if it’s with a pair of scimitars and an a high-caliber bolt action rifle, but at least have it mean something more than random humour and slick ultraviolence.
At least we can say Aneesh Chaganty is using modern tech innovatively in his storytelling. Search is, in fact, told entirely via such ephemera on a computer screen. Cleverly
using everything from email, messages, texts, photos, videos, and FaceTime interactions, Chaganty creates an assemblage of elements that introduces his family of protagonists. We see photos from the couple’s only child, Margot (Michelle La), as a baby, then attending kindergarten, starting her first piano lesson, all the way to being a freshman in high school. We also meet her parents, David (John Cho), and Pamela (Sara Sohn) via their photos and chats, and we see the emails from Pamela’s doctors, informing her of a cancer prognosis, one that eventually proves to be fatal. It plays a bit like a techno-spin of the renowned opening sequence of Pixar’s Up, telling the story of a family in pointedly brief detail.
When Margot stops answering David’s texts one evening, he’s not terribly concerned at first, but when, after the next day he still hasn’t heard from her, he calls the police and gets put in contact with the highly decorated Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing), an expert on missing children cases. The two of them attempt to find Margot, utilizing all the technology at their disposal. David painstakingly goes through her laptop, cycling through all of her social networks, watching
her journal-like casts, sorting through her email and messages, trying anything he can to uncover clues that might explain what happened to her.
At first, the film works almost strikingly well. It’s true we spend so much of our waking hours in front of a screen of one kind or another (and no, good people, I don’t consider a proper movie screen to be quite in the same category), flipping through apps simultaneously, that watching a narrative constructed entirely of such familiar elements feels like a smooth, natural fit. Chaganty smartly avoids the inherent claustrophobia of only looking in one direction by making David a big proponent of FaceTime, allowing us to watch his face as he communicates ever more frantically with Margot’s classmates and assorted random people associated with her various social media apps.
This format gets stretched to eventually include news broadcasts, weather reports, remote camera feeds, and traffic cams, but by that time, Chaganty has already earned our trust by keeping to his simple formula so it’s easy to allow a bit more flexibility with which to continue the saga. Amazingly enough, the film’s first hour is surprisingly tense and engrossing,
anchored by the fine work of Cho, whose down-to-earth manner works as a perfect contrast to the torrent of onscreen information. But in its final act, the film suddenly endorses the kind of plot-twist heavy machinations worthy of a Dean Koontz paperback. In wanting to keep us glued to his screen, Chaganty eventually loses control of his narrative, spinning so many unlikely twists and parries by the end, the whole thing feels a good deal more silly than it needed to be.
Still, with this film (and several others that have proceeded it, including the Chilean indie Young and Wild, 2014’s Unfriended, and Open Windows, and last year’s Olivier Assayas film Personal Shopper) he has at least successfully proved it’s possible to make a riveting story utilizing our communication technology. Whether it ever goes beyond the gimmick phase into something truly artful is yet to be seen, but as this social media generation grows into adulthood, storytelling that reflects their shared experience will be essential in their understanding of themselves — and older generations’ understanding of them.