Ari Folman
The Congress

The bubble that burst after the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, which gradually involved various figures from the Hollywood world but also, it seems, from our local cinema, probably deserves broader reflections than we have given so far.

This does not mean that the aspect regarding sexual violence in the strict sense is secondary, but that this very great power exercised by these figures, which is the condition sine qua non at the base of the abuse (in any form one wants to interpret it), constitutes a theme that has a fundamental relevance in making certain considerations about our society and particularly the world of large film productions.

In this sense, and in the effort to delve into every aspect of this reality, which in some way constitutes a parallel world of sorts to the real one—a separate dimension where everything appears through a distorted perception of people as well as things—the contents of this film directed in 2013 by Israeli director Ari Folman and freely inspired by a work of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem (the one of 'Solaris', just to be clear) are particularly revealing and offer a series of points of reflection that, starting from the world of cinema and show business in general, expand into broader considerations on the so-called 'appearance society' in which we live.

The film is titled 'The Congress', it is a joint production between Israel and France, and it was shot in mixed technique, live action, and rotoscope animation (practically: cartoons). The work from which it is inspired is a 1973 novel by Lem, 'Kongres futurologiczny', a science fiction piece of great inventiveness and particularly brilliant social content in which the author's 'fetish' character, Ijon Tichy, finds himself in the middle of a clash between the major world powers and subsequently involved in the conflicts and then poised between two indifferent parallel worlds destined, however, to intertwine with one another.

The plot of Ari Folman's film is certainly different: if one part, the specific congress, is somewhat coincident with Lem's work, the plot as a whole develops in a decidedly different manner, and the developed themes are different (though not entirely).

The film centers on the figure of actress Robin Wright, who, along with Kevin Spacey, happens to be among the most discussed personalities these days, the main actress in the popular series 'House of Cards', and in this film, she plays a fictional version of herself.

In 2013, the actress from 'The Princess Bride' (1987) or 'Forrest Gump' (1994), now in decline and considering herself incomplete due to her difficult character, is approached by the offices of 'Miramount' (Miramax + Paramount) and is made one of those proposals that, as they say, cannot be refused: essentially, to cede entirely for twenty years the rights to exploit her image to the film production company, which will digitize her to create a digital actress they can use as they see fit, while she will have to contractually retire from the scene.

Robin Wright signs the agreement, and twenty years later, while her digital alter ego has now become one of the main cinematic successes worldwide with the series of science fiction films 'Rebel Robot Robin' and probably achieving a popularity far greater than she had previously achieved, she is invited to a congress organized by Miramount in collaboration with the Japanese production company Nagasaky, at the Miramount Hotel in Abrahama City.

Once she arrives at the congress, Robin is forced to take a hallucinogenic chemical whose effect is to transform everything into a fantastic collective hallucination, where everyone reconstructs the world according to their vision and becomes its protagonist. At this point, a series of vicissitudes will unfold with her at the forefront, starting from the clash between the supporters of this 'chemistry' and their opponents, to what we can define as her 'ideal execution' while she is still under the influence of synthetic compounds.

Because of this, Robin is subsequently cryogenically frozen and wakes up twenty years later, still suspended in this world of hallucinations (rendered on screen in a particularly effective manner in the beautiful and psychedelic animated scenes of the film), determined to find her son Aaron, affected by Usher Syndrome and destined to lose both his hearing and vision over time. Everything that will follow from this moment on will be a continuous alternation between hallucination and reality, where the world appears to have fallen completely into misery due to the total disinterest of humans in anything and by virtue of achieving virtual fulfillment of all their needs through chemical compositions.

The film evidently has particularly important social connotations and content that cannot be underestimated. An immediate reference, in my opinion, goes to a maxim of Karl Marx contained in the 'Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right': 'Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.'

Naturally, drawing a parallel between cinema and religion constitutes a stretch, but the theme on which the film develops is essentially what is defined as 'free choice'.

It is indeed precisely this, the arbitrariness, which Robin Wright initially does not want to give up: her uniqueness and her independence in choosing what to do and what not to do both as an actress and as a person.

During a visit to her son’s doctor, Dr. Barker (Paul Giamatti), he makes some particularly relevant considerations about both the freedom of choice and the cinema world, arguing that in some way the son, by virtue of Usher Syndrome (which is already starting to cause problems with his auditory capabilities), is somehow unconsciously a free subject because he, not perceiving exactly what he is being told, interprets it in his own way, thus creating a world according to his subjectivity.

This principle constitutes undoubtedly a stretch, but when Robin is at the famous 'Congress' and discovers the truth about this new chemical compound and its spread, she will understand that signing that contract was a mistake and that she has been excessively used, eventually becoming for the Miramount leadership a true 'symbol' of this new 'reality', which quickly becomes the dominant one and to which everyone ends up easily succumbing.

Without delving too deeply into the social content, which are evident and as apparently simple as they are complex to argue, returning to what we said at the beginning about the Weinstein scandal and what may have been the various accusations against him, all linked to what Weinstein's demands would have been in exchange for the possibility of success, it is easy to think of that principle of 'free choice' mentioned in Ari Folman's film. 'Free choice', which is clearly understood as the possibility specifically of rejecting his demands (in the film there is an explicit scene at the beginning where Robin Wright tells her producer that she would have preferred to sleep with him instead of giving up her image rights, before changing her mind...), but which would be only a partial reading of the situation. Where instead, we still have a dominant subject imposing a condition on someone who may evidently be unprepared for the situation and considers 'free choice' to yield to something that may seem easier.

To speak, in this case, of the 'victim's' guilty or complicity, as I have explained before, seems simplistic, while it appears to us instead that we are facing what, consciously or not, only falsely constitutes a free choice, being instead a complete surrender.

Thus, faced with this film, all Hollywood myths collapse, and the actors return to being merely people with their humanity, devoid of all those superstructures that are created and built around them even in their real and daily lives, where evidently even they can make mistakes just as we 'mere mortals' can.

'The Congress' is definitely one of the most brilliant science fiction films of recent years, and as far as I'm concerned, also a real revelation for the technique with which it was made: meticulously detailed, it works excellently both in live-action and animation scenes. The soundtrack by Max Richter is excellent.

Particularly brilliant is the performance of actress Robin Wright, clearly the figure around which the entire film revolves, but I especially want to highlight the excellence of Harvey Keitel in the role of Robin's agent, a protagonist only in the first part of the film but a standout with an exceptionally meaningful and emotional monologue that perhaps constitutes the true leitmotif and emotional legacy of the entire film.