Reel Rundown: Nothing subtle in message by skilled filmmaker of ‘2073’
Regardless of what side of the political spectrum we fall on, those of us living in these interesting times have plenty of reasons to be worried. If we aren’t concerned about the ongoing challenges to the First Amendment, it might be about our 401(k) tanking – or things eminently worse.
British filmmaker Asif Kapadia isn’t shy about revealing what his worries are. The latest evidence of this is his hybrid mix of fiction and documentary titled “2073,” which is streaming on several services.
“Hybrid” in Kapadia’s hands means a split between a standard, narrative storyline and an array of arguments done more or less in straight documentary form. In “2073,” Kapadia uses this melding of styles to detail how a society might devolve into dystopia and how people might then fare in a post-apocalyptic world.
The narrative part of the film stars Samantha Morton as a mute woman referred to only as Ghost. Reflecting the film’s title, the year is 2073. This, we are told, is 37 years after “the event,” an unidentified cataclysm that has changed everything.
Ghost lives in the underground section of what once was a shopping mall. She spends her days scrounging on the surface streets for anything useful – a tattered copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” for example, or a stray can of discarded food.
She has to continually dodge the AI-enhanced forces that prowl the streets, looking for anyone who is “suspicious.” And a suspicious person is automatically considered to be an enemy of the new social order.
Ghost knows that if the authorities find her she is liable to be disappeared and suffer the same fate as her friend (Naomi Ackie). As Ghost explains, she is past helping the world recover its bearings after what happened during “the event.” It’s too late for her, she says. But she hopes that it’s not too late for whoever is listening.
Which, presumably, is us. And if we didn’t get the message from Ghost, then Kapadia delivers his arguments – and they definitely are his arguments – by augmenting them with real-life newsreel footage of today’s police and military acting to repress people around the world.
And who is behind all this? He points his cinematic finger at the various authoritarian figures whom he targets as the problem. That list includes the likes of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and others – including, to the chagrin of his supporters, President Donald Trump.
But, too, he fingers the so-called billionaire oligarchs that are using their wealth to support those in charge. You know the names: Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel … and, most prominently, Elon Musk.
As you might suspect, nothing about Kapadia’s film is subtle. It’s a call to arms put forth by someone who is disturbed by what he sees as a growing threat to the world’s democracies. And it’s done by a skilled filmmaker.
He is, after all, the guy who won an Academy Award for the 2015 documentary feature “Amy” and a BAFTA for the 2010 documentary feature “Senna.”
So, clearly he is concerned. The question is, how worried should the rest of us be?