Le Congrès

It worked on me intellectually rather than emotionally. A very original, and originally conceived dystopian sci-fi story that’s a lot more depressing, serious and ambitious that I could have expected. In particular, the switch from live action to animation is not just an empty, meaningless gimmick. The Congress offers a lot of food for thought, perhaps so much that it doesn’t manage to fully work it out in its two hour run. The only thing missing for my total enthusiasm are effective emotions; in that sense, the movie really didn’t get me at all. The problem, in my opinion, is the monotonous dubbing and expressions of the characters in the relatively long animated sequence. I didn’t feel anything at all from their voices and faces (especially Robin Wright’s). (KVIFF 48) (10/07/2013)

The Sunset Blvd. of the digital age pedals along nicely until the moment it collides with the hallucinogenic Inception. From this, it takes a serious hit, especially in its ability to be more lucid in its storytelling as such, with the effort to get out of it turning into a creative layering of one bit of nonsense after another. This ensures that the second half of the film is unable to function on its own, let alone in fusion with the first; the cameo of "that guy nobody even knows about anymore" is amazing, whilst Dr. Kubrick is completely out of place (given them a Golden Raspberry for the masks, please!). (01/09/2013)

A protest that helps itself by downplaying the things it fights against and moving them to the level of easily attackable caricatures. It may, of course, feel revolutionary and radical, but in reality Folman's revolt against mechanization, schematization, and the subjugation of reality is even more mechanical and "generic" than most of the criticized phenomena. The Congress inevitably feels like a hopelessly leaky metaphor stuck somewhere in the dystopian visions of the 1990s, like a weeping confession of an extinct star, the bitter murmur of an independent filmmaker about something he didn't bother to understand, and above all a terribly aggressive testimony which, unlike Valčík and Bašír, the animation does not serve as a means of liberation and distance from trauma, but rather a tool of subjugation and enslavement of the viewer's perception (pure ideology, the entire visual, complete trivialization, synchronization of the pictorial information, as we intellectuals with a clip-on beard like to say). I have not seen a more ill-conceived film for a long time, one that is able to anger me so much with its simple bile. Basically, I see two positives: Max Richter's excellent soundtrack will definitely serve as a good background for the trailers, and the first thing that came to my mind after The Congress was: I want to see Michael Bay's new movie. His simple stupidity will purify me more than this bony and sinewy parable, whose "intellectualism" is as ostentatiously engineered as a caricature of Tom Cruise. P.S. Maybe Folman should think about the fact that his vision was processed by a damn visual psychotropic factory several times infinitely more intelligently and sophisticatedly. But I know that this doesn't fit into his indignant reality. (31/07/2013)

Even though the film definitely has something to say and carries a message inherent in the fact that the story was adapted into this medium, it's primarily the form that captivates here, and rightfully so. For a moment, you might feel like it's something else from Charlie Kaufman's pen, but it's actually a delightful sci-fi with beautiful imagination and wonderfully bizarre, absurd development. (29/05/2017)