L'Autre Monde (Black Heaven)

[pro-bassoonist]

Gilles Marchand's L'Autre Monde a.k.a Black Heaven (2010) has received a preliminary release date for the Gallic markets: November 17th.

Aaron Hillis:

Beyond "eXistenZ" filmmaker David Cronenberg, has there ever been a filmmaker able to mine worthwhile ideas from the unsteady relationship between reality and the virtual kind? Maybe it's unfair to fault French genre screenwriter and occasional director Gilles Marchand ("Who Killed Bambi?") for chasing popcorn thrills rather than naked truths in his stylized cyber-goth noir about a fresh-faced teen who becomes the Hitchcockian everyman in a dangerous game of self-destructive femme fatales and murderous coercion. Treated as a B-movie, it's a wickedly seductive ride, but whenever it postures to say something more clever as an Information-Age cautionary tale, the film's overreaching ambitions, limply written characters and illogical plotting fall right on their avatar's face.

On summer vacation in Marseilles, young lovers Gaspard (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) and Marion (Pauline Etienne) find a cell phone and discover cryptic messages between a vampish blonde named "Sam" (Louise Bourgoin) and "Dragon." Curiosities too tempted, the couple's investigation leads them to stumble upon and save Audrey (who goes by "Sam" in a virtual game called "Black Hole") from a joint suicide pact. Gaspard is immediately smitten by her beauty, sadness and lower-back tattoo, and goes so far as to join the online fantasy Audrey escapes into, an exciting CGI world as sleekly futuristic as "The Matrix," as monochromatic and neon-lined as "Tron," with the fetishistic secret-society intrigue of "Eyes Wide Shut." More so than its live-action counterpart, the animated kingdom obeys its own eccentric laws and principles, introducing a purgatorial black beach where characters retreat for a few hours if they happen to be killed — or kill themselves. Whatever happened to just wearing black and listening to The Cure? (Or, in this case, a gorgeously brooding score by French electronic musicians M83.)

The film shows its cards too early by introducing Audrey's brother (Melvil Poupaud), an overprotective sociopath to be predictably trifled with in the third act. The real-world parallel of his sociopathic motives is striking: This past week, a Minnesotan man was charged with assisting suicide over the Internet, a relatively new and grisly form of persuasion that "Black Heaven" invokes but can't find anything to say about other than that it exists. Again, perhaps it's too much to expect a film to expose modern troubles of the human condition, but at a film festival recognized for embracing cinema as high art, Marchand's cold-souled entertainment feels like a missed opportunity.

Pro-B