Upside Down
Two and one-half stars
Starring: Jim Sturgess, Kirsten Dunst, Timothy Spall, Jayne Heitmeyer
Directed by: Juan Solanas
Duration: 100 min.
Parental guidance: some violence
Playing at: Forum cinema.
Juan Solanas misses Montreal. The Argentine-French director spent two years here with his wife and young children while he was shooting, editing and future-fying his sci-fi love story Upside Down.
?We lived next to the Palais des congr?s, at the beginning of Old Montreal,? he said, on the phone from Paris, earlier this week. ?Franchement, j?ai ador?. I felt at home. I miss it. Not a week goes by that I don?t think of my friends there.?
Montreal is all over the visually dazzling but dramatically fizzling film ? attentive eyes will spot many a local thespian alongside Jim Sturgess and Kirsten Dunst, who play star-crossed lovers Adam and Eden.
According to Upside Down?s audacious premise, the lovebirds are from neighbouring planets, which have opposite gravitational pulls that keep the inhabitants of each forever apart. And that?s how the powers that be want to keep it. The world up top ? where Eden is from ? has money, style and game shows; the world below ? Adam?s ? is poor and oppressed.
?The idea pleased me on two levels,? Solanas said. ?On the one side, for the simplicity of the love story within the complexity of the outside world, with its wild visuals. But that?s not enough. What really sold me was this idea of double gravity. It?s an ideal way to talk about our reality. This is a super-complicated time, and the film was a really open way, without being fascist, of commenting on reality.?
Solanas knows a thing or two about fascism. His family fled Argentina in the ?70s for France, where the director has lived since age 11.
His father, outspoken filmmaker Fernando ?Pino? Solanas, has since returned to his homeland, entering the political arena as a senator. He was shot six times in the legs in 1991, days after criticizing Argentine President Carlos Menem.
?I?m a child of left-wing militants who always tried to change the world and fight for justice,? Solanas said. ?For me, that?s normal. I grew up with it. I can?t conceive of making a film without trying in some small way to make things better. To just make pretty images is not enough.?
Upside Down is full of pretty images, enhanced by the special effects of Montreal?s Vision Globale (which also worked on the esthetically similar Quebec feature Mars et Avril). Somewhere between Inception and The Hunger Games, the film presents a dystopian future of haves and have-nots.
Primarily shot from the point of view of the have-nots, it features sepia-toned images of a rundown Old Montreal with the dazzling, inverted cityscape of the world above looming overhead.
Plot-wise, Adam and Eden meet as teens, when each coincidentally ventures to their planet?s highest peak. They fall in love, of course, finding innovative ways to embrace despite their respective gravities pulling them apart. One day they are separated, under dramatic circumstances, during which Eden suffers a concussion that gives her amnesia.
Fate brings them back together 10 years later in the offices of TransWorld, a skyscraper where inhabitants of both planets work. Eden is some kind of urban designer, while Adam is perfecting an anti-aging cream made from special bee pollen (based on the opposing gravitational pull of the other planet). Can Adam elude detection long enough to infiltrate the world above and remind Eden of their special bond?
That?s where things get messy. While the set-up is intriguing, their romance is a bit of a dud. Aside from a shared love of kissing, we learn little about what connects these two. (Dunst barely speaks, beaming beatifically for most of the film.)
Their developing relationship is represented as a series of rose-tinted clich?s, to which the scenes of gun-toting agents trying to keep them apart feel awkwardly out of place ? as if Solanas didn?t know whether to make a cutesy love story or a stark thriller.
You can?t fault the guy for lack of ambition. On a modest (for the genre) $60-million budget, he was most intent on creating a unique cinematic experience.
?I like films that leave you with something,? he said. ?A contrario, I hate films where you know every 10 minutes what?s going to happen, then you get out of the theatre and forget it. (Those films are) like McDonald?s. I want to make films that go outside of homogeneity and marketing. J?ai horreur de ?a. Filmmaking is a militant act.?
tdunlevy@montrealgazette.com
Twitter: @tchadunlevy
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