“Another End,” billed as a sci-fi romance, went on a film festival tour in 2024 and is now set to be released in select theaters and VOD on September 19. While the film certainly qualifies as sci-fi, the romance leaves much to be desired, falling somewhere between disappointing and fun when the filmmakers had hoped it would be their centerpiece. Close, but not quite.
Set in an uncertain future, but with a very similar feel to the present, Sal (Gael García Bernal) plays a young man whose wife, Zoe, recently died in a car accident in which Sal was the driver. Naturally, he struggles to process the loss. He is so distraught, dejected, and depressed that his sister, Ebe (Berenice Bejo), a scientist at the Another End Institute, offers Sal the chance to reconnect with Zoe through technological software that allows one to say goodbye to deceased loved ones. They store the memories and consciousness of the dead in a database, which is then inserted into a "host" body that, for a brief period, assumes the "essence" of the deceased, even if it doesn't know it.
Director: Piero Messina
Writers: Piero Messina, Giacomo Bendotti, Valentina Gaddi
Stars: Gael García Bernal, Renate Reinsve, Bérénice Bejo
I know this sounds like meaningless technobabble, and to some extent it is, but it creates a hypothetical scenario that many science fiction films have exploited to reconnect the living with the dead through advanced technology too fantastical to conceive. But for the purposes of this film, co-written and directed by Piero Messina, the intention is to move us to tears when a man manages to win back his lost love. Unfortunately, most of that love angle is one-sided, as the host of Sal's wife's memories is someone who doesn't seem willing or able to share them.
That would be Ava (the incredible Renate Reinsve), a young woman chosen to be the host of Zoe's memories, a stripper at an upscale gentlemen's club who mourns the loss of her son years ago and seems to have given up on life, just like Sal. With Ebe increasingly concerned that Sal is overreacting with his visits to Ava, which aren't working out very well, it's obvious the end is near and Sal just has to go with the flow. That's why the romantic angle is so one-sided. It's not until near the end that Ava, now aware that she's been playing Zoe, can see Sal as Zoe, not Ava.
Long stretches of "Another End" dive into personal grief with extended segments of Sal expressing his emotions, facing life with misery, despair, and tremendous guilt for having been responsible for Zoe's death. She's unable to come to terms with the loss, and Sal's sister, Ebe, knows this and risks her job at the Institute by allowing Sal to extend his visits to Ava. There's an important twist in the story at the end, but only in retrospect did I realize what kind of mental and physical state Sal was in. This twist helped me appreciate the melancholy of the story's slow, meandering romance.
Confronting ethical and philosophical questions by manipulating our lives in a futuristic environment where anything is possible, the convoluted nature of this advanced technology, which manipulates our emotions, creates a situation almost too far-fetched to conceive. But as a subject for reflection, the film works well enough through the invention of science to deliver the kind of story I'm sure it was meant to be: to define what it means to be human. As contrived and drowned in pain as it is, I identified with its ability to capture vestiges of that almost elusive compassion of the human spirit.
Comments
Post a Comment