Christian Volckman, “Paris 2054: Renaissance” (2006)
A glossy animated style of minimal black-and-white presentation, emphasising detail, mood and atmosphere in a future Paris governed by corporations through panopticon-style surveillance made possible by hologram and other future cyber-technologies, ultimately proves inadequate to save this film from tired character stereotyping, a dull formulaic plot and shallow treatment of its films. All that we take away from the film is that the elites, whether political or corporate, or bad and that whatever they lust for and pursue is for their own self-interest and profit while the hoi polloi must continue to resign themselves to serve them. The film ultimately can offer no more than an attitude of “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”(“the more things change, the more they stay the same”) with an accompanying implication that humans are incapable of change, overcoming their self-interests and desires, and creating a better society.
The thriller plot follows the fortunes of police detective Karas (voiced by Daniel Craig in the English-language version) as he searches for young kidnapped scientist Ilona Kasuiev (Romola Garai), held somewhere in an oppressive tech-noir Paris. He relies on Kasuiev’s associates who include her sister Bislane (Catherine McCormack), with whom he has been acquainted on a more personal level in the past, and her employer Avalon Corporation, to find possible reasons for her kidnapping. As he delves further into his investigation, he discovers that Kasuiev was involved in a secret corporate project to recover the methods and results of an experiment on children suffering from progeria – a genetic condition in which sufferers experience premature ageing – which might hold the ultimate genetic key to staving off ageing and death, and achieving immortality. At the same time that Karas finds revelations about Kasuiev’s work, sinister agents are following him and learning what he learns. He becomes romantically involved with Bislane as well.
Triteness oozes from nearly every pore in the plot and its characters. The romance between Karas and Bislane is never convincing and seems to have been thrown in simply to inject some James Bond frisson and the notion that Karas is somehow more than just grim crime-busting operative into a shallow plot and a one-dimensional main character. Likewise an unnecessary car chase is added into the story; the illogicality of such a car chase in a story and setting where surveillance is so pervasive that the chase could have been ended by the police before it began (a helicopter or a drone could have shot the runaway car from the air or forced it to stop by hacking into its electronics) needs to be overlooked for the cheap thrill the ruse adds. It’s as if director Volckman and his script-writers couldn’t trust the premise of a panopticon police-state Paris enough to allow the story to develop naturally and suggest its own narrative that could intrigue their audience and make viewers aware of their guilty pleasure as complicit with those overseeing the city and its life; and instead forced the sci-fi vision into a lame thriller plot in the belief that the public will prefer the familiar and the generic over the innovative, the unusual and the experimental. What an insult to the public’s intelligence!
The plot, shorn of its unnecessary convolutions, and the animation would have worked well enough together for a shorter film and the twist ending, when it comes, would have made much more of an impact. As it is, the film becomes something of a torture to sit through as it limps to its resolution and perceptive viewers might guess that both hero and kidnap victim receive very unpleasant shocks when they meet. Somewhere along the way, the film’s message – that life with all its highs and lows only has meaning when ended by death – ends up being submerged by too many clichés.