Writer-director Asif Kapadia’s latest film offers viewers a glimpse of an American dystopia of the near future, about 50 years from now. 2073’s opening montage of drones, cameras, bombed-out looking cityscapes and rampant arrests and police brutality plays out while a bit of onscreen text tells viewers that the movie takes place 37 years after “The Event.”
In New San Francisco, Capital of the Americas, everything is covered in dust and rust, and a toxic golden haze fills the air. It’s got none of the charm of a foggy day in the City by the Bay, and all of the trappings of nearly every sci-fi film focused on terrible tomorrows. Beyond the opening, 2073 might feel familiar to viewers because it’s based on French filmmaker Chris Marker’s classic experimental 1962 film, La Jetée. La Jetée was also the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s film 12 Monkeys. And maybe it was a whole bunch of Gilliam fans who made 2073 the number one trending film on MAX just after its streaming debut on April 7?
In 2073’s ravaged future, Samantha Morton plays Ghost, a mute survivor who’s only heard in voice-over. Ghost scavenges through the wreckage of New San Francisco — crumbling malls and garbage-choked seas under a perpetually orange sky. In the 37 years since “The Event,” society has split between underground rebels and a ruling elite hoarding the last scraps of sunlight. Ghost’s world is a grim dance of survival, dodging drones and AI enforcers. Ghost gets by with the help of allies like Naomi Ackie’s idealistic teacher, clutching books like lifelines, and Hector Hewer’s eerily gentle android hinting at defection. The visuals flip between Ghost’s bleak 2073 and a collage of real world news/social media footage — tech oligarchs, climate chaos, and authoritarian crackdowns — showing how we got here. 2073 isn’t a traditional narrative film, and Kapadia’s experimental daring results in a mosaic of despair, with themes of memory, resistance and the cost of apathy threading through both sci-fi and documentary territory simultaneously.
Marker’s La Jetee, the film’s aforementioned spiritual godparent, is a 28-minute masterpiece of still images — a “photonovel” of a — a “photonovel” of a time-traveler haunted by a memory, chasing love and doom in a post-apocalyptic loop. Marker’s 1962 film reduces cinema to its essentials: black-and-white photos, a sparse voiceover and one fleeting moment of motion that hits like a thunderclap. That simplicity amplifies its themes of time, longing and the fragility of existence. 2073 nods to it with reverence, borrowing the time-bent survivor angle and that sense of being trapped in a memory you can’t escape. Ghost’s wordless drift through ruins echoes La Jetée’s unnamed man, both tethered to a past that’s slipping away. Kapadia doesn’t embrace Marker’s formal extremes, but he blends fiction and documentary in a manner that feels up-to-the-moment contemporary.
Unfortunately, Kapadia’s filmmaking is more well thought out than his politics. 2073’s blending of fact and fiction becomes a confusing blur — that’s the point, and that’s good writing and directing. But all the found news footage that Kapadia and editor Chris King smuggle into their sci-fi-dystopian-Chris-Marker-homage ends up in service of the most predictably banal interpretation of mainstream political rivalries and squabbles, culture wars and economic chess games. Chris Marker was a poet of images, but Kapadia’s ponderous political messaging is only propaganda. Marker was a radical artist and if 2073 is going to be explicit about politics those politics, should be explicitly radical.
2073 is streaming on MAX
Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.