The Congress

The times when there were still the really big, real superstars of cinema are over. Computer-created ideals have long since taken over, great acting is hardly in demand anymore. This is what the once so successful Robin Wright has to realize when she desperately hopes for a comeback on the big screen. But her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) and studio boss Jeff Green (Danny Huston) make it clear to the actress: her time is up. The only way she can retain anything like relevance in the business would be to sell the rights to her likeness to the studio. In exchange, her body and facial expressions are scanned into a computer, and from then on, an ever-young, attractive Robin Wright can star in any movie imaginable. The digital Robin Wright becomes a celebrated action star and even 20 years later her star has not yet sunk. So she is invited to speak as a laudator at a major convention, for which she must enter a colorful, surreal animated world - a world that reveals terrifying things to her about actual reality.

The Congress is a loose adaptation of the novel The Futuristic Congress by Stanislaw Lem. Waltz with Bashir director Ari Folman has turned the dystopian vision of the future about big chemical companies' total control over human emotions into a somewhat experimental swan song to classic cinema. In his film, the major studios have found ways to use chemical substances to project movie images directly into the viewer's head. Screen heroes of flesh and blood have long since ceased to exist in this world; there are only soulless ideals that are, in the end, nothing more than simple chemical formulas. And the viewer is just a soulless shell, controlled by the powerful studio bosses.

What starts as a live-action film turns into an animated film of a very special kind after about forty minutes. Artists in eight different countries worked for nearly two and a half years to create the nearly 55 minutes, which is done in a traditional hand-drawn style. The result is a mixture of tribute to the Fleischer brothers' animated films from the 1930s and a psychedelic trip that is a little exhausting, but also very fascinating in its own special way. It's not just about a swan song to the art of acting or the end of free will. The film also tells the story of a mother who is willing to give up everything for her sick son and fight to the bitter end - even if it is against a powerful system.

All this makes The Congress undoubtedly an interesting film, which in its best moments can definitely be called a small work of art. But while it clearly also strives for emotionality, the production ultimately lacks the very humanity that is also missing from the soulless film productions that dominate the market in this vision of the future. Folman apparently focused too much on the artistic aspect of his film, which ended up being at the expense of developing the story and its characters. No question, there are some quite wonderful moments in the film and its intellectual value cannot be denied. But overall, the story just presents itself as too unwieldy, too inaccessible to be anything more than a bitter indictment of the movie business in the post-Avatar era.

For those who only care about dealing with the possible end of an art form in the most artful way possible, for those who enjoy getting ideas for socio-political discussions, this work can definitely be warmly recommended. But if you want to be stimulated not only on an intellectual level, but also emotionally, if you want to be offered a really rousing story in the midst of all the cinematic art, you might well cut your teeth attending The Congress. Therefore, only for those viewers who enjoy cinematic challenges, who appreciate arthouse trick films and high intellectual standards, there is a: worth seeing!

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp