Asif Kapadia Offers Disturbing Portrait Of The Future

There’s a disturbing plausibility to director Asif Kapadia’s docudrama 2073, which just premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival. It’s set 49 years in the future, a time when surveillance drones swarm the skies and shock troops keep the order, truncheons in hand. We’re not in America anymore. Welcome to “New San Francisco – Capital of the Americas.”

Old geographic boundaries have dissolved, apparently, but not because we’ve all come together as one. No, the S.F. location hints at a future where Silicon Valley and its tech bro billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have achieved hegemony, in alliance with authoritarian political leaders (for reference, see Putin, Vladimir and his ecosystem of oligarchs).

A digital billboard in a Blade Runner-like urban environment blares, “Chairwoman Trump celebrates 30th year in power” with a picture of a grinning Ivanka Trump. Farfetched? Maybe so, maybe not. (Kapadia clearly means this as a joke, one of a few he permits himself in what is otherwise a downbeat depiction of our trajectory).

In the scripted portions of 2073, Samatha Morton plays a woman struggling to hold onto a shred of freedom in this post-apocalyptic nightmare. We don’t know much about her, other than that she’s trying to stay off the grid and out of sight of drones. In voiceover, she recalls talk of an earlier time when humanity still had a chance to avoid catastrophe but blew it.

Flashback-like sequences suggest how everything went wrong – and this is where the documentary element comes in. Contemporary news footage shows wildfires, floods and massive storms — a gesture towards the ferocious impact of climate change. A mashup of imagery illustrates the current dangerous tilt towards right-wing populism: Muslims being attacked in Modi’s India; Duterte authorizing extrajudicial killings of alleged drug dealers in the Philippines; a tête-à-tête between Trump advisor Steve Bannon and UKIP party leader Nigel Farage, presumably plotting over how to spread their ideology far and white; British-Indian conservative politician Priti Patel, the former Home Secretary, gleefully promising to “end immigration” in the U.K.; footage of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 when then-Pres. Trump appeared to offer words of support to white supremacists.

Interspersed in the news footage are interviews with journalists who have been warning us about the alarming direction of our world – people like author Anne Applebaum who has elucidated the emerging “unholy alliance” of authoritarian leaders including Putin, Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un — and potentially Trump, should he return to power. Maria Ressa and Carole Cadwalladr also provide useful insights into our current dilemma, particularly how AI and social media (brought to us by tech bros) are being used to dismantle democracy.

Kapadia manages to knit together the documentary footage and the fictional story into a cohesive whole. At one point, Maria Ressa, the Rappler founder, observes that democracy has been imperiled by a lack of consensus about what constitutes truth. She then asks, “Isn’t this a science fiction movie?” Kapadia immediately cuts to Morton in what is, of course, a sci-fi movie.

The director could not have chosen better than casting Samantha Morton to star in the dramatic segments, an actress who communicates so much with her luminous eyes – both vulnerability and a wearied resilience (it’s easy to imagine her thriving in the silent era of motion pictures, when expressive eyes proved an essential asset). Kapadia also references Morton’s earlier cinematic work to build a kind of backstory for the character – a sudden shot of the actress as the “precog” Agatha in Minority Report feels especially evocative because of that film’s futuristic setting.

Kapadia acknowledges that the sci-fi visual landscape of his film owes a debt to La Jetée, the 1962 short film directed by Chris Marker that has likewise influenced other post-apocalyptic films, including 12 Monkeys. The innovation here is putting the viewer into the future and using news archive from today as a time capsule. The effect is eerie and unsettling, as it should be.

The filmmaker also wisely avoids the seeming imperative in documentary film to provide a “hopeful ending” even to the direst stories of societal dysfunction. Had he attached a pat wrap up, it would have let all the air out of the balloon and absolved viewers of contending with his thesis. As the trailer for 2073 puts it, “This is not fiction. This is not documentary. This is a warning.”

Title: 2073

Festival: Venice (Out of Competition)

Distributor: Neon

Cast: Samantha Morton, Naomi Ackie, Hector Hewer. As themselves: Maria Ressa, Carole Cadwalladr, Rana Ayyub Ben Rhodes, Rahima Mahmut, Silkie Carlo, Cori Crider, George Monbiot, Nina Schick, Chris Smalls, Douglass Rushkof, Carmody Grey, Tristan Harris, James O’Brien, Anne Applebaum, Antony Lowenstein

Running time: 1 hr 23 mins