Transgressive love

Went to see Code 46 this evening and came away disappointed. The basic story follows an ID investigator (Tim Robbins) pursuing then falling in love with the fraudster (Samantha Morton). The individual elements of the film worked beautifully, but ultimately they failed to coalesce into a coherent, satisfying whole. The film had little context or detail, and I found it emotionally flat and a little dull.

But I'm not keen on dismissing it outright as there were numerous individual elements (visual, conceptual and structural) that worked for me and, I feel, will have me rewatching it when it's released on DVD:

- It's a futuristic movie, set in an alternative present governed by a unitary global force. Everyone speaks a global patois of English, Spanish, Italian, French and Mandarin Chinese. Due to the widespread practice of assisted conceptions and sperm- and egg-donated births, people from the same gene pool are forbidden to have sexual relations with one another.
- It is exquisitely shot - eery and ethereal, not edgy like usual futuristic films - around Shanghai, Dubai and Jaipur.
- Key themes revolve around alienation and dislocation, love and transgression, and the conflict between individual and global autonomy, and insiders and outsiders.
- Unusual for a sci-fi movie, Code 46 is short on special effects and plot and long on ideas and vision. It's grainy not slick, rough around the edges with an inconclusive ending, decidedly lo-fi, and the bad guys of the future are not aliens but ourselves.
- Morton and Robbins are endlessly watchable as individual characters, but not together - there's none of the oddly mismatched chemistry of Murray and Johansson in the stylistically-similar Lost in Translation.

Afterwards, we went back to eat in Asmara - a much more rewarding experience.

Related link:
+ Channel 4 review of Code 46

Other links today:
+ Bashing the McMasses. The inherent class snobbery of Super Size Me
+ Richard Dawkins' musings on "race"