Misunderstandings and superficiality in «The man with the magic box».»
Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF) - Virginia Eufemi
Swiss premiere at NIFFF, The man with the magic box is an Italian-Polish production that leaves a taste of unfinished business.
A young engineer from Warsaw in the 1950s (Piotr Polak) is able to travel through time using a meditation technique he has developed with fellow scientists. For a few minutes, he levitates in the air, just long enough to find himself a girlfriend in the future, as the temporality of the future is dilated - we don't understand why. He then has time to disembark by boat in the Warsaw of 2030 and find an apartment and a job as a janitor in a large company. There, he meets the beautiful and arrogant Gloria (Olga Boladz). We don't understand what binds the two characters together apart from sex, but apparently it's a great love that will lead the young woman - who has always treated the young man very badly - to fetch him from the past, once the levitation session is over, so that they can live together in the future.
But there's one thing you have to give this film credit for: it's littered with quotations from science-fiction cinema. The transparent raincoat of Blade Runner (1982), Terry Gilliam's «retro future» settings, where new technologies rub shoulders with objects from the late 20th centuryth Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the romanticism of skyscrapers exploding in front of a large glass window a la Fight Club. Not to mention androids, post-apocalyptic cities and personalized advertising. But above all, the beginning of the film - which openly quotes the « neuralyzer »from Men in black - reminds us of The army of twelve monkeys (1995), based on the sublime 1962 short film, La Jetée. A must-see for those who missed it.
When it comes to time travel, viewers seem to have to sign a fictional contract that stipulates they must unreservedly accept any temporal illogic. In The man with the magic box the past is contemporary with the future and doesn't seem to influence it. It's more like a parallel world with different temporalities. Very little is said about the context of Warsaw in 2030: why do the buildings keep exploding? Who's planting the bombs?
Image-wise, the tones are cold, neon-lit, giving them a greenish or whitish look. The costumes are very interesting, especially Gloria's dresses, which light up and feature a futuristic style inspired by Japanese manga iconography. The man with the magic box, directed by Bodo Kox, is undoubtedly a tribute to science-fiction cinema, but fails to distinguish itself in the genre. The actors are bad and devoid of personality, the characters are annoyingly useless, the «love» story is pitiful and not believable, the context too vague to be interesting, leading to a series of misunderstandings that the viewer is too tired to attempt to delve into. The fear that in reality there are no explanations accompanies us as we leave the theater, into which, perhaps, if we could go back in time, we wouldn't have entered.
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Write to the author : virginia.eufemi@leregardlibre.com
Photo credit: © NIFFF
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2 comments
Minor corrections :
I agree on nothing in your article: I found the film excellent, the actors very good in their minimal acting, in a society where the population is subjected to an absurd ultra "connected" totalitarian order. This world is close to our own, but remains mysterious, as many things are unexplained and it's up to the viewer to invent them, like Bilal's "Tycho Moon", for example. The story unfolds slowly, far from the hysterical codes of fashionable cinema, and we understand the temporal intrigue filmed with a rare poetry...On the contrary, I find the characters touching in their anaesthesia as they seek to rediscover their lost humanity...a masterpiece of the genre!
I agree on nothing in your article: I found the film excellent, the actors very good in their minimal acting, in a society where the population is subjected to an absurd ultra "connected" totalitarian order. This world is close to our own, but remains mysterious, as many things are unexplained and it's up to the viewer to invent them, like Bilal's "Tycho Moon", for example. The plot unfolds slowly, far removed from the hysterical codes of fashionable cinema, and the temporal intrigue is filmed with a rare poetry... On the contrary, I find the characters touching in their anaesthesia as they seek to rediscover their lost humanity... a masterpiece of the genre!
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