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| Image from the ending in spectacular chronovision |
Full disclosure at the start. I am coming at this film from a different perspective then most. I was trained as a historian in college, I ran a video store in my youth, and I have investigated the tale of the Chronovisor for the past several years. I mention this up front because those things are referenced in the review. As a result I came armed for bear.
THE CHRONOVISOR begins with a sequence that will cause a lot of people to turn the film off or walk out of the theater. It opens with our heroine speaking to two people at dinner, no that's wrong, she is talking at two people at dinner about her work involving memory. After a long very complicated speech she begins to explain it as all one need to is imagine a house with many rooms and furnish each room with what we want to remember and then all we need to is walk through the rooms when we need to recall something. Its a long sequence that has a lot of jargon but little else. What this has to do with the rest of the film I'm not certain since the majority of the film is taken up by her quest to get information on the legendary Chronvisor, the machine created and then locked up by the Vatican because its ability to project any moment in time on a screen was too dangerous.
I should say at the start the story of the Chronovisor is a real one. I have no idea if it's true, its been kicking around for decades. The short version is that the Vatican brought together, though not at the same time and place, many of the great minds of the mid- 20th Century to work on the machine. They did it. They then hid it away. One of the priests involved in the creation spoke about it and word got out. Things then got complicated when a picture of Jesus was "released". Or not. The priest saying he told the journalist Jesus looked like the photo, not that it was Jesus. This made people skeptical and created complications. Its a hell of a story and there are a number of solid You Tube videos on the subject as well as numerous articles if you want further details (most of which are not mentioned in the film).
I mention the true story and the sources at the start since if you have any interest in the story or seeing a good film you'd be better off tracking those down, especially since they are only a fraction of the run time of this 100 minutes mess.
And before you ask about how something like that would work and how you would tune it and know what you are watching, I have no idea. No one, in anything I've ever read or seen has addressed that.
I am at a loss about what the point of the film is. I suspect it has something to do with memory and why wouldn't need it if we had something that could pull every moment out of the air. However, I'm not sure. It's never explained. A big reason is that all we have is one person's oobsession to find out about some thing. Unfortunately we don't know why our heroine is obsessed because there is no indication. There is no effort to connect it to her work on memory or her life or anything because neither she nor the film tells us, even in the margins. Actually she never says anything to anyone except for pontificating at a dinner or to ask for information concerning her search for the machine or to talk to people on her cellphone in the hope of finding someone actually connected to the machine.
A huge problem with the film is that we know nothing about the person at the center (I'd say or anyone else but there is only one character in the film). She moves from source to source, video tape to video tape or audio tape to audio tape but none of it connects. All we see obsession and what she randomly ingests informationwise in that quest. There is a repeated series of statements on screen about never knowing the people we meet, and its true, but at the same time I can get better read about who someone is from a two minute encounter than I ever got from 100 minutes with the cipher at the center of this film. We never see her eat or sleep or do anything outside of search. No, that's not true, she does smoke a cigarette while on the phone. She is a machine and nothing more so it is impossible know anything. Even the choice of the textual passage we are asked to read give no clue.
It doesn't help that probably a third of this film is reading text about the Chronovisor in various (translated) languages. Nothing happens, we are just asked to read various passages, many of which repeat or cover the same material. Why so much? I don't know. Seriously a good portion of the film is actual texts from books and magazines about the chronovisor that we are asked to read and reread. Its as if the filmmakers couldn't find words to tell the story so they stole other people's words to do so. I've read something that this is an effort to make it literary, or to give us the same experience as our heroine but the words are cherry picked and repetative and after a while it becomes kind of dull. For a film that nominally thinks its audience is smart enough to keep up with what it is trying to do the reptative nature of the text seems like that isn't the case. It feels like the directors didn't trust their audience so they hammered home the points they thought were important.
Another problem with the film is that things just happen. Everything comes out of left field and having no logical reason. For Example, late one night, there is a knock on an inside door to her house, she goes and opens it and there is a box of archival materials of a priest connected to the machine that was sent from a Monroe College ton a six month loan. What college would just randomly send archives to a person out of the blue? I say this because she reacts as if she had no idea it was arriving.
But the one thing that bothers me the most is that the film insists on keeping everything analog. There are no computers. It's not that there aren't computers, we never see any. There is no effort to show us any- except that out heroine has the latest iphone. Why isn't she using that to look something up? More to the point how is an academic, doing research in this day and age not using a computer? I ask this as a historian. I ask this as someone who I believe has seen some of the passages quoted in the film on line. Why does she insist on using only magazines, VHS and audio tapes? One would think that some percentage of them would have been digitized. I ask this because she is calling people all over the world on her cellpohone but we never seen her with a phone book. (And why is she trying to reach some of the people she is trying to reach? Why does she think that decades on some of these people would be able to help her?
The film makes no effort to explain or even infer why she is so analog. I honestly would have been fine if the film was set in an unspecified time, or if she had a flip phone, or better yet no celphone, so we'd see it a as a few years back, but the film is recent, something we see by the phone and because the conversations place the film in the 2020's.
Before you jump down my throat, I completely understand that movies don't have to explain anything. Indeed movies that don't explain things are often some of the best ones out there. The trouble is that this film doesn't just not explain anything, it never connects the pieces that are here. We don't know who the person is at the center, she is basically the same person from start to finish. We don't know anything really about the world she operates in. In theory its ours, but it may not be. We are simply thrown bits of information but we don't have anough to connect them all up because there is huge holes in the heart of the film.
There is no logic or reason, just random events thrown at the screen to see if it sticks.
To be certain the film does generate a certain amount of mood, but as a narrative it doesn't go anywhere. Even how it lurches from event to event
The truth of the matter is this is a very pretentious art film made by some people who think they are very clever using ideas and notions they really don't understand in order to make a film that looks very intelligent, but isn't. I'm certain the filmmakers think there is something here, but it is not. Its a film that was made by psuedo-intellectuals in order to fool the rubes who need to be seen going to pretentious art house films in order to feel good about themselves. If there is any actual clever things here they are wrapped so tightly in bullshit they are lost.
I wanted to stand up in the press screening and yell. I wanted to lecture everyone in the screening about how bullshit this whole film was. I didn't. (I did end up writing a very angry very profane first draft of this review because the film pissed me off so much)
There is one thing that happened bothered me on a deeply personal level - the way she restores the unspooled VHS tape (from the archive box)... as a guy who ran a video store in the VHS days my attiude as recorded in my notes was "jesus fucking christ to hell what is she doing?" as she put the tape on one reel, didn't thread it through the opening so the VCR heads could read it, and then just jammed the tape in before screwing it closed and playing it. It doesn't work like that. It was the moment where the film utterly and truly flew out the window for me because on the most basic level it had broken with all reality.
That VHS moment had me biting my tongue not to laugh out loud and scream.
(SPOILERS IN THE NEXT PARAGRAPH)
It also leads into the moment 80 something minutes in where the narative utterly and completely goes right off the rails as she finds out that the chronovisor is actually out in the world, stolen by a Portugese guy who has gone insane because the chrosvisor actually beams memories into your head and he treated it like a drug. So she goes off to Portugual, finds the house walks into it without knocking, walks past the insane guy and then turns on the Chronovisor (which is made of all parts decades newer than when it was supposed to be made.) We then get a this films version of the stargate sequence from 2001 (which does exactly what you think- shows us, kind of, historical events before replaying sections of the film in "chronovision").
(END SPOILERS)
What the hell is this?
It is like the ending of any number horror films, particularly of the found footage sort, where the POV shifts so they can give you an ending that doesn't connect to anything that went before (I'm looking at you Poughkeepsie Tapes) because the filmmakers didn't know how to end it, and thought the last minute change would freak people out and allow them to come up with an unearned ending.
What complete and utter bullshit.
Yes, I stayed to the end. I had to kill time before I went to lunch with my brother so I stayed...and I was hoping against hope they would pull it together... but no, it just stops. (And despite my hope there is no The Chronovisor will next appear in Avengers Doomsday card)
Nothing is explained- at any point- and if something really happens it's just because the directors wanted it to happen and not because its organic or they have any clue about how to actually tell a compelling story.
This film is a mess.
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