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VENICE 2009 Critics’ Week / Sweden

Last stop, Metropia

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In Europe in 2024, you don’t have many choices: you can either take the underground, watch the TV show "Asylum", or wash your hair. In any case, someone will read your mind and you will never really be free to think for yourself.

Tarik Saleh’s animated Swedish film Metropia [+see also:
trailer
film profile
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is a Kafkaesque and Orwellian nightmare, set in a not-too-distant future dominated by a devastating energy and economic crisis. The metro that links the whole of Europe in a gigantic underground network is owned by a multinational which also makes shampoo that sinks into the brain and reads your thoughts. The company has even installed video cameras in television sets in order to spy on people’s every move.

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Roger, a call-centre employee in Stockholm, goes into an underground station and hears strange voices in his head. Soon after, he encounters Nina, the charming blond woman who advertises the shampoo, and he decides to follow her. She helps him to solve the mystery of the voices, but Roger realises he is involved in a conspiracy against the powerful multinational.

Taking as its premise the fact that today we are constantly watched by video cameras, at work and in public places, and are bombarded by other people’s ideas that we end up assimilating, Saleh (who previously worked in advertising) has created a paranoid world, Metropia, which is merely a degeneration of the real world. Co-written by Stig Larsson (author of the Millennium trilogy who died in 2004), the project took six years to be developed and completed.

The most striking aspect of the vision in this fantasy thriller aimed at adult audiences is the technology used for the animation. In 2000, Saleh and art director Martin Hultman made a series of animated shorts for Swedish TV. The hyper-realist style was described as "Kafka depicting the last supper with a machine gun".

There was an ambitious photomontage in which people and landscapes were put together to create a new universe. This aesthetic also derives from Saleh and Hultman’s past as “graffiti artists” on the outskirts of Stockholm.

Isak Gjertsen, chief animator on Metropia, was faced with the challenge of bringing to life its characters, drawing inspiration from the tricks used by great masters such as Juri Norstein and the first Disney, in the digital version. Metropia was therefore made using real photographs, with the Cut-out Animation technique, in Adobe After Effects. The result is a gallery of characters who look human but with alienating elements, such as their larger-than-normal eyes and skull. By way of example, Roger’s girlfriend, Anna, is definitely based on a photo of US actress Rosario Dawson.

To round off the game, the characters’ voiceovers (the film is shot in English and aimed at an international market) are performed by an impressive cast: Vincent Gallo (protagonist Roger), Juliette Lewis (Nina), Stellan Skarsgård and Udo Kier. Gallo gives a passionate performance, almost as if he were acting before the camera, and Juliette Lewis reveals her most sexy side.

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(Translated from Italian)

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