There are two Sophias in French director Virgil Vernier’s clever, cunning, chilling fifth feature. The first is its setting, the eponymous “Sophia Antipolis,” a technology park in the s…
A fascinating tension exists between the antique, grainy, warm aesthetic of Simon Roca and Tom Harari’s 16mm photography and the slicing, hyper-modern sterility of the film’s mood. A cast of non-professionals adds a further layer of docudrama verisimilitude , as does the absence of any score or musical signposting.
This is a place where 16-year-olds lie about their age in order to get breast implants. In the film’s arresting opening, a series of young women are being taken through the pre-screening procedures for breast augmentation by a smooth-talking plastic surgeon. He draws outlines of the incision points in marker on one girl’s naked torso; to another he offers some words of advice as she tries on different implant sizes and admires her new synthetic profile in the mirror.
Simulation, artificiality and performativity become common themes as Vernier and Mariette Desert’s fitful, elusive screenplay skips like a stone across the surface of several lives in this contemporary dystopia. An Asian mail-order bride, recently widowed and left with an apartment, a modest income and nothing to do, starts attending the meetings of a local cult, where a charismatic leader puts people into hypnotic trances.
Across town a young black man takes to his training as a security guard and is inducted into an unofficial militia who run a sort of underground fight club in which they perform simulated muggings, rapes and humiliations on each other.
Vernier’s work often revolves around the relationship between people and their surroundings, and “Sophia Antipolis” continues and expands on that project, asking uncomfortably topical questions about human society in an inhuman, or at least non-human age. The word “Antipolis” means simply “the city across” but it’s hard not to think of it here as an anti-polis, an anti-city, a place almost infernally designed to alienate its citizens from itself and each other.
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