Kristina Buožyte, the Lithuanian director of the erotic and multi-prizewinning sci fi fantasy Vanishing Waves in 2012, co-directs a quite different raw and gritty sci fi adventure Vesper with her French screenwriting partner Bruno Samper. Set on a post-apocalyptic Earth nuked back to the Middle Ages by ecological crises and runaway genetic engineering, Vesper offers a slim shred of hope in its scrappy 13-year-old eponymous heroine, a backwoods waif who keeps her dying father alive on tubes attached to his brain while she searches for the key to making food seeds fertile again. The film celebrated its world premiere at Karlovy Vary, no doubt the first of many landings for a visually confidant effort whose themes feel a tad déjà vu for adult viewers.
Buožyte and Samper invite us to put everyday logic to one side and enjoy the ride, much as they did with the scientist in Vanishing Waves who discovered the mental sexual thrills possible with a beautiful woman floating comatose in a water tank. Here the leading actress’s youth directs the story along more classic dystopian lines. If Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men hypothesized the need to save the last fertile woman left on Earth, what about saving the last fertile plant seeds, so people need never go hungry again?
A solid international cast acting in neutral, barely accented English is led by Raffiella Chapman as a taut, boyish early teen determined to stand by her dying father (American actor Richard Brake) who lies in bed reduced to a human shell, with dirty, jerry-rigged tubes leading to his external organs. He doesn’t speak, but he has a catchy voice role speaking ex machina from a cheap robo-drone that follows Vesper around as she roams the woods and sneaks into his brother Jonas’s farm to steal things.
She is equally determined to escape the hunger of abject poverty, where a nutritious meal is defined as sticky soup garnished with live worms. Interested in genetics and bio-synthesis, she has turned their wooden cabin – and several hidden locales – into filthy labs where she tests and experiments with technology not even NASA has; her hope is to be welcomed into the citadel with her father as a scientist.
Vesper’s world is dark, indeed. After environmental disaster practically eliminated edible plant life, a rich and powerful oligarchy retreated into a self-sufficient citadels. They had to keep the poor out, as one character explains, to keep from using up all their resources. If this sounds like a social allegory for our times, with undertones of current geo-politics, the film is clearly meant to be ringing topical bells, particularly rallying points for the younger generations who are the most likely to make discoveries in the film’s themes and characters.
Though we never see life inside the glittering citadels, there is enough negative info to form a pretty good idea that the well-fed people inside are lonely, greedy, and ready to exterminate anyone who threatens them. But there is also a tough realism about the ugly side of the poor, whose large families of geeky kids resemble degenerate hillbillies. In a shocking early scene, Vesper witnesses the murder of a so-called “Jug”, a bio-synthesized creature created by the inhabitants of the citadels as mindless slaves. A small crowd has gathered round to silently gawk as paterfamilias Jonas (English actor Eddie Marsan) orders his teenage son to kill the terrified “creature” with a knife. Intelligent and mighty cruel, he circles around his niece Vesper, waiting to brand her as one of his family and turn her into a “breeder”.
When a sudden event brings high-born Camellia (Rosie McEwen of The Alienist in an interestingly complex role) into Vesper’s life, the girl seizes her chance to be introduced into the Citadel. But Camellia is not all she seems and Buožyte and Samper’s screenplay, written with Brian Clark, glides into its final violence-laced scenes on her shoulders.
Cinematographer Feliksas Abrukauskas uses a murky green and brown palette on everything that lives in the swampy, mucky wasteland, from the landscape to the interiors to the smudged-face inhabitants. A big hand goes to the visual concept developers and the VFX and SFX creators, many of whom are credited, for the film’s fairy tale look blended with steam-punkish laboratories and fantastic greenhouses where Vesper grows new species of plants.
Directors: Kristina Buozyte, Bruno Samper
Screenplay: Kristina Buozyte, Bruno Samper, Brian Clark
Cast: Raffiella Chapman, Eddie Marsan, Rosie McEwen, Richard Brake, Melanie Gaydos
Producers: Asta Liukaityte, Daiva Varnaite-Jovaišiene, Alexis Perrin
Cinematography: Feliksas Abrukauskas
Editing: Suzanne Fenn
Production design: Ramunas Rastauskas, Raimondas Dicius
Music: Dan Levy
Sound: David Vranken
Production companies: Natrix Natrix, Rumble Fish Productions in association with 10.80 Film, EV.L Prod
World Sales: Anton
Venue: Karlovy Vary Intl. Film Festival (Crystal Globe competition)
In English
104 minutes
