If nothing else, Eugene Kotlyarenko is a filmmaker dedicated to understanding how we live with technology, and his greatest strength is a willingness to confront how uncinematic this can be and to push himself to invent something new. He takes the mundanity of staring at our phones as a challenge to experiment and innovate, and in his new film, The Code, this includes the use of over 70 cameras of varying quality and size, from iPhones to cheap consumer spycams purchased from AliExpress. Here, Kotlyarenko adds to the difficulty of capturing how we live now by also making this very explicitly a movie about the pandemic, a topic few are excited to revisit. Celine (Dasha Nekrasova) decides to turn her troubled relationship with Jay (Peter Vack) into a documentary, which is also on the surface going to be a movie about how couples navigated lockdown together. Celine and Jay haven’t been having sex, and they decide to go on a vacation to find the spark between them once again, while capturing every moment of it on camera. Jay, recently canceled due to a series of anonymous #MeToo accusations, gets paranoid about Celine only telling her side of the story, and so new hidden cameras are arranged, leading to a cacophony of prying eyes clearly intended to emphasize the lack of personal privacy under surveillance culture and the performativity of being a person on the Internet.
All of which is well and good, but Kotlyrenko luckily has the chops to make all this also genuinely funny, thank god. Much of the social commentary here is quite straightforward and expected, which could rankle if you’re hoping for the film to uncover something revelatory about our collective compulsion towards self-presentation. But the aim here appears more focused on lampooning all this for comedic effect and, more interestingly, using it as an excuse to play around with screenlife aesthetics and formal subjectivities. We bounce around between the couple’s seemingly endless portals into each other’s lives, often with multiple screens arranged for us — one marvels at the prospect of editing this film together into the coherent madness we take in — to dart around and identify what story we’re meant to be following. As a feat of filmmaking, it’s genuinely astonishing, which makes the spare moments that fall flat (extended riffs on cancel culture, references to Nekrasova’s real-life persona) easier to ignore.
Unlike Kotlyrenko’s previous film Spree (2020), which was similarly ambitious and sought to ape the hunt for online virality through the apathetic eyes of a rideshare driver, The Code is far better pitched as less a Black Mirror-esque treatise on the dangers of technological misuse and more an opportunity to reflect waggishly on the apparent breakdown of interpersonal communication and the Gone Girl-like potential of, just maybe, rekindling passion through the reality-blurring power of mutually assured documentation and representation, puked back up for consumption. In other words, it’s a film made by and for the irony-poisoned Extremely Online, but only as a jumping-off point for excavating real pathos from a medium (the cinema) that has been or has pretended to be threatened by all these screens. The Code, then, seems to prod and offer a specific provocation of the art form: try harder. Film has always been about voyeurism, its perversity and its pleasure, and the seeming inanity of what we see online and our natural inclination to spy over someone’s shoulder at whatever they’re looking at is taken to its logical conclusion here. One could crassly but accurately call it the rousing cinematic answer to digital brainrot.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 1.
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