Only a few minutes into his A Hundred Thousand Billion, 48-year-old French filmmaker Virgil Vernier (Mercuriales, Sophia Antipolis) presents to viewers a gang of four young escorts who, bathed in something of a Warholian atmosphere (mostly reminiscent of Chelsea Girls), are gathered in a small room, laid or sat on a bed, chit-chatting about their sexual experiences — stories concerning some of their clients, and the different challenges they’ve faced in their profession. The next morning, three of the friends head for their holiday vacations abroad, leaving Afine (Zakaria Bouti) behind in the Christmas-y quietude of a phantasmagoric Monaco. From this moment forward, Afine idly — without much ado beyond meeting and accompanying some of his clients — and aimlessly ambles around the city, checking out his friends’ photos on social media, reading through random messages on his phone, or, later, hanging out with long-time Serbian friend Vesna (Mina Gajovic), who’s trying to make a living by babysitting a wealthy family’s 12-year-old daughter Julia (Victoire Kong). This framework allows the three characters to create their own version of a never-had, happy family, and as A Hundred Thousand Billion deliberately avoids a conventional, plot-oriented narrative, Vernier subsequently shapes their shared drifting into an ambient bit of visual fiction, frequently punctuated with the sensibilities of both documentary-like realism and street photography. The result, then, is a 77-minute film built around a series of evanescent encounters, casual conversations, and ephemeral snapshots in and around the luxurious Monaco.
Yet, despite the film’s explicitly raw, low-key imagery and the generally austere minimalism of its carefully arranged compositions, Vernier (expectedly, for those who have seen the director’s other films) also incorporates some stylized visual flourishes, like various sequences of saturated fluorescence or semi-impressionistic panoramic skyline shots (specifically, during the film’s evening- and dusk-set scenes). It’s not mere empty style, though, and instead helps establish A Hundred Thousand Billion’s critical contrast between the glittering Monegasque urbanity and superficial commodifications — the urban spaces here randomly will appear in some scenes under construction or in the process of expansion — and the film’s post-reality show protagonist’s somber melancholy, existential alienation, and profoundly clandestine sense of desolation. As we hear in the film’s allegorical opening voiceover, which enigmatically speaks about a very strong giant who destroys everything in his path, it’s credible also to think of Vernier’s A Hundred Thousand Billion as a kind of apocalyptic narrative documentary wherein its best moments can be found in the moments of intimate mundanity shared between the outcast trio of Afine, Vesna, and Julia in the face of an apathetic, post-capitalistic monstrosity. There’s an introspective quest here to find a higher truth within nihilistic materialism, and to survey the increasingly rare human emotionalism within our age of ever-present pornographic sensation. That thematic core supported by an indie-experimental aesthetic makes a solid case for regarding Vernier as something of a French counterpart to Sean Baker.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 3.
