Activism often dictates that form follows function, and that the message must come through at all costs — even if it should sacrifice the logic and coherence of the medium. Whether by its very nature or by way of accommodating such an edict, the documentary form has embraced vérité, jettisoning all overt manner of stylizing in its noble effort to accentuate the reality laid bare behind the message. Truth, to use the philosopher’s fancy vocabulary, is not deflationary; with the right incisions, and a world of determination to back them up, the documentarian’s word, which is the word of truth, will prevail. Asif Kapadia’s 2073 puts a somewhat creative spin on this presumption: as a docudrama, it makes clear its fictionalizations and narrative liberties, chief among which being its futuristic timeline and furtive backdrop. But the gist, insofar as the film has one, is unambiguous. The world has gone to shit, and someone better do something about it.
So much for the utopian longings of time capsules half a century past. Just short of another 50 years after the present day, and 26 years after a mysterious event has plunged the world into decrepit, total dystopia, 2073 presents itself as a message from the future, its lonely echo reverberating through time to meet us at the precipice of unallayed disaster. Its self-purported DNA draws from Chris Marker’s haunting 1962 short, La Jetée, in which a time traveler returns to the past in the hope of safeguarding the future from a nuclear winter; Kapadia’s protagonist, a possibly mute survivor named Ghost (Samantha Morton) who lives off-grid and underground, turns back the metaphorical clock to revisit the harrowing years at the turn of the century which her grandmother lived through. We tread familiar terrain, beginning at the Cold War’s end, when optimism about the “end of history” found vindication in breathless technology and connectivity; pausing at many key junctures in the wake of neoliberalism’s worldwide assault, including rising technocracies and eroding democracies; and concluding on an ambiguous note, with an aesthetic monotony of guns, batons, and surveillance offering easy ciphers for the endpoint of fascist totalitarianism. Though set in San Francisco, the film’s ambit is unabashedly global.
With a runtime of just 85 minutes, 2073 seems poised to overreach itself. And indeed it does — but the viewer should be discerning as to why and how this is so. Kapadia’s panoply of talking points is generally inoffensive in its rectitude; or, at least, the journalists he takes inspiration from are generally accurate in their diagnoses and therefore acute in their suffering. But his eagerness to diagnose, diagnose, and diagnose does the film few favors. At once woolly in its liberal do-gooding and generic in its doomscrolling purview of contemporary malaise, the film serves, perversely, as a better example of neoliberalism’s paralyzed symptom than as its urgent remedy. The didacticism of its onscreen pronouncements enervate more than they conform to any organizing principle (though billionaires, dictators, and AI are promising candidates), ultimately engendering an atmospheric dread without substantial heft. In its bid to have its cake and eat it, 2073 exploits neither the promise of its speculative open signifiers nor the depths of its pervasive Orwellian metaphor. It merely entreats us to have a shitty time.
DIRECTOR: Asif Kapadia; CAST: Naomi Ackie, Samantha Morton, Hector Hewer; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: December 27; STREAMING: January 7; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 23 min.
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