Some day, our future will be someone else’s past. Arco, the titular co-protagonist of illustrator, comic book author, and short film director Ugo Bienvenu’s debut feature, is an 11-year-old boy from a time long yet to come. Humanity lives on platforms in the clouds, flying not just through space with the aid of special flight suits and rainbow-hued capes, but also through time with the aid of crystalline gems attached to the forehead of their suits. Their temporal voyages are exclusively backwards, gathering information and resources from eras of relative abundance — theirs may be a time of extraordinary technological advancement, but their situation is one crafted from necessity. Their elevation above the earth has been engineered to permit the planet to recover; specifically from what is never explained, though the implication is patently that it’s human-made environmental damage.
And so we arrive in our future, but Arco’s past. He’s below the permitted age for flying, so he makes his journey without the knowledge of his family, and arrives at his destination, 2075, entirely by accident. He lands in a forest, his rainbow-streaked descent witnessed only by a trio of adult brothers, obsessed with discovering the secret to a similar marvel they saw 20 years prior, and a schoolgirl of Arco’s age, Iris, skipping class in an apparently characteristic spell of ennui. Her parents work out of town, and largely appear in her life as live holograms; she and her infant brother are under the care of their house robot, Mikki. She’s lonely and frustrated, and Arco’s remarkable appearance from the sky ignites a fascination in her that she finds nowhere else in her life.
Iris’ loneliness isn’t unique to her. Her separation from her parents is mirrored in Arco’s, as he tends to his family home and farm on their solitary platform while his mother, father, and sister venture off to distant places in different times. The outside world is distant to Iris too — buildings in 2075 are protected from the elements by indestructible bubbles during particularly inclement weather, which is becoming more frequent and more severe, or so it seems. Much in this movie is left to suggestion, from the nature of humanity’s eventual retreat from the surface of their home planet, and the precise functioning of the flight suits and gems, to the state and quality of life 50 years from now. Iris’ home town is blessed with benign technological boons (the humanoid robots, with their retro appearance, are quite far removed from the present-day specter of a malicious, omniscient AI), yet otherwise outwardly quaint, with a ‘90s-esque suburban Americana aesthetic. It’s an apparent utopia under an unequivocal threat, though this is of little concern to Arco. Adrift and flustered due to the unintended mistake of his arrival here, and having lost his gem upon falling to the ground, his sole concern is to return to his family, some 900-odd years away from him now.
Bienvenu’s concept has imagination in spades, but his storytelling is somewhat lacking in it. Arco’s quest to return is a simple one, and he’s a simple character; Iris is more richly-drawn, conflicted between her interest in and bond with Arco and her awareness of his essential need to leave her at the earliest convenience. The three brothers in their pursuit are a slapstick sideshow, and Bienvenu’s heavy-handed comedic touch weighs down every scene in which they appear. Arco and Iris aren’t just being chased by them, but by local enforcement robots, having become alerted of Arco’s inexplicable presence in the town, and by encroaching fires, placing the town on an impending lockdown. It’s a race against time, and little else.
What little else there is, then, is of mixed quality. There’s a lingering ambiguity to things in Arco, most notably in the malleability of secondary characters’ shifting statuses of heroes and/or villains. The brothers may be either help or hindrance to Iris and Arco; the robots seek to protect them but may, in so doing, prevent Arco from seeing his family again. And an act of tragic remembrance will, soon thereafter, lead directly to a moment of joyful fulfilment, albeit one tinged with more than a hint of tragedy in itself (the movie, overall, posits a message of hope, an inevitable light after even the deepest darkness). Yet it’s debatable how intentional these ambiguous details are, since Bienvenu is frequently sloppy in his filmmaking. He takes liberal shortcuts, such as allowing Arco to fly in arid darkness when he’s previously stated both sunlight and rain are required for flight, and indulges in curious inconsistencies, such as a pair of insurance robots able to inform Iris of Mikki’s serial number yet unaware of how long they’d been with her family. Similarly, some of the mysterious elements of Arco may appear inadvertent, and ultimately distancing.
The emotional ambiguity, too, is difficult to process — Arco moves briskly, albeit through a pretty thin plot, and never dwells for quite long enough on the feelings evoked in these characters during a presumably incredible experience for all. The climax occurs with startling abruptness, and concludes with equal haste, closing with a pat statement by Iris that one supposes should sound considerably more profound. Profundity is a little out of reach for a movie like Arco, whose best qualities often feel accidental, and whose story is too weak to carry much thematic weight. But, in place of profundity, it has poetry. One benefit to life in the far future is that humans can now speak to birds, as Iris discovers when she finds Arco on the roof of her house, conversing with a flock that’s perched at his feet and on his arms; the movie will eventually end in birdsong. Birds, a rare living connection to our present past, endure into Bienvenu’s vision of our future alongside us. And that too will be someone else’s past, even if it proves to be less idyllic than what he’s imagined. A hopeful movie, then, but one might have hoped for a better one, too.
DIRECTOR: Ugo Bienvenu; CAST: Swann Arlaud, Alma Jodorowsky, Margot Ringard Oldra, Vincent Macaigne; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: November 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 28 min.
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