Inadequate Response

On the morning after a one-night stand, web designer Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and chiropractor Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) wake up on the balcony of Giovana's high-rise apartment to a public health and safety alert on their phones and the sounds of air raid sirens. Mysterious pink cloud formations have descended upon the city and other parts of the Earth, and breathing in their toxic particulates causes death within ten seconds. Giovana and Yago, are forced to shelter in place, only able to contact their friends and family via video chat.

As the days stretch on interminably, the government initiates a system in which much needed rations are delivered by drones through a series of vacuum tubes. The days stretch into weeks. Giovana wants to keep her relationship with Yago casual, to maintain her independence. Yago wants kids someday. Giovana wants none. She's just waiting for a solution to the crisis is found, for things to go back to normal.

But as weeks stretch into months, and months into years, the pair's all-but compulsory interdependence, by necessity, blossoms into something more serious. Giovana is forced to defer her autonomy for the sake of a world that, far from seeking a solution to the Pink Cloud, is rapidly adapting to a new normal. The delivery system, "The Tube", has developed from a rationing system into a thriving consumer marketplace. Every aspect of economic and social life - employment, entertainment, education, therapy, even romance - are automated or done on the web to serve the interests of a world in quarantine. Some come to see the Pink Cloud as a blessing rather than a curse. Some, particularly those lucky enough to be locked down with their family and close friends, even celebrate its birthday, with a mixture of ironic exhibitionism and fanatical earnestness bordering on secular evangelism. The prolonged quarantine is a boon for therapists and dating apps, to say nothing of influencers who proclaim that the Pink Cloud has not only brought people closer together, but that it has also been a catalyst for some to reclaim their own lives, to be their fullest selves. Even children's toys and cartoons begin to depict the Pink Cloud as a friendly, smiling cartoon. A new generation, including Giovana and Yago's own son, is born and raised in quarantine, knowing nothing of life outside of the family pod, unable to comprehend the pain and nostalgia that their parents attempt to hide from them.

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Having premiered almost exactly a year ago for the World Cinema Dramatic Competition of the Sundance Film Festival, Brazilian filmmaker Iuli Gerbase's The Pink Cloud (A Nuvem Rosa) started its limited run at the Quad Cinema this Friday, having built up a considerable word-of-mouth as both an emotionally intensive drama and a shockingly prescient work of speculative fiction. As the distributor and filmmakers are proud to declare in the publicity and in the opening titles of Gerbase's debut feature, "This film was written in 2017 and shot in 2019," and, therefore, any resemblance of its near-future events to the contemporary COVID-19 pandemic is "purely coincidental."

Whether intended or not, there's actually a double-meaning to this phrasing. On the one hand, the distributors of the film and the filmmakers get to play up the eerie, suggestive parallels between fiction and reality. They get to sensationalize their own prescience, effectively making that prescience part of the cinematic experience. On the other hand, by emphasizing the "purely coincidental" nature of these parallels, they also get to disclaim any criticism of the film's speculative nature, of its projection of human behavior and social systems at a time of novel crisis, that is so essential to making it dramatically credible. The Pink Cloud is, therefore, about COVID-19, and capitalizes upon this, up to the point where credulity to this idea is convenient, to the extent that a shockingly incurious critical establishment will reward this strategy with earned media. It stops being about COVID-19 at precisely the point where the eerie parallels between reality and Gerbase's vision - of people, of the world and how it works, of what we as spectators see and don't see, per the limited perspective of her characters - threaten to point up the shallowness of that vision.

Just the suggestion that the parallels between recent events and Gerbase's film are "purely coincidental" is patently absurd. There is never anything coincidental about parallels between art and life. What's more, there is never anything coincidental about parallels between science-fiction and science fact. Science-fiction is practically defined by the inspiration its draws from material realities, or postulations about what might be possible. From the earliest utopias of scientific romance to the farthest-flung space adventures, it is all but the credo of science-fiction, endemic to the popularization of the very term in the mid-'50s, that it should reflect and react to a material world in constant flux, that it should predict and anticipate. The coy declaration that Gerbase's vision is a coincidence is a foreboding of the film's lack of seriousness as a work of science-fiction. The film's topicality and proximity to recent events serves to compensate for its apparent lack of imagination, even laziness.

None of this is to say that The Pink Cloud is a poor debut, per se; merely that Gerbase's freshman effort betrays a lack of artistic maturity. Even before it could leverage the reality of COVID-19, the film was already leveraging the semantics of science-fiction. Before reality made The Pink Cloud more topical, its titular monster was already a fashionable accent to an otherwise unambitious drama about an independent woman, Giovana, for whom unforeseen circumstances gradually erode at her sense of autonomy, control, and hope for the future. Interviews with Gerbase herself only elaborate further her primary occupation with crafting an intensive, psychologically-oriented drama, rather than attending to the specifics of what is going on or why in terms of the story's modest sci-fi setting. Thus, without intending this to be the case, Gerbase undermines her own ability, and the ability of her performers, to make the psychology and motivation of her drama comprehensible. Because the rapidly changing world the characters inhabit is not sufficiently grounded in material details, the characters themselves grow inaccessible, the progress of their motivations and actions not sufficiently tethered to a foundational rationale.

Like a lot of young filmmakers, Gerbase is overly comfortable with ambiguities that, especially in the context of a speculative genre like science-fiction, devolve into mere obscurantism, rather than stimulation of the spectator's own imagination, or provocation of their critical thinking. This problem is further compounded, again, by the framing of the film, now inextricable from Gerbase's adaptive vision of it, as a prescient coincidence. Within the first ten minutes, however, there proves to be nothing particularly prescient about the coincidence of The Pink Cloud.

Science-fiction has long been fascinated by natural disasters, including novel diseases and pandemics. From the Black Plague to H1N1, they provide an apocalyptic backdrop and catalyst to some of the most profound social, political, economic, and technological changes in human history, and are thus all too suggestive as tools for authors and artists seeking to speculate about the apocalypses yet to come. For decades, now, epidemiologists, climatologists, and environmentalists have been warning us that as global temperatures rise, as climate devastation increases, and as humanity encroaches more into the natural habitats of species with which we have not previously shared intimate contact, that the rapid mutation and outbreak of novel diseases requiring extraordinary response would become all the more likely. The Pink Cloud is not only not particularly prescient; its vision is also not even remotely coincidental. Its science-fiction arises from the ephemeral awareness of science fact. Just as accelerating material changes in the world around us made it increasingly likely that something like the COVID-19 pandemic would arise, so did they accelerate the likelihood that a film like The Pink Cloud would be made, the proximity between imagination and reality rapidly diminishing. This proximity should not be the subject of praise, but rather of terror. It signifies the fast approaching limits of our imaginations, our inability to be sufficiently prescient, our shrinking capacity to collectively anticipate what is, in relative terms, right around the corner.

But even this framework gives too much credit to what is, really, just a publicity stunt. The Pink Cloud is not actually a film about a natural disaster or a pandemic. It's much closer to an alien invasion movie.

Alien invasion movies are not, in themselves, entirely distinct from the disaster film. Indeed, they're joined at the hip in terms of the historical development of special effects and the science-fiction film. As Susan Sontag noted in her 1965 essay "The Imagination of Disaster," the science-fiction film as it emerged in the 1950s and progressed into the '60s was largely concerned with spectacular, extensive destruction. These spectacles, in Sontag's theory, arose as a cathartic, "inadequate response" to the accelerating modern capacity of human beings to destroy themselves, particularly in terms of the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the possibilities of nuclear warfare. Seeing these films as part of a continuum of Western allegorical depictions of disasters and cataclysm - including depictions of historical events and episodes from the Bible and mythology - Sontag's analysis was limited in terms of her emphasis on the scope of destructive spectacles and the modern "ingenuity" by which they were achieved. But in as much as the science-fiction film presented extensive, external destruction, its development just as much echoed themes of gothic horror, being concerned with unseen, invisible, and internal corruption. Whether we're talking about mind-control devices or the Pod People of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the devices by which alien monsters invade and destroy our world are just as often inscrutable to the naked eye, affecting and changing not only the world around us but the very nature of human beings themselves. The modern, Cold War fear of having oneself, one's neighbor, or one's leaders taken over or corrupted by invisible forces was just as, if not more significant, than the spectacular weapon itself. It implicated the invisible menace of radiation just as much as, if not more so than a nuclear explosion; and it implicated everything else, from Communist subversion, to U.F.O. crazes and conspiracy theories, to the use of insecticides. Invisible threats were everywhere, and they have remained so, especially as developments in the science-fiction film have brought about, with increasing frequency, something that was much rarer in Sontag's time: The science-fiction film in which the destruction wrought by the invisible, alien menace was not necessarily extensive, but rather intensive, psychologically and dramatically focused.

There is a clear continuity between the opening credits of the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which a shot of a rolling, cloudy overcast is endowed with the threat of an invisible menace being carried on the wind, and the opening of Gerbase's own film. The pink clouds themselves, as they appear over the unnamed Brazilian city in which the film is set, do not seem to accumulate from anything extant, so much as to manifest of their own whimsical accord, as if they are slipping in through time and space. When a first victim walking a dog steps out onto a pier overlooking a lake, a single formation of the Cloud approaches, not as if it is being carried on the wind, but as if it is composed and moving with deliberation. Later, when Giovana locks her windows and looks out upon the Cloud with fascination as it gracefully stops just before the glass pane, as if gazing right back at her, she wonders why it doesn't come through the cracks. This is just one of those cases where critical appraisal of Gerbase's prescience actually undermines appreciation of what her film is actually depicting, and the story it is at least trying to tell. The Cloud, rather explicitly, does not act like a poison gas or a virus. It is clearly sentient, though its motives, or the extent of its consciousness, remain inscrutable.

The Pink Cloud is, in the end, not altogether dissimilar from Gareth Edwards' Monsters, though that latter film was nowhere nearly as appreciated. They are both basically "no budget" works of science-fiction that use the semantics of an alien invasion or monster movie in order to stage a more intensive drama. In both, emphasis is placed on the effect of apocalyptic change on "ordinary people," those who are not the scientists, or military men, or politicians of the classic sci-fi disaster movie. In doing so, both films critically expand upon the allegory of disasters by foregrounding those who have little control over or say in the aftermath of our accelerating modern crises.

In Monsters, Edwards followed a photojournalist and an heiress on an It Happened One Night-style journey across Mexico, ravaged by the breeding patterns of extraterrestrial monsters and, seemingly more so, by the devastation wrought by the American military in the desperation of containing them below the now highly militarized U.S.-Mexican border. (These monsters, as it happens, were brought back to Earth by a crashed NASA probe in the first place.) At the climax of the film, crossing the border into Texas, our heroes find only more devastation. The attempt to alienate and neutralize the monsters has proved entirely futile and, what's more, this "inadequate response" has now become normalized along a retreating, but expanding border, the whip used to subdue our southern neighbors now blowing back and cracking over the heads of those it was said to protect.

In The Pink Cloud, the drama is even more intensive, concerned largely with how one woman, with no plans of ever settling down or having children, suddenly finds her entire world domesticated. At first, Giovana seems to have the upper-hand, or at least an equal footing in her relationship with Yago. The chiropractor suddenly finds himself unemployed, dependent on Giovana as breadwinner, because her job does not necessitate human contact. Not just a modern woman in terms of cultural cliches of sexual or professional independence, Giovana's allegorical empowerment reflects upon the intimate relationship between social, economic, and technological changes, and the very ability of women as an oppressed group to attain some form of security and self-sufficiency. Gradually, however, and all but inevitably, this world structured now totally around atomized individuality is compelled towards a nightmarish extreme. Rather than an autonomous, self-governed social existence, Giovana finds that the walls of the domestic space have been made the limits of the entire world. It is not simply that circumstances have compelled her to defer her dreams. She watches, horrified and powerless, as her now teenage sister, quarantined with two friends during a sleepover, resigns herself to having a child with her friends' father, even scoffing at Giovana's lack of realism. She watches from afar as her best friend, a former teacher, wastes away in depression, reading from social media as trolls embrace the eugenic potential of the lockdown. In the matter of a few years, this extraordinary crisis has pointed up the flimsiness of socially progressive principles without physical intimacy, material support, or the capacity to organize. With the Pink Cloud as an extreme catalyst, the atomization of the world has resulted in a period of almost medieval regression, the mask slipping away to reveal a face of entrenched reaction against a stable progress and values that Giovana falsely took for granted as the organic norm.

The sentience of the Cloud in this scenario becomes an all the more important feature of the film, hence the need to distinguish it from simply being a more extreme prediction of COVID-19. The reason that the Cloud does not enter through the cracks of Giovana's apartment is because it will not do so. It begins as a monster corralling the characters into their respective pens, a threat that drives them to retreat from the social world. It is, however, endemic to the world outside. It waits for the characters, inviting them. When Giovana looks at it through the apartment window, or when her infant son happily greets it in the morning, it is transformed into a thing of beauty, embodying both danger and the excitement, as enticing as it is threatening. When it first arrives and claims the victim by the lake, one cannot mistake the way Gerbase lingers on the face of the actor, veritably hypnotized, trapped in awe, dying before knowing what has even happened. There is a duality to the Cloud, which is nothing short of the inescapable duality of life, the horror of which is only magnified when it is denied.

Which is, of course, where The Pink Cloud gets quite tiresome and flimsy as not only a science-fiction film, but also, consequently, as an intensive drama. It just makes no sense. Its ambiguities are, again, a clear marker of Gerbase's overestimation of how simplicity and lack of clear explanation can enhance the emotional experience of her drama, to better convey the unique psychological predicaments of her characters and understand them at an intuitive level. The problem isn't the absence of explicit clarity, though. The problem is the same as the double entendre of the opening disclaimer. Just as The Pink Cloud gets to vacillate between being about COVID-19 while also not being at all about COVID-19 in particular, so does it get to vacillate between being a science-fiction film and excusing its lack of credibility as such on the basis of its more intensive focus, the sci-fi semantics being expressly metaphoric (which is to say, shallow and pretentious).

The failings of the film become all the more amplified by the strategy that the filmmakers and distributor themselves have courted, to frame The Pink Cloud as a work of "purely coincidental" prescience. But in spite of all the maudlin melodrama of the film, what needs to be stressed about The Pink Cloud is that, as an anticipation of the near future, it is shockingly, even disturbingly optimistic. It speaks volumes that Gerbase's vision of a near future scenario in which the world is faced with a virtually unprecedented public health and safety crisis is one in which successful lockdowns are achieved almost immediately. It speaks volumes that she envisions this process occurring in a more-or-less centralized, universal fashion, rather than occurring as a protracted nightmare in which individual cities and states are more or less forced to fend for themselves. It speaks volumes that there are no allusions to political conflict in the midst of crisis. It speaks volumes that the intensive focus on the tragic, but functional lives of her privileged, high-rise characters is so intense that it is virtually never punctuated by allusions to how they can live this way, or why.

In lieu of many visual references that were no doubt deemed too expensive or impractical to achieve, much of our conception of the technology at work in The Pink Cloud, particularly with regards to "The Tube," is conveyed entirely through off-handed exposition. Gerbase, defensibly, wants the characters to speak as if these are taken for granted, simply background aspects of their lives. But in the context of a story about a nationwide, possibly global lockdown, when you see packages of rations being taken out of vacuum tubes specially installed in windows, going up to god knows where, the packages somehow dropped in there by drones, to say nothing of allusions to robot therapy dogs, there's an obvious, pressing question: Who the Hell built all this? Who installed the Tube? Who manufactured the drones? Who packed the rations? And once the consumer economy is back up and running, who is doing the work of making sure that the high-rise protagonists get every commodity their heart could desire?

At a certain point, it doesn't really matter if Gerbase's vision is motivated to provoke precisely these sorts of material questions. When Giovana shows Yago a viral video of a grocery store in Rio where a customer is killed in a brawl, Yago claims that the video is faked. Why he thinks this, or whether or not he really thinks this, is not clear at all. What could be a clarifying moment about the possibilities of a "real world" outside of these characters and their lives of hermetic ennui is, no doubt, willfully sidelined by the filmmakers. It's possible that this lockdown is, in fact, a privilege rather than a burden, that there are as yet millions of people who must live every day in the specter of the Cloud. It's possible, though, that, as Yago alludes, there really is the technology to fake this scene, from multiple angles, to be perpetuated by trolls in this near future. It's just as surely, or ambiguously possible that nobody in Giovana's apartment ever complains about something as accessible as technology not working or service failing, but that the system could be unraveling everywhere else. It's possible that, even though we see our characters literally doing a video chat with a doctor as instruction for performing a water-birth or vaccinating their son, that Giovana's friend, the teacher, couldn't just teach by remote. It's possible she just got too depressed to maintain a job. It's possible that there are lots of people who are forced by circumstance to brave the dangers of the Cloud, and therefore possible that Giovana and Yago could just take their changes. It's possible that what's actually holding them together is just some surreal force as primal and inexpressible as the Cloud itself. Lots of things are possible, but not all of them are credible, or fulfilling. Lots of things are just lazy, solipsistic rubbish.

The Pink Cloud is not primarily prescient in terms of what actually happens in a near future, extraordinary public health crisis. But it is prescient in terms of how certain people internalize what happened. Its prediction is of an already present fiction. Gerbase's film is bound to be the most accessible to, and is more or less made exclusively for, precisely the audience that is privileged enough to have locked down at all. With its sensual cinematography, eerie music, and fleeting pace ushering the viewer through all but imperceptible stretches of time, it anticipates and now embodies the perfect ideological fantasy. Despite its horrors, it comforts the viewer with a vision of a world that seamlessly perseveres and adapts, where the tortured psyche of the privileged all but eclipses the parallel story of what actually happened to almost everybody else. In its lack of seriousness about science-fiction, it demonstrates a startling lack of investment in matters of material interest, of how the spectacle of disaster looks to and effects regular people. Gestures at interpretive ambiguity prove disingenuous in the face of the film's fantasist conception of the world, of politics, of what could, and did, actually happen when conventional systems of power and wealth were facing down the barrel of new cataclysm. That there are so many parallels between Brazil and U.S. in terms of the crises that The Pink Cloud only supposedly anticipated is all too perfect. Gerbase's juvenile imaginary was made for the United States of Amnesia.

Make no mistake, despite the lack of ray guns and exploding monuments, the intensive sci-fi film is just as much a cathartic imagination of disaster, and it serves the same alienating, neutralizing function. The Pink Cloud is a triumph of atmosphere, but a narrative and dramatic failure. It is riding the wave of positive critical consensus not in spite of, but rather because of the inadequacy of its response to our new, scientific fears. It needs to be prescient because this is the way we want to remember.