Bold. Brilliant. Beautiful.
How to make Hollywood poetically tragic when most of the time it's just plain old depressing? The players are forgotten, abandoned, chewed up, spit out and they die everyday, and the show goes on. Geniuses and visionaries have to conform or remain in obscurity with a black cloud following them for the rest of their professional lives.
In this grim future, capitalism has corrupted the foundations of human consciousness. "Movies are old news, remnants of the last millennium," says Miramount's monstrous overlord.
But this film "The Congress," is anything but old news and it plays fast and loose with a source novel by Stanislaw Lem, splits from its version of reality at the 45-minute mark, and at that point becomes a decadent post-modern classic.
It's also a wholly original and thoroughly surprising fusion of sensory overload and philosophy bound to confuse and provoke in equal measures.