“Remember that life only lasts 18,000 days”
As the title suggests, the postulate of Sky Dome 2123 there is nothing very original about it. A century after our era, the Earth became barren and Humanity took refuge under immense domes. To maintain an artificial ecosystem and guarantee the resources necessary for our survival, all people over 50 are necessarily transformed into a treewhich leaves each individual with a maximum of 18,000 days of life.
In this timed existence, everything is calculated and rationalized, productivity and procreation taking precedence over everything else. So, when Stephan discovers that his wife Nora, older than him, has decided to shorten her days after the loss of their son, he tries everything in his power to save her and change their destiny. But can we really “save” someone in a post-apocalyptic context?
If the pitch suggests a frantic race against time and a grueling headlong rush, the narration chooses on the contrary what this company under cover has given up doing: not rushing, taking the time, without trying to make a profit at all. prices for hours and minutes. So, Sky Dome 2123 unfolds a melancholy and contemplative story. The plot is slow, sometimes even lethargic, without palpable tension or unbearable suspense, without major social revolt or real impact on this merciless system.
Just the beauty of this shot
Stephan and Nora are ordinary characters, generally powerless, who are not intended to shake up anything on a large scale. They have no control over anything, except their relationship, and possibly their death. Sky Dome 2123 is therefore as much a story of anticipation as love story that wakes up after a long coma.
While time is sorely lacking, they just take “the time”, that of playing on an out of tune piano, of cleaning up a trashed room to which they will never return, of sitting in an empty theater, of dwelling on old memories and make love like it’s the first and last time. It’s simple, beautiful, sad and so strong.
The restrained performances of Tamás Keresztes and Zsófia Szamosi
Once upon a time the life
In Sky Dome 2123, the Earth is infertile, but whether because of rain or unbreathable air, it never gives the impression of being dead. With the ruined buildings and abandoned ships littering the landscape, it is as if Humanity had destroyed everything and then decreed that life was no longer possible, while it only aspires to sprout again.
We have the impression that a bud could emerge from the earth at any moment, that a bird could pass through the sky or that a fish could swim up a stream. It’s like the planet is screaming to start againbut that humans remained deaf and blind.
On the eve of a new life
This is the other particularity of the film: its humility. Sky Dome 2123 bears an uncomfortable but fair reflection on our condition and our belonging to something bigger and more important than ourselves. Our end is not an end in itself (the same for the characters), because we do not condition life. We suffocate and subjugate it.
The film therefore does not need to aim for the stars and the immensity of the universe to bring us back into a mechanism of which we are only a cog, one form of life among many othersa grain of sand in a desert.
Letting evolution happen without us, our greatest challenge
Certain scenes are cruel and poetic at the same time, like the ending (which we will not spoil) or the discovery of the human trees with their leaves with fingerprints, and the dehumanizing speech of the scientist who marvels at them. And while we’re talking about the strange beauty of the film, the visual bias of rotoscoping completes the approach.
The fact of recreating the characters by hand and not by computer gives them vibrant, almost unstable features, so much so that they appear to be continually moving. Quite the opposite of the frozen 3D settings and photorealistic objects which run through this story, much larger and wiser than it seems. And when we know that this is only the first feature film from the duo Sarolta Szabó and Tibor Bánóczki, we are already asking to see the next one.
Sky Dome 2123 has been in theaters since April 24, 2024
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