Presented out of competition at PIFFF 2024, Daniela Forever allows us to find director Nacho Vigalondo for a fascinating sci-fi film.
Until now relatively little identified in France, the Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo nevertheless explored the waters of genre cinema with great inventiveness. After proposals like Timecrimes or Open Windowsit’s with the “fake” kaiju movie Colossal that we were able to fully understand his way of navigating between styles and tones. This romantic comedy about depression, led by Anne Hathaway, subverted the codes of the giant monster film to probe the tormented interiority of its protagonist.
Daniela Forever is part of a form of continuity, although this time, Vigalondo himself presents the feature film as that of a man who has reached the second half of his life. If the notion of depression is still very present, the fear of death and the difficulty in facing mourning constitute the emotional core of this strange science fiction object.
Eternal Sunshine of Madrid
Nick is a DJ based in Madrid, who quickly falls in love with Daniela, whom he meets during one of his sets. Unfortunately, their happy life as a couple comes to an abrupt end when Daniela dies in a road accident. Distraught, and unable to move forward, Nick agrees to participate in the tests ofan experimental drug, which allows you to travel in lucid dreams. By taking control of his imagination, he begins to create new memories with his deceased partner…
Of course, Daniela Forever evokes in many aspects Inception with its dream sessions which gradually make the protagonist lose his footing. Except that unlike Christopher Nolan's montage, which intertwined temporalities and spaces, Vigalondo marks a clear split between reality, captured by the dreary and grainy look of an old video camera, and Nick's dreams, filmed in glorious digital 2.39 to highlight the warm colors of Madrid's streets.
Through this inversion of the relationship of values (Nick's interactions in the “real” world have something terribly artificial), Vigalondo finds the singularity of his film, which calls the spectator, just like his main character, to prefer ephemeral beauty of the imagination. We well suspect Nick's inevitable tragedy, and his progressive confusion between the two worlds he inhabitsbut the director only uses it for the dramatic knots of his plot.
What really interests him are the moments of floating, the pure dreaminess that transform Nick's stuffy apartment into a mirror of his psyche. By recreating Daniela in her image as Pygmalion creates Galatea, there is immediately something stuck, between her initial behavior as a video game NPC and the increasingly toxic attachment that her lover applies to her.
From there, Daniela Forever depicts a shattering existential crisiswhere the projected image of a romantic idyll can only deteriorate, and reflect aspirations abandoned by the couple's concessions. Without ever losing sight of his passionate romanticism, Nacho Vigalondo touches on a form of inevitable resentment, both on the part of Nick and Daniela, and the complexity of their feelings, supported by increasingly chaotic imagery in his abstract visions.
We can criticize this ball of emotions for being a little too complacent in implementing its rules, but Daniela Forever surprises with its approach centered on deep solitude, and its progression which refuses to simply be shaped by the different stages of mourning. Vigalondo prefers a form of sinuous stroll, which owes a lot to the talent of his actors. Alongside Beatrice Grannò (seen in The White Lotus), which marvelously juggles between the devitalized feminine fantasy and the mental projection in search of independence, Henry Golding proves all the dramatic talent that was suspected of him. His coolness, until now exploited in romantic comedies or action films (Crazy Rich Asians, Last Christmas, Snake Eyes), actually hides a vulnerability that Vigalondo transcends in this fascinating dreamlike wandering.
PIFFF 2024 takes place from December 4 to 10 at the Max Linder Panorama in Paris.
