29/08/2024 - VENICE 2024: Aude Léa Rapin ventures into the genre of the societal sci-fi thriller, plunging into a world that is particularly worrying for civil liberties

‘There's no point in resisting (...) You can't escape here’. It is in a sort of 2.0 extension of philosopher Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975) du philosophe Michel Foucault, immersed in the current excesses of policing in many democratic societies, that French director Aude Léa Rapin has anchored her second feature Planet B [+see also:
trailer
interview: Aude Léa Rapin
film profile], a very raw sci-fi film presented as the opening film of the International Film Critics' Week at the 81st Venice Film Festival.

QR identity codes in contact lenses, swarms of police drones, criminalisation of opposition movements, acute impoverishment of certain sections of the population. The year is 2039 in Grenoble, France, and it all begins with the night-time explosions of a communications relay and a Total warehouse, followed by an arrest operation during which Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos) accidentally kills a policeman and is shot in the eye, before waking up completely unharmed in a very strange setting: a small hotel in paradise by the sea.

With the few activists who share her fate, Julia soon discovers that she is locked up in the first virtual prison in history, a space where an invisible magnetic barrier makes it completely hermetic and where psychological torture is used every night through unbearable nightmares (‘it's hell’) to encourage those incarcerated to inform on others. Meanwhile, in the real world, migrant Nour (Souheila Yacoub), who has only ten days left to avoid deportation, steals a helmet from her ultra-secure job as a cleaner (a profession far removed from her former militant commitment - ‘I've learnt to be nothing and nobody’), enabling her to propel herself into the heart of the virtual prison. She makes contact with Julia, but paranoia, danger and violence reign in both worlds...

From these rather exciting ingredients, influenced in particular by the cult British series The Prisoner but also fleetingly reminiscent of many other films (Children of Men, Strange Days, Minority Report, etc.), Aude Léa Rapin (who wrote the screenplay herself) unfortunately fails to concoct a truly convincing recipe, despite a thunderous start. The desire to focus on action and rhythm (on a countdown basis) hinders the development of the characters and the visual style, trivialising all the good ideas injected into the story. As if sucked in by the ill-controlled intoxication of the desire for a genre film and the desire to reach a young audience, the good intentions of resistance and denunciation of the threats to civil liberties are not enough to transcend Planet B, even if it is always essential to remember just how quickly totalitarianism can take hold of minds and criminalise opponents.

Planet B was produced by Les Films du Bal and coproduced by France 3 Cinéma, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma and Belgian company Wrong Men. StudioCanal is handling international sales.

(Translated from French by Margaux Comte)