Avalon

"Oshii Mamoru's Avalon is one of the most sophisticated and
visually achieved movies ever made about intersecting levels of reality."

Tony Rayns

[Plot synopsis: Ash is one of the greatest players of the game Avalon, a virtual battle simulation that has attracted many devotees and addicts all trying to reach its highest levels. Ash works solo, with memories of the days when she was part of a team whose leader was lost in the game. Hearing rumours that there is a more advanced level of the game that can be attained with potentially deadly consequences, Ash decides to become part of a new team.]

I've been dithering over whether or not to use Mamoru Oshii's Avalon on a film studies course, on a week devoted to cyberculture and virtual embodiment. After taking a good look at it, I'm still dithering. Avalon is a tricky one. Is it a beautiful, enigmatic and elusive masterpiece that I just didn't connect with, or is it a stodgy, pretentious mess with little substantive to say about the way we interact with virtual spaces and lives. If you don't recognise the name of its director, Mamoru Oshii, you've probably heard of the anime classics he lists on his c.v., most notably Ghost in the Shell (1995) and its extraordinary sequel, Innocence (2004), which must surely rank as one of the most sublimely beautiful bits of animation ever crafted: take any frame, blow it up and frame it. It looks perfect throughout. Animation encourages that kind of carefully composed precision in its imagery - if you have time and tools to make something look exactly how you want it, why not take control of every element and make sure it is composed exactly how you want it? Paint over it if it goes wrong. Avalon is Oshii's fourth live-action feature, but the first to get any kind of international recognition or release. Shot in Poland with an all-Polish cast (Oshii likes Polish cinema, apparently, but seems to have modelled his environments on a gloomy, post-war Eastern European template gleaned from movies rather than any kind of futuristic Warsaw), it contains many elements that are far from "live". Soaking almost everything (food seems to come out quite colourful) in sepia tones adds to the vintage look (though it could also be that the US DVD has altered the colour of the film) and shows Oshii exerting an animator's control over his images. CGI is used quite sparingly, and is closely integrated with the themes of the film. If the tendency with digital effects is towards excess, to show off with grand scale what can be done with a few pixels and mouse clicks, Avalon seems to go in the opposite direction. Its every move is economical. Rather than creating a virtual world that is radically different from the filmic real world, Oshii makes them visually similar. In the virtual world of the game, characters who are killed disintegrate into a shattered two-dimensional oblivion like stain-glass pictures, and in several shots (see below) Oshii fractures the illusion of the simulation by inserting these succinct perspectival tricks into the 3D world to immediately mark it out for what it is - a Plato's cave of flat data experienced as actual space.

In an interview with Tony Rayns in Sight and Sound, Oshii stated:

I wanted to create characters in the same way that I do in animation. I did a lot of digital work on Ash's face during the post-production, which went on longer than the actual shoot. I felt free to alter expressions to give me exactly what I wanted to see on screen.

This is all very well, but it does give the film a certain coldness, probably not in the service of its themes of alienation and emotional disconnect (although it certainly contributes to that), but in order to get everything neatly composed. Whatever, the tidy compositions of nearly every shot, and the aesthetic similarity between Avalon and the external world of its gamers cumulatively facilitate the interpretation, which is there if you want it, that none of this is real, that everything we see is just layer after layer of fabrication with no externally real reference points. Oshii himself is vague on the subject, so make of it what you will - what is probably most important is that you cannot know for certain what is real, imagined or simulated when you watch this film. While The Matrix trilogy gives you a pretty strong sense of the divide between the solid and simulacrous environments in which each scene takes place, Avalon makes that division increasingly fuzzy and suspect. This is mostly because no sequences are privileged with cinematic techniques that might traditionally be associated with filmic realism - in that sense, I suppose, we're back to an animation-style aesthetic again.

So, let's assume that you're familiar with ideas of virtual reality, and that old science fiction chestnut that said virtual reality turns out to be more seductive, sensual and downright exciting than the glum, organic place where your skin and bones are situated. Avalon retraces these generic tropes, but it doesn't seem like an insider's view of the addictive rush of playing at being a superhero in an alternative reality: I feel as certain that Oshii is not a gamer as I am that Woody Allen doesn't know any East End crooks. I never got a sense of why these characters were so obsessed with a game that offers actual deathly danger as opposed to the fantasy of danger, which is surely the point of video games: we play them to avoid the incursions of unpleasant realities into our lives, not because we want to risk our necks every minute of our spare time. And, of course, with her lithe physique and classy mid-1960s Anna Karina style, Ash just doesn't look like someone who spends most of her time jacked into a games console. This piqued my suspicion that Oshii doesn't care about the actual impact of technology in society. He hasn't researched patterns of behaviour amongst people who spend a lot of time on the internet, and he hasn't extrapolated his future world from the current state of things simulacrous. He treats the concept of virtual reality as a philosophical metaphor, a means to question our own solipsistic interactions with the world around us.

I should add that I watched this on a Region 1 DVD, brought to me by the good people at Miramax. Now, it's OK that they've produced their own English language version. It's not even a problem that they've added a Blade Runner style voice-over to some of the quiet scenes to make it a bit easier to follow what's going on. It's not a problem, because I'll be switching over to the original Polish language track and turning on the English subtitles. Thanks for including both versions, Miramax, but would it have been too much trouble to offer English subtitles that don't include the voice-over narration sequences?! That way, I won't have to have inaninities like "Is this what they call reality?" popping up on my screen every time there's a gap in the dialogue. It may not be entirely Miramax's fault also, but let's blame them anyway, that despite being made almost three years earlier, it didn't get a release until 2002, meaning that it seemed to trail like an imitative latecomer behind The Matrix, Dark City, Existensz in a chain of popular movies about manufactured realities usurping, er... real ones. This is unfortunate, because it's certainly an interesting film that haunts you in a way that films you can't quite figure out often do. It's a goal-orientated quest narrative in which a tightly-clad heroine seeks to reach a plateau of gaming achievement through skilful, choreographed violence, and in that sense it is quite conventional. It lingers in the mind because of the unnerving doubt that that goal might just be a fleeting, futile or vapourous one: you're never sure what is at stake, what can be won, and any victory could be an empty one. This is the masterstroke of the movie, because it calls into question the value of the virtual reality that it might otherwise privilege, but at the same time it undercuts (deliberately) the potential for thrilling spectacle that its generic identity may have promised. So, will my students find it a provocative talking point, or will they hate me for not letting them watch The Matrix instead?

Review at Midnight Eye.