Review of Eden Log (2007) by Roy C — 31 May 2010

"Eden Log" is the story of an amnesiac character who wakes up in a pool of mud somewhere down below, and gradually discovers, through the sketchy accounts of the battered computer stations of the underground city he appears to be in, the horrible demise of a utopian vision gone awry.

This cheap French movie has been compared to Luc Besson's black and white, post-apocalyptic film, "Le Dernier Combat", which used to be one of my favorite films in the eighties, and to Shinya Tsukamoto's "Tetsuo", of which I have been able to watch only about five minutes, finding its hyperkinetic and psychotic visual style much too aggressive and dangerous for my own sanity. Predictably, I liked the "Dernier Combat" moments of the film, and tended to look elsewhere during the "Tetsuo" ones, when the stroboscopic effects and deliberately incoherent camera waving made the film just too painful too watch.

Before I bought my secondhand DVD, I didn't even know that the film has been written by Pierre Bordage, the author of about twenty science-fiction and fantasy novels (none of which I have read, though I was curious at one point about his "Enjomineur" trilogy), and of the screenplays for two other French scifi films, the CGI animated "Kaena" (which I have postponed seeing because of its anti-religious message) and "Dante 01", which has received even worse reviews than "Eden Log", although I might give it a chance some day.

"Eden Log" is such an immersive film that it almost has the feel of a video game (it probably might well have ended up as one.) You know what the character knows; when he is trapped in a net, you (or rather the cameraman) get trapped in the net with him; and when he passes out, the picture fades to black. These are only some of the tricks Vestiel uses to involve you in the story. His storytelling is also more intuitive and visceral than logical. Shot in mostly in black and white with a handheld camera in backlit sewers and other claustrophobic spaces, the film is more an experience than a drama, occasionally bordering on a hippy happening of the 1960s, with its bearded, mud-caked figures going through bizarre grimaces and contortions.

There is very little articulate speech in the film, and what little there is is usually delivered by computer projections. For a while, you are even entitled to think that the main character is some sort of ape man, as you only hear him panting and growling. Added to that are the snarls of what can only be called the C.H.U.D.s (cannibal humanoid underground dwellers) that people the subterranean world, resulting in a very nightmarish auditory atmosphere.

The "message" of the film (if any) seems to be a mixture of anti-utopianism (the various classes of people - guardians, workers and technicians - are reminiscent of Plato), nihilism (with a John Carpenterian ending) and environmentalism - with the depiction of a technocratic world that seems to have overexploited a natural resource it mistakenly believed to be "infinite.".

I probably liked this film for very idiosyncratic reasons. For years, I have had dreams about exploring subterranean universes, and I've always liked decaying, post-urban environments. "Eden Log" also reminded me of the homegrown scifi I used to watch in my teens and twenties, and the more adventurous, experimental shorts that I had the energy to seek out in those days. Of course, with just a little less texture or conviction, "Eden Log" would have looked just like a cheap rehash of "Resident Evil". But it did manage to convince me that it was more than that.