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Daft Punk's Electroma (2006)

Director: Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Thomas Bangalter

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From Time Out London

If the wise-cracking, bone-crunching action of ‘Transformers’ is at one end of the robot movie continuum, ‘Daft Punk’s Electroma’ is right down the other. This flagrantly arty anatomy of an AI existential crisis was conceived and directed by the French techno-pop duo and, although neither they nor, more surprisingly, their songs appear in it, the film’s glinting melancholy and precision-tooled absurdities seem consistent with their music. The band’s familiar visor-clad mechanical personae are cast here as road-movie wanderers, pitching up at a California desert town in their vintage Ferrari and scandalising the locals – all robots too – with a shameless desire to be human, expressed through the laboriously-applied and none too convincing latex face masks in which they parade down the street. Banished and dejected, the duo strike out into the desert… A self-consciously formalist exercise nodding at the likes of ‘2001’, ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Gerry’, ‘Electroma’ is a gorgeously photographed trip whose careful soundtrack – from Mayfield and Eno to Haydn and Chopin – contributes to a surprisingly clear emotional narrative given the lack of dialogue and, indeed, human faces. Perhaps best viewed at the end of a long night, though.

Author: Ben Walters

Time Out London Issue 1928: August 1-7 2007

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