The Upcoming
  • Culture
    • Art
    • Cinema & Tv
      • Movie reviews
      • Film festivals
      • Shows
    • Food & Drinks
      • News & Features
      • Restaurant & bar reviews
      • Interviews & Recipes
    • Literature
    • Music
      • Live music
    • Theatre
  • Fashion & Lifestyle
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
  • What’s On
    • Art exhibitions
    • Theatre shows
  • Tickets
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Interviews
  • Competitions
  • Special events
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

London Film Festival 2013

The Congress

London Film Festival 2013: The Congress | Review
5 October 2013
Nigel Booth
Avatar
Nigel Booth
5 October 2013

Thursday 10th October, 9.00pm – Vue West End, Screen 5
Friday 11th October, 6.10pm – Screen on the Green
Saturday 12th October, 3pm – Vue West End, Screen 5

Lewis Carroll’s canonical Alice in Wonderland is a rambling diaspora of causally unrelated madness. The Congress – Ari Folman’s hotly-anticipated follow up to 2008’s Waltz with Bashir – may not be intended for children but, like Alice in Wonderland, confuses free association with creativity.

Robin Wright plays herself: an out-of-work, unreliable actress. Slithery movie producer Jeff (Danny Huston) offers her one last contract: to digitise her image and splice it onto a computer generated avatar. 20 years later Wright’s contract is up for renewal; she travels to the animated city of Abrahama where a futuristic congress is happening. Here she discovers thousands of people who live their lives in this self-editing animated dream-reality, becoming caught up in it herself.

Loopy, incoherent and with all the restraint of a feral child in a sweet shop, The Congress is what happens when you let loose creativity without focus. Descriptive programme notes suggest that the more nonsensical sequences in the animated world are actually hallucinations. There is one glaring problem with this: it isn’t in the actual film. Hidden depths are laudable, but if the urtext is inscrutable without guidance then the story is flawed – and deeply so.

Unfortunately so is the dialogue. Stultifyingly po-faced lines such as: “There’s no more ego – thanks to chemistry we’ve been reborn” are commonplace. Even the animation is bland and characterless in comparison with the sumptuous Waltz with Bashir.

And yet there are positive elements in The Congress. The live action sections are well-acted and beautifully shot; Paul Giamatti is reliably superb as Wright’s son’s ELT doctor, while the animated caricatures of Tom Cruise, Grace Jones and even the apple-headed man from Magritte’s The Son of Man painting provide welcome comic relief. It is possible, even, that the entire film is a commentary on mental illness – Wright is unreliable, forgets things and loses track both of time and herself once in Abrahama. Could The Congress be a point of view account of an unhinged actress struggling with Alzheimer’s subsumed by technology she can’t understand? Possibly, but it’s a stretch.

The Congress is big on intention and, like Marmite, will divide audiences.  For lovers, its unbridled creativity is inspirational. For haters, the film is proof that when trying to be profound you mostly end up being precisely the opposite.

Nigel Booth

Follow our daily reports from the London Film Festival here.

For further information about the 57th London Film Festival visit here.

Watch the trailer for The Congress here:

Related Items

More in London Film Festival 2013

12 Years a Slave

Aoife O'Driscoll
Read More

The cast of Drinking Buddies chat on the red carpet at London Film Festival

Timothy Bano
Read More

Saving Mr Banks

Francesca Laidlaw
Read More

Blackwood

Nigel Booth
Read More

The Invisible Woman

Francesca Laidlaw
Read More

The Parrot and the Swan

Jack Whitfield
Read More

The Epic of Everest

Nigel Booth
Read More

Gone Too Far!

Aoife O'Driscoll
Read More

The Selfish Giant

★★★★★
Nigel Booth
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap
  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • Kaleo – Surface Sounds
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • London’s Michelin-starred restaurants open al fresco right now – and all those re-opening in May
    Food & Drinks
  • Weezer with the LA Philharmonic and YOLA at the Walt Disney Concert Hall Online
    ★★★★★
    Live music
  • The Motherhood Project: An interview with creator and curator Katherine Kotz
    Theatre
  • Ride or Die
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • Laddie: The Man Behind the Movies
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • The Last Photograph
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • Fear of Rain
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • House of Cardin
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • Chiswick Playhouse Recharged: An interview with producer Wayne Glover-Stuart
    Theatre
  • 50 Next unveils the new generation of food industry pioneers
    Food & Drinks
  • Arlo the Alligator Boy
    ★★★★★
    Movie review
  • London’s Michelin-starred restaurants open al fresco right now – and all those re-opening in May
    Food & Drinks
  • Campfire in Kings Cross: Two Tribes deliver everything you’ve been missing with a night of beer, BBQ and live music
    Food & Drinks
  • Live from the Barbican: Moses Boyd
    ★★★★★
    Live music
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

London Film Festival 2013: Becoming Traviata | Review
London Film Festival 2013: Bertolucci on Bertolucci | Review