1 (2009)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 31 minutes, rated 6.0 by 519 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy (sorta); Species: phenomenology
DNA: Magyar.
Verdict: intriguing.
Tagline: Why the pear? Good question, Einstein.
Our story begins with a dowager purchasing a book which her obliging chauffeur will later read to her on this dark and rainy night. Bear that in mind.
This emporium specialises in antiquarian and rare books wherein, as it is being closed, another customer appears from the interstices of the shelves. Oh, well, a customer is a customer. He asks for an odd and unusual book. To expedite matters at this witching hour, the proprietor takes this enigmatic individual to the back room to search for the tome, where they find that every book there has been replaced by large white book called 1 (perhaps from the white library at MONA). What’s more, when, in confusion, they return to the front of the shop 1 has also replaced every book there, too. The customer seems bemused by this substitution but the owner is enraged, blaming the faithful manager, the mute janitor, the customer, and Hillary. He demands Hunter’s lap top be seized.
The flying squad from the Reality Defence Institute arrives to check this anomaly in the space-time continuum, lead by a detective whose harrowed face makes Harry Dean Stanton look like a fresh-faced teen. Harrow chain smokes and yells at his subordinates because he suspects this affair is the work of the prodigious Pole Stanislav Lem! Bingo! Juan Luis Borges has an alibi.
1 is a summation of one single minute as experienced by all 5 billion humans, reduced to statistical data, e.g., in the global minute there were 37,000 electrocutions – several of which are shown, including one no man wants to see. There is data on the number of rapes, which we also glimpse. And so on.
The white book is part talisman and part samizdat. It must be suppressed least its tabular data causes confusion and panic. Quite why incomprehensible spreadsheets would do that remains itself a mystery. Soon the newshound are howling. Knowing nothing does not stop them from baying and braying. Hmm.
Soon 1 is everywhere. Journalists go ballistic, as usual.
In an effort to contain the fallout, Harrow whisks all the witnesses away to seclusion in an insane asylum for psychological evaluation. (Catch the sledgehammer metaphor as it goes by.) Incarcerated, they deteriorate and sleep. The transformation of the proprietor, the manager, the janitor, and the customer is a tribute to the makeup and the actors.
In sleep these confined witnesses communicate and plot. Meanwhile, Harrow grows ever more erratic, and soon is replaced by an ambitious underling, and himself confined, as a witness, with the others and he, too, deteriorates, though further deterioration did not seem possible in his case, it occurs. Soon he joins the others in somnolent hijinks. Yes, I thought of Sleep Dealer (2007) from Mexico, too.
Wait! Perhaps this all is the story the chauffeur is reading to madame. Life is but dream, right Neo?
Like most, but not all, of Lem’s stories it is circular with neither development nor resolution. All trip and no arrival but at least the trip is not Tarkovsky-length. Nor does it smack of the contempt for the audience that Tarko specialised in for it does try to explain itself but just does not do it very well.
As with many films from the red and once-red world much of the incidental paraphernalia is in English as a visual disclaimer, e.g., the titles on the spines of the books, the posters on the wall in the asylum, the street signs to suggest this strange tale is Western, and in no way applies to or reflects on the Red, now Pink, World.
Wellington Paranormal it is not. The gravitas is heavy. Very.
For those who must know the only Hungarian I learned in our truncated stay in Budapest was goulash, although we did not eat any.