Bugonia

Everyman

Who decided that all films should now have inter-titles and chapter headings? In the olden days, you would sometimes get a “Twenty years later” caption for the benefit of the slow kids: but generally setting or passage of time was indicated internally, by the flow of the story. At best, you put an establishing shot of the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal on the screen to signal that the action had shifted to Paris or India. Frankenstein felt the need to tell us that we were listening to “Victor’s Story” after Victor started talking, and “The Creature’s Story” when the creature took over. Bugonia keeps telling us that it is “Three Days Before the Lunar Eclipse” and “Two Days Before the Lunar Eclipse”: the Luna Eclipse having been established as a significant turning point in the story. Is it that films are so damn long that you have to keep assuring the audience that we are getting closer and closer to the finishing line? The one thing I dislike about Kindle is that I can't find the end of the chapter and feel it in my finger how much I have left to read. Or perhaps the normal way of consuming a story is now via an episodic Netflix binge and the visual way-markers are simply mirroring the dominant form? Or is it a matter of structure: if you have a meandering narrative which is going to eventually come to a definite end point, perhaps it is a good idea to give the reader a map? Shakespeare sometimes started his plays by saying “This is going to take about an hour and a half, and at the end, both lovers will commit suicide. Having designed a really cool, alien looking font for the opening credits, it would be a shame not to use it more than once. The film has a cold-open and, puts the title on the screen after it has been running for ten or fifteen minutes. Although of course what the really cool directors do is not put up the title card until the very end. Thunderbolts actually made that a plot-point. I remember the days when the names of the best-boy and Mr Moore’s wig-consultant were still scrolling over Shirley Bassey while the latecomers were shuffling back to their seats with their choc-ices. Now that information is disseminated in the limbo between the ending and the post-cred teaser. Which I suppose is the modern equivalent of "Bond Will Return In..."

So: Bugonia is a very odd film. It’s by Yorgos Lanthimos, who directed Poor Things, which I liked a lot, and also Kinds of Kindness, which I was totally baffled by. Bugonia is not as spectacular as Poor Things, but it's not as baffling as Kinds of Kindness. Or, if it is, I did at least feel that I was supposed to be baffled, where in Kinds of Kindness I just felt that I had lost the point. It is adapted, freely, I should imagine, from a Korean film called Save The Green Planet. It’s possibly a bit like The Sixth Sense, in that once you know there is a big twist, you can probably guess what the big twist is, although unlike The Sixth Sense, having guessed the twist doesn't render the movie pointless.

So: there are these two young guys, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis). They have something of an air of Wayne and Garth about them, and something of Neo and possibly even Norman Bates as well. I also kept thinking, slightly irrelevantly, of Caine and Abel in Sandman. 

Teddy keeps bees and works in an Amazon packing warehouse. He is fascinated by bee-society and concerned that bees are going to become extinct. It sometimes so-happens that a hive just collapses spontaneously. He has formed the opinion, by "doing the research" on the internet, that a pharmaceutical company called Auxolith is responsible for killing the bees, and (although he doesn’t misquote Einstien directly) that human civilisation would not long survive if the bees became extinct. He has also formed the opinion that the CEO of Auxolith, Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone, of course) is a space-alien, and that she is deliberately destroying the bees as part of an attack on the human race. As you do.

This would all be fairly harmless, if not for the fact that Teddy declares himself to be a one-man earth defence-force, and hatches a complicated plot to kidnap Michelle and force her to arrange an audience with the alien emperor.

The film comes down to a psychological three-hander, with Michelle and Teddy engaged in psychological cat-and-mouse. She threatens him with the likely consequences of kidnapping a famous business CEO; she tries to win his confidence; she drifts into what seems to be a Stockholm syndrome bonding with him. Teddy's ruthless bullying of Don, who is sceptical but not very bright, is almost as disturbing as his abuse of Michelle. He shaves her head (which seems to be done for real, on camera) because aliens communicate with their hair; he smothers her in antihistamine cream, for some reason which I forget but which makes perfect sense to him; and he ends up torturing her with electric shocks. At times it could be a kind of an arms length S/M game in which the victim is (possibly) in control. But he makes his brother "chemically castrate" himself, so the aliens can't use their sexuality against them. 

Teddy is not a stereotyped tin-foil-hat nerd; or even a classically toxic male. His language, about the elites and the hegemonies and the environment and social media has a kind of logic to it; certainly you can see why it appeals to him given his bleak and empty life. It gradually emerged that his mother is comatose in hospital as a result of a botched drug test by Michelle's company; and that he was, in unspecified ways, abused as a child by a baby-sitter (Stavros Halkias) who is now the local sheriff. The police officer is awkwardly sorry for what happened, and Teddy seems more embarrassed by it than anything else. But this psychological baggage may partly explain Teddy's obsessional theories.

And then, in the last thirty minutes, it all turns very weird indeed.

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