The existential questions guiding “2073,” Asif Kapadia’s audacious exercise in futurism, are broad and familiar ones. How did we get here? What does our future look like? How can we change our current course toward a brighter one?
This is hardly the first time anxieties about our collective future have been addressed in a documentary film. Yet Kapadia, who won an Oscar for the documentary “Amy,” about the singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, in 2015, makes the uncommon decision to not only investigate the years ahead, but to also visualize them in science-fiction sequences.
The narrative scenes center on Ghost (Samantha Morton), a dissident living off the grid in San Francisco in the year 2073. In a voice-over, Ghost explains that there was a widespread apocalyptic event that upended American life decades earlier. She is now nonverbal and sheltering in the bowels of an abandoned shopping mall, where she seeks refuge from surveillance drones, poor air quality and a brutal authoritarian regime.
Big Tech, climate catastrophe, autocracy — these are the hallmarks of Kapadia’s vision of the future, and they each receive an origin story of sorts in the nonfiction portions of his film. Montages of archival footage are paired with expert commentary on how the issues are correlated, and the bleak future they presage. Kapadia also profiles a handful of female journalists, who, alongside the film’s array of villains, emerge as spirited heroes offering an iota of hope to counter the feeling of impending doom.
The cuts back to Ghost often feel abrupt, given her limited plotline. We observe her scavenging under polluted skies and dodging patrol officers who are hunting for dissidents. At one point, an android with puppy dog eyes is introduced, only to vanish a couple of scenes later. Much of Ghost’s society is rendered with visual effects, but Kapadia occasionally folds in actual news footage of migrants or families living in poverty, using the contemporary images as episodes from a ruined future.
This blurring of real life and dystopia is fascinating, especially in a film that tends to draw a hard line between its two segments: nonfiction, based on interviews, and science fiction, stacked with genre tropes. Kapadia is a gifted storyteller in both modes, yet one wishes for a version of “2073” in which the veil between them was more permeable. As the film makes clear, they may soon be one and the same.
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