Aniara

Aniara is a Greek word that means "sadness" or "despair".  The title aptly describes an exceptionally dispiriting science fiction film directed by Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja that adapts for the screen a Nobel-prize winning 103 canto long "space epos" written in the mid-1950's by the Swedish poet, Harry Martinson.  The film is literally a one-way trip to oblivion and, true to its name, induces a sort of helpless depression in its viewers -- when I saw the film at the Lagoon Cinema in Minneapolis, the small audience filed out of the auditorium in gloomy silence.  It was a windy night and the rain-wet streets seemed darker and more menacing than they had been before I came to the theater.  The most popular critical take on the film is that it is like Star Trek as directed by Ingmar Bergman -- a morose plunge in Scandinavian angst and darkness.  In fact, Bergman's films often offer some glimmer of hope and, at their greatest, provide the complex pleasures of tragedy.  Aniara seems more akin to Lars von Trier's horribly distressing Melancholia, also apocalyptic Science Fiction in which the subjective state of clinical depression becomes an objective correlative (or is it vice-versa) for the end of the earth when the moon draws near and smashes into our planet.  After that film, also uniquely dispiriting, most of the audience were speechless with misery although some people were so distressed they felt that they had to discuss the picture with complete strangers and seek reassurance that it was, in fact, a bad movie.  (Melancholia, like Aniara, is not a bad movie -- but I don't know that I can recommend these deep dives in stygian gloom to anyone.) 

In Aniara, about 400 passengers embark on a three-week voyage to Mars.  The space ship is like a casino-hotel connected to several nice shopping malls.  It has plenty of haute cuisine restaurants, shops, a big swimming pool, and something called Mimara, a virtual reality emporium where people can come to experience idyllic pastoral scenes as a respite from the austere bunk rooms and the shopping malls.  The space-ship carries refugees from a world that climate change has rendered infernal -- many of the people seem to have suffered severe, even disfiguring facial burns, although this aspect of their appearance is never overtly mentioned.  Some nuts and bolts of space debris are floating around and one of them knocks the space-craft off course.  The space-craft's pilot tells the frightened passengers that the trip may last as long as two years -- the ship needs to loop around the gravity of another planet to get back on course.  But the pilot knows that the ship is now heading into the oblivion of outer space and that it will never reach Mars or anywhere else for that matter.  At first, the people on the vessel try to make the best of their plight -- after all, they expect to be home in a few years.  The ship has algae in huge tanks that photosynthesize to produce oxygen and the algae is also edible -- the steaks and shrimp in the expensive restaurants run out in about two months.  After a few years, the people on the space-ship start to go mad.  They invent strange religious cults.  There situation becomes more desperate when the Mimara virtual reality machine goes crazy itself and starts broadcasting images of fire and death and destruction.  The virtual reality system is closed although its empty room -- people experienced the VR by lying face-down on the carpeted floor -- becomes a sort of shrine, and later a tabernacle for sexual orgies.  Things don't improve.  About five years into the trip to nowhere, a space craft is spotted.  The people on the vessel think  that this has been sent to provide nuclear fuel to save them.  For months, the space craft's crew work to develop devices to seize the long, narrow vessel floating in space -- it's called "the spear".  This object is several football fields long, but when it is captured, it proves to be an enigmatic artifact from some alien civilization, completely impermeable and meaningless.  Lots of people commit suicide.  By the 23rd year, there are only a dozen survivors, huddled together in the empty Mimara chamber -- the shops have been looted and the corridors are filled with garbage and corpses.  After about 5.9 million years, the space craft, now named "The Sarcophagus", reaches the Lyra constellation where it flies by a blue planet with clouds and continents.  A shot inside the sarcophagus shows that the empty tomb is weightless inside -- dust floats around in the air and we see a human mandible slowly spin by.  Thus, the film ends.

The story is told through the point of view of a female scientist called Mima, apparently, the inventor of the VR system.  After about eight or nine years, she invents a way to produce holographic images so that the survivors in the ship can look out the window to see lush Scandinavian forests and meadows with waterfalls -- whether this cheers anyone up or just contributes to their despair is unclear.  In the tenth year of the voyage, called "Jubilee", the pilot gives Mima a medal to celebrate her accomplishment in creating the holographic system.  His wrists are bloody and bandaged from a suicide attempt.  Mima goes to her bedroom, now filled with dirty clothing, throws the medallion aside, and sprawls face-down on the bed, too miserable to even cry.  Earlier she had a love affair with a female pilot named Isagel -- Isagel had sex with one of the men on the ship and gave birth to a baby.  But Isagel kills herself at the three-quarter point in the film and drowns the baby as well.  All of this is more or less unbearable -- and I've left out many, many other deaths that the film scrupulously, and clinically, documents. 

The movie is terrifically claustrophobic.  For the most part, it is shot in extreme close-ups.  Some of the close-ups are so tight that the images seem extracted from an experimental film by Stan Brakhage -- we see an eyelash, a milky eye, skin pocked with pores like craters.  A disconcerting element is the occasional presence of facially disfigured burn victims in the movie -- at least several of these people seem to be real burn victims.  If they were Klingons or some sort of odd alien life form, their ugliness would startle, perhaps, but not disturb -- but they are people who are, in fact, mutilated and their presence in the movie is terrible reminder of the sort of horrible conditions prevailing on earth.  I suppose the film is allegorical, a bit like von Trier's Melancholia.  We are destroying our space vessel by overheating it with carbon emissions -- the earth is like the space-ship in the movie, a craft on a one-way trip to nowhere.  And, indeed, the film raises this question:  aren't all of us trapped on this planet and, therefore, doomed by what we have done to it?  Life is hopeless -- only the dead are fortunate.  Isagel kills her baby because as she says:  "I am giving birth in a prison and my baby will be a prisoner.  We are all living in a sarcophagus."  But doesn't this  existential formula apply to all of us?