297 total views, 1 views today
White Plastic Sky 2023 Movie Review
The world in the near future: animals and plants no longer exist; the remaining people live under a plastic dome. The price of survival is high: every 50-year-old is planted with a seed that transforms them into a tree that provides oxygen and food for the community. Stefan, a young man, agrees with this system – until his wife Nóra decides to give up her life and have the seed planted voluntarily.
What sacrifices must individuals make to the community? Is life too short or unbearably long? Does the germ of a better future already lie within humans, or does it have to be planted there by machines? And what is the value of working for a new world in which one cannot participate? Moral philosophers and existentialism give Sarolta Szabó and Tibor Bánóczki ( Milk Teeth ) a whole catalog of profound questions, which their ephemeral vision of the end times rather puts off than fathoms.
Timeless and topical conflicts pass by in the futuristic fable like the post-apocalyptic landscape on the archetypal characters. The middle-aged Nóra ( Zsófia Szamosi , Állítsátok meg Terézanyut! ) and her husband Stefan ( Tamás Keresztes , Children of Glory ) live in the Budapest of the future under the eponymous dome, which is constructed like a gigantic oxygen tent in the middle of a pestilent wasteland without animals and plants. In order to continuously replenish the oxygen reserves, all humans are turned into trees by the age of fifty using genetically modified seeds.
After man has destroyed the natural balance, he pays dearly for its artificial replacement. Is the symbol-heavy metamorphosis that Nóra voluntarily enters into earlier a salvation? Does the wasteland through which Stefan wanders with her in the hope of a reversal of her fate hold alternatives? The narrative possibilities seem endless, yet the directing duo never venture from the simplest, most conventional of plot paths. What lies along the way is more exciting than the destination.
More fascinating than the plot of Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó’s feature film debuts is its animated cosmos. Science fiction tropes merge with motifs from fairy tales and literature to create a story somewhere between tragic romance, road movie and philosophical fantasy. Simple drawings dress scientifically based fiction, mythical allegories and universal symbolism in spherical shapes and colors. Despite narrative weaknesses and schematic characters, the atmosphere of thoughtful melancholy draws the audience into a futuristic fairy tale whose peculiar appeal lies in the untold.