TIFF Report: RENAISSANCE Review

It is the future and the Paris of 2054 retains the Eiffel tower, but everything else is low tech slums or ultrahigh technology sprawl. A company called Avalon promises, via animated billboards hundreds of feet tall, beauty and youth for all of your days. There is a hiccup in furthering their youth technology however. A key genetic scientist, a young protégé named Illona, is kidnapped putting Avalons latest genetic research on hold. Enter tough as nails police detective Karas, an unorthodox loose cannon who gets quick results even if he has to muscle his way through any bureaucratic red tape. The only lead to her disappearance is her last contact with her older sister, who also works at Avalon as a file clerk, but this final meeting wasn’t at the office, but a seedy techno club, during the negotiations for mysterious lab notebook with the Parisian crime syndicate. Thus Karas begins to follow the clues back through some fantastic locales including open vistas made of glass at the mid level of the city above the transit system, elevated natural forests in the middle of the city, a forest of steel girders everywhere else. Thugs in light bending suits with pulse rifles and night vision are constantly in pursuit, and the CEO of Avalon as well as the senior police officers are pulling Karas in multiple directions. To top it off, Illona’s sexy older sister has a dangerous air about her that screams she is not to be trusted.

A good noir exposes how good people are turned bad by crushing cynicism and poor choices in life. A good noir is about the complicated human emotions revealed as the narrative pushes forward. Renaissance goes through the motions, but generates little emotion, despite a game voice cast. The main issue is that nearly all of the dialogue is plot exposition; the characters never get a chance to breathe or react to one another in a human way. Karas is fatally flawed because the man is pretty much a forward moving robot, he has no vulnerable inner core. Think of what Humphrey Bogart brought to his hard boiled character. For a more recent example, think of even what Harrison Ford brought to Rick Deckard. Even Robert Rodriquez’s Sin City had all three of its male protagonists be softies under the hard exteriors. I am not trying to say that Renaissance should have been confined to the tropes of the genre, but if it was going to step out of the box, it should have gone somewhere, instead of standing on the lid.

The closest things come is the relationship between Illona and her ancient captor, but the film opts instead to follow her sister and Karas, who generate little heat for one another, around the admittedly fully realized city. The film then serves more as a technical demonstration, a way for the massive collection of animators to test what they can do with this artistic medium. If the talented technical team can only turn out one of these features every seven years or so, more emphasis is going to have to be put on the script next time around to make the effort less in vain. All that being said, watch the film to bask in the visuals, they are some of the most sumptuous monochrome sights that cinema has to offer.