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Director: Mamoru Oshii
Screenplay: Kazunori Itō
Cast: Małgorzata Foremniak as
Ash, Władysław Kowalski as Game Master, Jerzy Gudejko as Murphy, Dariusz
Biskupski as Bishop, Bartek Świderski as Stunner, Katarzyna Bargielowska as the
Receptionist, Alicja Sapryk as Jill, Michał Breitenwald as Murphy of Nine
Sisters, Zuzanna Kasz as the Ghost
Viewed in Polish with English
Subtitles
Synopsis: In futuristic Poland, Ash (Małgorzata Foremniak) is a successful player of an illegal virtual
reality game named Avalon. Her awareness of someone who has been watching her
from afar within the game, who cannot be identified, leads her to the search
for the Seven Sisters and a secret level of Avalon only accessed by a literal
ghost in the game.
Mamoru Oshii's career trajectory is fascinating. On one hand, he's
known for the likes of Ghost in the
Shell (1995) and works like the first two Patlabor theatrical films. For most of his career however, with the
exception of starting with the likes of the Urusei Yatsura franchise, he's always been an experimental director
who yet managed one major success, one that broke into the mainstream and
altered pop culture as a result, and has thankfully had the ability to be constantly
in work even if his post-2000s work is mainly difficult to find and divisive
even for Oshii fans. Beyond this, he
was always this experimental director even at the beginning, one of his
contributions to Urusei Yatsura the
feature film Beautiful Dreamer (1984),
a experimental rumination on reality, or Angel's
Egg (1985), exploring his own lapsed religious faith by way of Yoshitaka Amano's gorgeous art. He was
always "difficult", even in Ghost
in the Shell with its turns into philosophy in the middle of action scenes,
especially the divisive 2004 sequel. He's also made a lot of live action work
since 1987's The Red Spectacles.
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With this in mind, Avalon's an interesting one-off for Oshii as its a Japanese production but set and co-produced with Poland, a curious choice that yet works to Avalon's favour. The spectre of Communist Europe is felt large in the mostly sepia tone and futuristic drudgery of this world, lost in time and with Avalon the whole point of life for many in response to this, an illegal game where many devote their time and can be able to afford luxuries with the pay from, in spite of posters on the walls proclaiming it should stop. The VR game itself is a constant war zone which exists in ruins and isolated industrial environments, evoking the Cold War era but also World War II. Also, it should be kept in mind that Mamoru Oshii has always been influenced by Western culture - as a man who has packed so much philosophy in his world, he references Western culture as much as Japanese culture so it's not surprising he'd eventually make one film outside his homeland once. Avalon the film is entirely about the search for the titular "Avalon" as well, the afterlife realm for heroes found in Arthurian legend, at one point in his trademark exposition dialogue linking it to another similar idea in Norse mythology too, in this futuristic world the closest thing a virtual reality game which allows Oshii to play with the notion of our perception of what reality truly is whilst offering a world for a player to find those lost in a form of afterlife.
If Avalon has a message, it is still a very relevant take on both the
subjectivity of reality, as Ash ultimately ends up in an experimental stage
where the film manages to pull a rug under another rug it pulled at the start
of the segment, a rarity it manages to make work, and also the increasing sense
as video games and virtual reality become more precedent in terms of their
relation to reality and our lives, where one can make a career out of it and
feels more true life than ours out of it. The decision to depict it through an
antiquated, post-Cold War aesthetic absolutely helps avoid technical obsoletion
in the themes, the computers here inherently old back in 2001, and the world in
and out the Avalon game is barring flashes of colour in sepia.
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| From https://thefunambulistdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/avalon8.jpg |
As with all Oshii works, unless we're talking about the reoccurring Bassett hounds in his work (an animal lover by all accounts), all his films are precise in their references and symbolism. Arguably, Avalon is one of his simpler stories to understand, one that would reward upon repeat viewings but can be absorbed on the first viewing in story and in terms of the spectacle. The film, deliberately artificial in its CGI, dating with grace due to this factor, is matched by its sense of the grandiose, emphasised further by Kenji Kawai's score or the use of classical music especially in the most emotionally powerful moment, an entire performance of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra intercut between an important dramatic incidents in the plot. Whilst known as a cerebral director to a fault for some viewers, Mamoru Oshii was always concerned with human drama and happy to blend it with action, and in this world this is implicit throughout.
This is as well with the danger
of the virtual world being unable to be taken seriously. If videogames have a
distance to them, then one could never be able to take any threat seriously or
any drama involved with it without any sense of absurdity. Here the threat is
there, especially when a giant monolithic moving fortress appears at one
moment; the drama is here too, Ash part of an undefeated group who collapsed
due a moment of failure, or how one member with her in that group has been left
comatose in a hospital, the game of Avalon and VR in this world with danger to
its use. Whilst it may sound ridiculous to have this type of seriousness to
games, Oshii sees games as being
worthy of elaborate existentialism, as with even his more light hearted
material of yore. And Avalon
ultimately succeeds, enough that I wish the film was better known. Unfortunately,
Oshii's availability especially from
the 2000s, and his career in general, in terms of filmography, is still an
issue. A shame especially as Avalon
proves worthy of re-evaluation as with a lot of his career.
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