It would be nice to say that Connor Storrie burns up the screen in “April Appropriating Harrison Ford’s frown from “Blade Runner,” among a few other elements taken from that sci-fi classic into this sci-fi film, Storrie brilliantly embodies a dark and harrowing story of cloning and human trafficking in a bleak dystopian future, but he doesn’t have much to work with here – and he mostly projects the aura of a working actor dutifully waiting for something better to come along. What has been done, therefore work accomplished. But we can hardly blame “April
However, only Storrie’s most ardently committed new fans will venture out to see this: It’s not an embarrassing blemish on his resume, but it will be forgotten long before the queer hockey phenomenon’s second season premieres. For writer-director Michel K. Parandi, making his feature film debut, “April But his screenplay, co-written with his regular collaborator Jack Coulter, is less impressive, piecing together scraps of stories from other, better films to rather murky and uninvolving effect. It occupies a genre space similar to that of the recent “Hot Spot,” Agnieszka Smoczynska’s comparatively disjointed and patched-up vision of a compromised human identity in a mid-term future; this film was a dud, but a measure of its imaginative eccentricity would still be welcome here.
The year isn’t specified, but the tired, brutalist apartment buildings on Bucharest’s outskirts still stand: Although it also doesn’t specify the location, “April The strange high-tech drone adds a futuristic touch to the film’s exterior views, but the new technologies that define the narrative aren’t of the shiny Brave New World variety: People are cloned in dirty, shady ways, while memories and dreams can be captured and uploaded to surprisingly retro data devices.
In this grim waking nightmare, twins Baxter (Storrie) and April (German actress Lilly Krug) barely eke out a living doing a variety of sketchy jobs, some more criminal than others. He deals in organs on the black market, while she has a special gift for dreaming: in an age, apparently, when no one has sleeping visions anymore, hers are enviably lucid and vivid, to a marketable degree. Having April sell her dreams to others who want to experience her sensations isn’t a new idea – paginate “Strange Days” – but it’s one of the most fertile here, and goes sadly untapped as the film continues to probe a single dark reality.
We’re more concerned with Baxter, whose underworld connections eventually clash with local gangster Klein (Serban Pavlu), and the twins’ combined savings aren’t enough to mitigate the dire consequences. Soon, April disappears and the desperate search for Baxter begins. The story continues when the story suddenly shifts forward five years: the world is much the same, but her hair is briefly longer, while April has apparently been cloned into a number of identitarian sex workers. The big existential question of the film is whether his brother can locate his soul in one of them, or somehow implant it via his recorded memories – but the characters themselves aren’t drawn with enough warmth or personality for us to really care either way.
Storrie went through it all with a clenched jaw and a steely gaze, but the world of the film never fully comes to life. Nathan Haugaard’s brilliant widescreen lens and Oana Novicov’s distressed production design ensure that the film looks quite good, but “April Parandi’s film ends up depicting a dystopia that’s more boring than devastating — although perhaps that’s the future we should really fear.
Gn entert
