One of the joys of my film fan life is discovering a director – beginner or not – about whom I knew nothing until now and watching a film made by him (or her) that surprises with its quality and / or originality. This is what happened to me watching ‘Sophia Antipolis‘,Virgil Vernier‘s 2018 film. It is the second feature film of this director who, as far as I understand, is not very interested in the definitions the borders between documentary and fiction genres or between social and experimental films. I believe that he does the right thing, because if he continues on this path, there are good chances that his coming movies will not be included in other genres than that of ‘Virgil Vernier‘s films’.
The title of the film seems somehow banat, but is actually very appropriate, because the subject and the main hero of the film is the city of Sophia Antipolis. I had the chance to visit this place. Second maybe to the La Defense district of Paris, Sophia Antipolis is the least French place in France – a hi-tech area located on the hills near Antibes and Cannes with ‘corporate’ style buildings where electronics, IT or bio-technology companies are based, plus a few hotels for business travellers, and villas of the privileged few who can afford to live here. In other words, a piece of Silicon Valley transplanted on the French Riviera. This is the setting in which the film’s heroes evolve. However, they are not the happy citizens of the world of the future but ordinary people, facing the same social problems and existential illnesses as all the other inhabitants of France: disoriented young girls just out of adolescence, lonely women brought here from others parts of the world, people unable to cope with the uncertainties of life seeking meaning and solutions in esoteric spiritualism, ‘veteran’ immigrants working in the security services and involved with gangs that terrorise more recent immigrants. There is also a vague crime story related to the discovery of the charred corpse of a young woman whose name is also Sophia, but the pursuit of the enigma and its solution were not at all in the focus of the script writer and director. The film is conceived as a succession of documentary-style sequences, some linked by the presence of a shared character, others completely separate.
The effect of documentary drama is accentuated by the use of unprofessional but excellently chosen actors, who seem to live on screen episodes from their own lives. There is no musical soundtrack, we only hear the dialogues between the characters and the off-screen commentary that is used in some places. However, some of the sequences manage to suggest very expressively, only through visual means, the internal tensions and external pressures to which the characters are subjected, the loneliness and the difficulties in communication that most of them suffer from. Each of these scenes could be a short film in its own right, a sketch of a character, a sequence of life. Together they form a complex and interesting mosaic, but at the same time they outline a pessimistic and desperate image of loneliness, contradictions and violence in a place with the appearance of paradise.