Poor old Qohen Leth; he’s waiting for the answer, waiting for God to release him from his self-imposed torture via a telephone call. In the meantime, he is trying to crack nothing less than the code of the universe itself, the very meaning of life. If he manages it, will he discover that the universe will indeed die one day, imploding and becoming a singularity that it allegedly began from? This is the challenge given to Q and he feels he is getting closer to the answer. Yet he is working all hours and becoming increasingly frustrated and out-of-touch with reality and out of touch with himself; feverishly eschewing all physical pleasures in pursuit of life’s Big Question.
He learns much later that happiness can be self-made – his love interest, Bainsley is an endearingly fragile kindred spirit who helps free him– alas not in time for a bid for freedom with her. He refers to himself throughout the film as ‘we’ and indeed 'he' hits us with a seething mass of personality disorders cobbled together so that he may function as a machine.
Q is a number cruncher working at Corporation Mancom; a role handled with a deep sense of sensitivity for the character’s complexities by Christopher Waltz. The parallel with quantum physics is mirrored in his frustrated attempts to solve 3d equations regarding sub-atomic matter as he notes that the particles seemingly defy logic and they don’t behave as they 'should'. They collapse as they are built, sometimes one particle can change seemingly randomly – and that then triggers random changes for surrounding particles that cannot be anticipated.
Terry Gillingham is said to have written this as a tragedy and not a comedy and this makes sense given the main protagonist's Sisyphean struggle. By focusing only on the data he crunches, Q cannot see the beauty available to him through allowing his emotional senses more room to perceive the world around him. He feels empty inside whilst chasing a logical, mathematical outcome and all the while the universe is refusing to play ball, dancing around him until he is utterly tormented. In the meantime, he has an unwavering faith that a telephone call will save him. We learn later that the call he first received out of the blue, gave him a sense of something indefinable beyond his ordered world, shattering it. He had dropped the receiver thus severing the connection and he has been waiting in hope of a call back ever since. Bainsley reveals her feelings on this by noting it ‘might have just been a sales call!’. We can see a parallel with his response to the call with how we currently cannot always adequately describe that which gives us spiritual sustenance – it’s a feeling that does not easily translate into words and certainly does not easily fit into our logical, left-brained,existence.
In the meantime, the film is a visual feast, and a recognition of the frustration of feeling like a small cog in an increasingly mechanised world;the visits from Management and his son yielding only greater frustration in a splendidly Orwellian and Kafkaesque way. The sheer inventiveness of the way Management first appears is brilliant; a seemingly random incident of Q choking on an item of food at a party leads him to stumble into a room where Management is already waiting for him (how can this event have been precognitively known? This leads to the question of how real is the world that Q inhabits. We could be talking about hyperreality, and/or we could be talking about quantum physics and the notion of space and time not being linear as was once thought. Either way it doesn’t really matter – we could get as lost in pondering the details as Q has and in so doing, lose our enjoyment and sense of appreciation of the genius of the film).
Q is surrounded then by seeming hopelessness and no escape – a place where his every move is seemingly known before he makes it, yet, right at the end, an offhand comment by Management allows Q to finally free his mind – the fact that he was waiting his whole life for something spiritual to call him had meant he had utterly deferred allowing himself to live his life fully. In this, the film is also a comment on our own sometime quest for spirituality –how far do we go, and who do we trust – we are bombarded with religions which all lay claim to being the only one true path and we are awash with New Age spirituality which can dilute or distort powerful spiritual truths until we don’t know who to trust and believe anymore. Answers can be found – but if you don’t want to be an ascetic then embracing all of life is a very necessary step on the path. As in Brazil, the world surrounding the central character is a dystopian nightmare with more than a touch of the theatre of the absurd, yet this film seems to me to be the more grown-up version of the two, and less overtly reliant upon shocking imagery.
This film, for all its dystopian despair and existential hopelessness,is a film which has found the seat of the Soul and is enjoying teasing the lead character with the possibility of it. The solution of course, is simple –all Q has to do is open his heart and follow his joy, becoming more embodied as he begins to discover what holds meaning for him. And it is touching to see Q begin to drop his carefully constructed barriers, finally managing to drop the way of referring himself as ‘we’ altogether. And as he utters the word ‘I’, we see this endearing character finally allow some cracks of light into his heart.
The simple message of beauty buried within the film then is this; no matter the chaos you can find yourself in; the answer is to follow your own heart absolutely, take risks and plunge head-first into uncertainty. Once Q relaxes and goes with the flow, the heart of the Universe begins to reveal itself to him. (A parallel perhaps could be drawn here between a person zealously practicing meditation every day in the hope of becoming enlightened. For all their spiritual progression they ignore the world around them,and in clinging to the much-anticipated outcome rigidly, the very enlightenment they seek may continue to dance away elusively, like a leaf blowing in the wind.
Why I loved this film: it encapsulates the modern juxtaposition; trying to find your own soul whilst living in a world that is still in thrall to the Industrial Revolution; a huge machine cranked into action mingled with an underlying existential gnawing angst that underpinning all of existence there may be a God –but what if there isn’t? What is the meaning of it all? |
