Like recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has shifted from a personalized viewing window to a virtual version. Despite the change, we will continue to review the most interesting experiences we find, from indie films to VR experiments.
The pink cloud begins with a message that underscores the disturbing ridiculousness of where we are: it’s a movie about people trapped in an infinite quarantine because of a deadly threat outside their doors. It is also an early prescription, as it was written in 2017 and filmed in 2019. It has no purposeful links with the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is impossible not to draw parallels between The pink cloud and our current reality.
The movie takes place in a Brazilian city where a mysterious pink gaseous cloud hovers over residents and kills people when they are outside for more than ten seconds, trapping them in which building they have been hiding for years. That said, The pink cloud is less about the mortality of their situation and more about the devastating monotony that follows. Quarantine is seen through a relationship between Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça), a one-night stand that changes in a slightly longer term if they are forced to move in together. Over the course of the next few years, Giovana and Yago go on to become a couple, having a child, divorcing without leaving the apartment, virtually going out, and reuniting.
These are the quiet moments that are there The pink clouds most powerful. FaceTime calls get boring, eating out the same thing every day, and the only other person in people’s lives starts scratching at every nerve. We are not meant to stop physical contact with the rest of the world suddenly, and the disastrous consequences of being cut off from everyone and everyone are silently devastating. Life seems to suddenly accelerate and slow down at the same time. Giovana is going to go from being stubborn against children to having one, waiting for the deadly cloud to disappear as she goes into household routines because there is no other way to live.
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At the heart of it is the internal struggle between the eternal hope that things will get better and the sinking realization that there is no end in sight. People switch careers to find something they can do at home, learn new skills, watch too much TV, play too many games, find virtual boyfriends and girlfriends and go home to school. Children are born in the void and know nothing of the outside world except what they can see from their windows. Adults who remember life before the cloud dream of returning to the world they once knew while working to make their new living conditions as good as possible.
The pink cloud is supposed to be a science fiction story, a dystopian world that silently asks, ‘How would you handle that?’ If I watched the movie in 2021, the answer is obvious: I do not have to wonder how I would manage it, I know exactly how I did it to not be able to see family members or certain friends for almost a year not. But even with the “fiction” aspect of The pink cloudThe science fiction has been removed, and the film is still the hardest part of Giovana and Yago’s ordeal, one I’m still struggling with and I’m probably millions of other people too.
When does it all end? How much optimism can someone have that eventually the pandemic – the pink cloud – will just disappear and life will return to normal? What even becomes normal mean? At a time when I was turning to movies to try to escape or find answers to problems I had no control over, The pink cloud is a reminder of our daily lives for the past approximately 300 days, and it provides no immediate answer.
Seems, The pink cloud was exactly the movie I needed. I devoured to watch this couple struggle with the same internal struggle of hope and acceptance, desires and satiety, good memories of the past and preparation for what comes next. The pink cloud, a film written about 1100 days before the pandemic, has ironically become a way to process so much of what happened in 2020.