Tonic and tangy, the beginning of Cloud accompanies the tribulations of a young couple. Against the advice of his partner, the man decides to leave his job to set off in the countryside. There, he plans to prosper more easily by setting up an online sales system of everything and anything that attracts the attention of Internet users.
Without warning, the film will go from a family chronicle to a black comedy on the excesses of e-commerce. This is only the first swerry of a story that plays a survivalist thriller, in horror film, in film transposition of a video game SHOOT ‘EM UPin metaphysical tale, in steroid fable, in gangster film, espionage …
Virtuoso, the narrative composition of the new feature film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa is in no way limited to this exercise of high dramatic and spectacular aerobatics. This malleability, this capacity of situations, their meaning, relations between beings (humans and objects) to reconfigure is its real issue.
Cloudunder its bizarre B standard, is a brilliant fiction for the functioning of capitalism in the digital age, including in its most delusional and deadliest modalities.
Intrigant, disturbing, jubilant, unpredictable while juggling with the known archs of multiple genres, the film deploys this palette. There is gradually the dizziness of a world where profit, derealization, violence and loss of landmarks describe the functioning of the contemporary world, in its brutality, its ridiculous, its immorality, its cynicism and its infantilism.
It is practically impossible to define how many films has made Kiyoshi Kurosawa since its beginnings over forty years ago. His career has a considerable number of feature films that left indoor and presented at the biggest festivals, including major works like Cure (1997), Kaïro
(2001), Jellyfish (2003), Tokyo Sonata (2008) or Towards the other bank (2015).
But it also includes a cloud of achievements with more uncertain status, by their production conditions, their durations, their modes of diffusion, the mixture of the genres there. This ranges from the achievements of DIY student on horrific and burlesque canvas to the film of a dazzling mini-series-Shokuzai (2012) – and short formats.
Among them is the astonishing medium-fell Chime –Sorti in theaters a week before, Wednesday May 28 – and which is an impressive variation on the presence of evil in everyday life. Protean, the filmography of this author finds in some respects a kind of concentrate in the versatility of tones and ways of filming Cloud.
The title judiciously refers both to the scrambling which indifferent to the limits and to the digital system supposed to now bring together all the data and all the characteristics of human existence, under a name which is itself a lure. We know how much the cloud is neither light nor celestial, but terribly material and costly in energy and deadly effects on human lives and other than human.
Ironic and dark, fun and apocalyptic, Cloud Circulates apparently erratic and in fact walled by an inner power, one, or one, or the other of the protagonists may draw the strings.
The devil, probably, but who is not necessarily a character, not necessarily a myth, not necessarily an intimate drive, not necessarily an economic system or a computer program. Or the result of all this, resulting in changing shapes like those of a cloud.
