After a break of nearly a decade, director Mamoru Oshii returns to live action with Avalon, a dystopian science fiction film concerned with the extremely forward-thinking idea (for 2001) that digital lives can be so lucrative and personally rewarding that they demand priority when judged against tranquilised participation in a crumbling, post-Cold War present. Małgorzata Foremniak stars as Ash, a highly-skilled e-sport pariah (who is, therefore, forced to play a team game solo) who excels at an illegal, highly-addictive multiplayer game in which players, with small arms loadouts, take on everything from tanks and helicopter gunships to sauntering, computer-generated mechanoids. Unlike the American productions that seem to default to high-flying, stunt show agility when photographing helicopters, Oshii and cinematographer Grzegorz Kędzierski regard their subjects, on loan from the Polish armed forces, as hovering monsters: bulbous, even insectile in shape; radiating incredible noise and landscape blasting power.
Their human victims, of which there are many, are instantly zapped into two-dimensional snapshots of death throes that then crumble into pixelated cinder. Complete a mission and the hovering hardware's final agonies are similarly frozen, pulsing with amber congratulation. Comparatively, Ash's sepia-stained waking life is drained of danger or, really, purpose. Her illicit earnings may be enough to procure fresh fruit and vegetables but her living space remains bare. She inhabits a pointedly impersonal lodging, not unlike Melville's Le Samouraï, anchored only by the come-and-go presence of Oshii's trademark basset hound. Stylistically similarly to the director's animated features, Avalon's early passages revolve around the kind of slow-motion, gestural movement that entrances when rendered in successive cels but registers as dawdling when considering real, unhurried people. The observational element, communicated in brush strokes, has been removed, you see. The simulacrum proving much more arresting than a captured, human equivalent.
Later though when Ash, very much like Major Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell, pursues an abstract reward as a way to make sense of her diminished, depressive sense of self, Avalon really comes into its own. Although largely found wanting when compared to Oshii's 1995 masterpiece, Avalon does excel when detailing the intense, perception-shifting enlightenment experienced by its main character. Whereas Kusanagi's electronic apotheosis is strange and unknowable by design, the ascension experienced by Ash is vividly described as a movement from a flat, haunted fiction to something much more brilliant and tactile. Having cornered the interlaced Angel that allows passage into the more mysterious corners of the game, Ash advances to a complete new, secret area entitled Class Real. The hustle and bustle of the Polish city of Wrocław is re-framed here as a technicolor wonderland; a confusing and beguiling Oz, with its own inscrutable tasks, for Ash to explore then conquer. This reframing of the contemporary, in which a modern Polish city is transformed, largely through comparison, seems indebted to similar interludes in Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe. There, brief glimpses of shoppers traversing escalators was used to paper over footage either missing or never shot and served to remind viewers that the mundane and everyday becomes equally unusual, even alien, when judged against landscapes and situations powered by pure imagination.
