Recently, directors everywhere have tried to make the first successful pandemic-era film, and none have succeeded. They try, and make them unrealistic, dull, and sort of a humdrum. It was not until Iuli Gerbase’s debut feature The Pink Cloud arrived to accurately portray the world we live in today.
The Pink Cloud is a chamber piece that resonates completely with all the feelings we have felt during this pandemic, and on a remarkable note, it was filmed in 2019, before all this madness happened. How could they have known that the film they were making would resonate with a future time? It is just so curious, as if they saw all this coming.
Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) are strangers who share a spark after meeting at a party. When they go out, they see a pink cloud that mysteriously takes over the city and an announcement tells everyone to seek shelter and close all windows for their safety. The cloud kills a person who inhales it within ten seconds. As days turn to weeks, and weeks turn to months, they are forced to come to terms with an accelerated timeline for their relationship, while being stuck together in quarantine until the pink cloud goes away.
Like most of us today, the characters in this film are governed by screens. They live between screens, meet new people by screens, talk to people by screens, and even go to the beach thanks to virtual reality. They use screens to try and get out of the reality of being stuck in the same room with the same person for months. It drives people crazy; we even see a person throw themselves out of a window. With the strain of isolation setting in, the couple struggles to reinvent themselves and reconcile the differences that threaten to tear them apart.
The Pink Cloud is claustrophobic. Sunken in a room with nowhere to go is basically how all this pandemic madness has us feeling. Although we can go out, there is still a fear of danger and contagion. There is confusion all-around. The characters in the film do not know when things are going to go back to normal, and nor do we.
The film is, in the best way possible, a dread-filled nightmare. The audience feels everything that the characters have gone through because they have gone through similar things. They try to get happiness out of the small moments. They feel lonely, and is why they interact in virtual/online sex, and make sexual games with neighbors through the windows. Boredom, despair, a bit of madness, those are more things they feel. We have felt all of that, but there is one more thing that keeps us going: hope. Hope is what has driven us at the times we have been down. How many times have you said, “when the pandemic is over…”? Thousands of times. That is hope. It drives them to try and withstand each other as they think it is going to be “ok” soon.
The Pink Cloud features excellent performances by its two leads as they give us a tremendous range of emotions. From sadness to happiness, from neediness to loneliness. Although their relationship is quite broken and they are trying to fix it, Renata de Lélis and Eduardo Mendonça have great chemistry together. With a claustrophobic production design and pink aesthetic cinematography, The Pink Cloud deals with isolation in an immersive way that feels close to home.
Iuli Gerbase first dreamt of this in 2017 and she could not have anticipated the shape of the world that we would be in when this film premiered. It is an interesting take on dealing with being locked down, showing you every aspect of it, both good and bad. It is upsetting, more now than ever. It’s refreshing to watch a great film about the times that we are going through. Simplicity is key in this film, as its slow pacing works great to make you feel more closeted and confined. A great directorial debut from Gerbase.
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