There's hardly any feeling more elusive than d?(c)j?* vu.
It's a dreamy sensation that stops you in your tracks, making you question the very nature of time and space. And in the epic adventure film, Cloud Atlas, it transcends these temporal and spatial boundaries, flickering through a half-dozen narratives across time: each successive story feels familiar, because each person's soul has been shaped by the previous story.
The film opens in a whirl, rapidly gluing images of incongruous characters together: there's a tribesman smeared in soil, a genetically engineered clone who's a waitress, a young black journalist from the days of The Doobie Brothers, a Billy Budd-like seaman, an elderly bespectacled publisher and a composer from the 1930s. This baffling trailer-within-a-movie set the rhythm for the next three hours.
In some way or another, the characters' souls are all related through the centuries. The composer's (Ben Whishaw) old love letters fall into the lap of the journalist (Halle Berry). The tribesman (Tom Hanks) watches the waitress' (Doona Bae) story projected as a holograph. The film's actors all play up to six roles-maybe the most fun is watching the ending credits when we see how Berry pulls off the role of a Jewish German mistress and how Hugh Grant, with the right makeup, can make for a convincing cannibal. A video plays next to each character's name, showing their evolution of roles through the film.
In one especially nostalgic scene, the journalist, named Luisa Rey, walks into a record store and hears the "Cloud Atlas Sextet." She instantly recognizes it and feels melancholy, but she doesn't know why. In a past life, her live-in composer and lover wrote this song for her, saying, "There are whole movements I wrote imagining us meeting again and again in different lives, in different ages."
David Mitchell, whose 2004 sci-fi novel inspired the film, said the most difficult part of the movie was the structure, which resembled Russian dolls, nestling and interrupting each other. The producers, Lana and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix and V for Vendetta) and Tom Tyker (Run Lola Run) couldn't model the structure of the movie after the book. What audience would sit for a 30-minute biography only to sit for another, and then another? They wrote elements of each narrative on flash cards, and then spliced the stories for the screen, weaving each narrative into the next one with the intent of a smooth transition.
But what results is an unwieldy and sprawling contemplation of human existence. They take on free will versus determinism. The directors are grappling with answers, but by the end of it, we're rasping with more.
The message, repeated through countless dizzying sequences, is that all of our lives are connected, that they're not our own.
By every action, we have already created our future. Our past and present dictate not only our lives, but the lives of others. While this idea holds some truth, it's over-simplifying things.
There were some touching moments, like when the clone waitress is saved by her lover from the future, played by Jim Sturgess. His character, a Korean freedom fighter, breathes life and romance into the waitress' sterile existence. The chemistry between Bae and Sturgess is palpable as he rescues her from her mechanical existence in a caf?(c), and shows her the spectrum of emotions she hasn't been allowed to tap.
But the movie is just too confusing for the film medium. By the end, it felt like an atlas of characters should've been handed out to keep the storylines straight. Cloud Atlas is ultimately a movie as foggy as our understanding of the cosmos.
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