It's always fascinating to see the way films visually represent the future. Usually, we see nothing more than "slicker" devices and faster means doing the same exact things done when the film was made, and very rarely anything genuinely new and not commonly imagined at that time. "Time of Roses", made in the '60s, and set in the 21st century, is one of the few such films I've seen that made the video displays flat. They got that right. When they get the day's news, the articles are individually selected according to the individual's profile. They got that right too. But when they actually read the news, the central information system has printed it out for them on sheets of paper. This film is loaded with gems like that, to say nothing of the inflatable furniture, the use of a slide rule and the backseat driving cars...
Anyway, "Time of Roses" is considered to be Finland's first true science fiction film. It offers an exploration of memory, history, and the nature of identity in a modern society that tends totalitarian and suppresses focus on the individual. Made in 1969, against a backdrop of the social unrest of that time, the film presents a dystopian future, 2012, characterized by surveillance, conformity, and a superficial understanding of culture, individuality and freedom. As an interesting aside, they have a particular television channel where anyone is allowed to speak their mind. But it's not useful for social activism because no one watches it.
Anyway, we follow a documentary filmmaker set on creating a biographical film about an ordinary and unknown person from the past. Does such a film elevate the common person, or does it humble individuals of the present? A woman from 50 years before is selected almost almost at random from a photograph, and he sets to researching her life.
Remarkably, by chance (or is it?) the film maker finds an ordinary worker with an uncanny resemblance to the woman in everyway. He casts her in his dramatizations. As they work together on the project, lines between individuals, past and present, begin to blur. The protagonist's quest to create a truth about two women becomes a metaphor for society's struggle to reconcile its past with its present, and the individual with a rational collective.
"Alphaville" meets "Vertigo"...
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