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Arco, a French anime-style film by Ugo Bienvenu, is special in many ways, the main of which is its original presentation of robots in a society 50 years ahead of us.
Though primarily set in 2075, the movie has, and opens with, another society that’s even further in the future: the unimaginable year of 2932. A boy, Arco, who lives in the latter and in the clouds with his family (the earth is recovering from 600 years of capitalism), decides to do something his parents forbid him to do. Fly about in a super suit like the one aliens handed Ralph Hinkley in the forgotten TV show The Greatest American Hero.
Arco accidentally flies back in time, back to the year 2075. There he meets and becomes friends with Iris, a girl who has parents but is raised by a robot named Mikki. And this is the part of the film I most enjoyed: the relationship not only between the girl and her robot, but also between robots and humans in general.
It is not fraught with the usual anxieties: Will the robots take over the world? Will we become their slaves? The suggestion that we should have listened to Sarah Connor because she saw this coming. No, the robots in Arco are not like that at all. They’re actually useful and often more caring than humans. Indeed, one might say they took over the world not with war (The Terminator, The Matrix, HBO’s Westworld, and so on), but with genuine love, care, and concern for humans. Robots that basically tell humans: “Love will be right here… So, have no fear, no tears… Love is here.” I have never seen that on screen.
Iris’s robot is devoted to her in a way her parents, who visit her as holograms (they work in the city; she lives in suburb), are not. And if there is any anxiety in this future world, it’s between humans, or humans and nature. Ugo Bienvenu directs this film in such a way that this unusual robot/human relationship (unusual to us in 2025, who can now purchase a very primitive, unloving, and apparently clumsy domestic robot, Neo, for $20,000—or pay $500 a month) is so well established as to be uninteresting, it’s a part of the background. What matters is the coming of age of two young adults. A story as old as the hills.
Acro screens today at 6:45 pm, November 7 at the Bainbridge Film Festival.
Get there. The schedule of today’s ferry from Seattle to Bainbridge is here. You can also look at the ferry schedule and films scheduled for Bainbridge Film Festival this weekend.
