Avalon

Sometimes reality is the eeriest thing of all

Talking last week at the National Film Theatre, my colleague David Thomson made an interesting prognosis of cinema's future. The real innovations, he proposed, would come from the world of animation: for young audiences, the long established game of photographing live actors was already looking like old hat. I couldn't agree more about animation's vitality – in the last two years, Hollywood has hardly produced a more innovative film than Monsters, Inc., purely in terms of rediscovering the luminous, tactile pleasures of image-making.

But there's another question worth asking: if live photography has gone stale, can it be given a new lease of life by a merger with animation? The big-budget films that currently look most futuristic – and who knows whether before long, they won't seem creakily quaint – are those most committed to an animation/live-action hybrid. Most spectacularly, we've had The Matrix, which has little to do with how live bodies perform in real space, everything to do with marvels that can only be dreamed digitally. It's not simply a question of live pictures being digitally tweaked, as has been the common practice for going on a decade and a half: we're beginning now to look at live images so extensively processed that they practically relinquish contact with real-world optics altogether.

Avalon is a particularly bewildering example of this phenomenon. Its Japanese director Mamoru Oshii is a leading practitioner of drawn sci-fi animation – anime – whose features Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor 2 are much prized by genre aficionados. Avalon is Oshii's first live-action film – up to a point. The locale is a city of the near future, where the populace is hooked on an illegal and highly dangerous virtual reality game called Avalon: strap on an electrode-spiked helmet, and you're an intrepid guerilla doing battle with sinister hovering helicopters and Dalek-like tanks. When we meet heroine Ash (Malgorzata Foremniak) on the virtual battlefield, the screen is steeped in heavy soft-focus sepia: shot with oddly dreamy delicacy by Grzegorz Kedzierski, the imagery is digitally treated so that everything seems to move in a slow-motion blur. We're treated to copious explosions and zap-gun effects, but hardly of the usual Hollywood action-movie strain: here, plumes of fire and smoke freeze in mid-air to be revealed as flat planes of light. When Ash shoots her enemies, they turn two-dimensional in mid-move, then shatter into glassy splinters. This is shoot'em-up console stuff, but oddly distanced, coolly presented for our aesthetic consideration.

I began to panic early on: the prospect of watching 106 minutes of deep sepia suddenly felt unbearably oppressive. But the film becomes even more claustrophobic when we enter the world in which Ash lives: a crumbling European city bled of colour. What makes Avalon a genuinely bizarre one-off is that – although the story seems the routine stuff of Japanese anime, right down to its asexual heroine – Oshii chose to shoot the film in Poland, with Polish actors speaking Polish dialogue. The result is a strange fantasy version of old Europe, with mouldering corridors, greasy 1940s soup kitchens, beer signs and the copious ingestion of kielbasa sausages. Even the dialogue – an inscrutable mix of techno-babble and Arthurian myth – somehow sounds ineffably Eastern European, especially in the mouth of Ash's Games Master, a disembodied head on a blurry screen, who could give Max von Sydow lessons in portentous glumness.

The plot involves Ash's progress to the hitherto-unexplored game level Special A, where she will be able to redeem her compromised record as a team player. Or something like that – the film's "go figure" quotient is formidable. But you watch Avalon less for its narrative than for its mood: where the first 10 minutes lead you to expect relentless wham-bang fury, the overall feeling is narcotised and profoundly melancholic. It's like watching Tarkovsky's Tomb Raider.

Talk about impassive: when she's not being a hard-bitten warrior with laser goggles and a Susan Sontag streak in her hair, Malgorzata Foremniak strides around in her trenchcoat looking like Michelle Pfeiffer after she's just failed an audition for a Robert Bresson film. There aren't many computer-game films in which all the references that come to mind are straight from European art cinema: the look of wartime desolation is pure Andrzej Wajda, the parallel-world narrative echoes Chris Marker's La Jetée, and the extremely incongruous montage sequence in which a plate of sausage and egg is devoured in lip-smacking close-ups can only be some sort of oblique tribute to Czech master animator Jan Svankmajer.

As the film emerges into the final stages of its narrative labyrinth, you might actually catch yourself gasping with relief as the sepia lets up and we at last catch a glimpse of blue sky that isn't digitally hyper-processed. The film suddenly seems to enter a world we recognise, but that's when things get truly surreal: the sight of perfectly ordinary crowds quietly flocking into a perfectly ordinary concert hall somehow becomes the eeriest sight here.

In Oshii's obsessively retextured confection of images, you simply don't know where solid matter ends and pixels begin. In grandly cavalier fashion, Oshii treats his live actors like games pieces: Foremniak's cheese-wire cheekbones and gorgeous zombie blankness turn out to have been subject to liberal computer retouching. This unnerving interface of real and artificial gives the film a quite unsettling metaphysical slant, as if it were being performed by a cast of ghosts. The nearest comparison is with last year's curious digital misfireFinal Fantasy: The Spirits Within, in which the more or less realistic-looking human characters were all computer-generated. If that film felt airless, Avalon is somehow airless yet uncanny, because you know its cast are actually human; they simply exist on screen as if they weren't. The only truly organic presence here is a bassett hound, who mysteriously vanishes from sight, as if his reality too has come into question (or more likely, because his mistress has just gone to some lengths to prepare him a dish of beef, rice and cabbage, which I'm afraid to say, looks pretty real too).

The idea of a computer-game movie so unforgivingly slow and spacy is a radical gesture of sorts, if not insanely counter-productive from a commercial point of view. For the teenage game-buff constituency, Avalon's aestheticised dreaminess will surely seem about as funky as prospect as Last Year in Marienbad, while the art-housers will no doubt find it impenetrably silly. I suspect that Avalon will become one of those cult oddities that, 10 years from now, people will remember as exotically flawed and misunderstood; in fact, since it has been enthused about by both James Cameron and Matrix co-director Larry Wachowski, we can expect some of its ideas to filter into the Hollywood sci-fi mainstream. Avalon is alternately fascinating and arid, yet there's something magnificently quixotic about its intractability. It may be about as esoteric as science fiction gets, but it's oddly refreshing to have your perceptions challenged by something so hard to categorise, bizarre not just in a genre-crossing way but on a molecular level.

j.romney@independent.co.uk