Harder, better, faster, longer

>> Daft Punk’s Electroma is a gorgeous, glacially-paced film about heartbroken robots

by MARK SLUTSKY

Daft Punk appeared on the scene in 1997 with their debut album Homework, and it wasn’t just the album’s dancefloor blazers that caught everyone’s attention. Just as arresting as their music were the videos that accompanied their singles, like the Spike Jonze-directed clip for “Da Funk” (featuring the wanderings of a ghettoblaster-toting, heartbroken, dog-headed man), or the neo-Busby-Berkeley robo-dancing of “Around the World.”

Clearly this was a band as concerned with the visual as the musical—to the point that the Daft Punk duo, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, only appeared in public in robot garb. Their next album, Discovery, went even further, with the videos for each song (like “One More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”) produced by Japanese animator Leiji Matsumoto, interlocking to form the movie Interstella 5555. And with their latest project, Daft Punk’s Electroma, they’ve taken yet another step into the realm of the visual, to the perverse point that the feature film, directed by the duo, doesn’t even feature any of their music.

It’s an unmistakably Daft Punk project nonetheless, sharing their obsessions with sad robots, magnificently gleaming helmets and ’70s soft rock. The plot is fairly simple: a pair of robots in the classic DP get-up (though played by actors Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich) travel through an arid American desert landscape and into a town populated by similar-looking robot people. They go to a lab and get grotesque human heads molded on top of their helmets. They are rejected and head into the desert.

Did I mention that there’s no dialogue? Or that the opening driving sequence lasts 10 minutes? Electroma isn’t for everyone, and even the most hardcore Daft Punk fan might find it trying at points. But despite the movie’s ultra-slow and contemplative pace, it’s still affecting at points, and that despite the lack of words and facial expressions.

It’s not a cartoon adventure like Interstella 5555; no, this is more of an art film, like a blowjob-less Brown Bunny. The photography is gorgeous (I just love those perfectly shiny chrome helmets) and many of the film’s images are beautiful. If you don’t have the patience for glacially-slow tragi-comic tableaus of emotionally aspirational robots, though, this may not be the film for you.

Daft Punk’s Electroma plays as part of
la Biennale de Montréal on Friday, May 11
at 11 p.m. at the Cinémathèque québécoise. Tix
will be available at the box office
May 9–11, from 4–10:30 p.m.

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