The Congress

An animated, aged Robin Wright in The Congress.

A few years ago there were a few Israeli films about the 1982 war in Lebanon. Beaufort I haven’t seen (I don’t think it got a proper UK release). One is simply called Lebanon took place entirely within the confines of a tank, and is well worth checking out.  The most famous is the “animated documentary” Waltz with Bashir. The Congress is director Ari Folman’s follow up to that film.

The film has had one of those releases that always worries me; it was shown at Cannes last year, had a couple of screenings at the London Film Festival in October, and is now finally out properly.  It’s worth noting that, as often happens, there was no “buzz” around The Congress last year, which is maybe why it’s taken so long to reach our screens.

Robin Wright, an aging actress who starred in The Princess Bride, has two children and has made some bad choices when it comes to films, plays a character called Robin Wright, an aging actress who starred in The Princess Bride, has two children and has made some bad choices when it comes to films. Her agent – a nice part for Harvey Keitel, who hasn’t been on our screens enough recently and Danny Huston, playing a slimy, sleazy studio executive (it’s nice to see a Huston declare the end of cinema as we know it) offer Wright her final contract; she will be scanned and used in films however the studio see fit forever. The studio is called Miramount, which raised a smile, as did, during the animation, the appearance of an actor in aviator glasses and flight suit with perfect, brilliant white teeth who had been helping starving children in Africa after being scanned.

Signing the deal, the film cuts to twenty years in the future, and Wright attends The Congress of the title, where she takes a drug and becomes an animated version of herself. The animation is not like that in Waltz with Bashir, which many assumed (wrongly) was rotoscoped. It is more refined, with dreamlike pastels.  “A genius designer on a bad acid trip” Wright describes it as.

Here, I felt, the film fell down.  Really, it is two films – a live action about an aging actress that I enjoyed and wanted more of, and an animation that I felt was interesting and ripe for development that didn’t really sit with the live action film.  Still, the ending is beautiful and almost works at bringing them together, but it is one slightly disappointing film with two great films screaming to get out of it.