The Pink Cloud was written in 2017 and shot in 2019. Any resemblance to actual events is purely coincidental. You are warned of this, at the beginning of the trailer and (I believe) the film itself. This seems reasonable, at first. After all, what follows is a film in which a fatal worldwide event forces everyone into a mandatory lockdown. It would be reasonable to assume that this — a film with a single set and, for the most part, three performers — was a response to COVID.
But I don’t think that anyone who watches The Pink Cloud will make that mistake. This is clearly a movie about quarantine made by people who never lived through it. Comparisons to COVID actually hurt the film, in my opinion. But even on its own merits, The Pink Cloud struggles to find a point. There’s some gorgeous acting here, but not much else.
“Don’t be sad.”
Giovana (Renata de Lélis) and Yago (Eduardo Mendonça) barely know one another. They met at a club, hit it off, came back to Giovana’s family house. After what was meant to be a one-night stand, the two wake up to an odd notification: A pink cloud is in the city, and it kills anyone it touches in just ten seconds. Go inside. Lock your doors and windows.
They do so. Food is sorted out quickly, as the government somehow uses drones to install airtight tubes to each house. You can purchase things and have them sent directly to your home. But they are no closer to learning what the Cloud is, or how it kills. Days become weeks. Weeks become months, and then years. They have a child, and begin to raise him in that same isolation. How can two people who barely know one another grow together in extreme circumstances? When, if ever, will they be free?
And, most worryingly — do they even want to be free anymore?
“It will go away soon.”
I was surprised at how quickly the film did away with any social or political questions. The government here isn’t just effective, they verge on miracle workers. Within what seems like days, they have found a way for normal capitalism to resume. You can buy seemingly anything and have it delivered. Somehow, the power grid stays up. Giovana, a web developer, seems to have near-infinite money; Yago does not appear to work at all. The appliances stay working over the course of many years. Technology continues to improve, as do the delivery system. But no one can go outside, presumably even with a hazmat suit (though this is never discussed or attempted).
So it’s not actually a film about quarantine. It glosses over the specifics there. Instead, this is a film about isolation. It is clear almost immediately that Yago and Giovana are not a good couple. They have physical chemistry, and they’re both decent people, but in normal circumstances they might have dated for a couple months and then realized they were not a good fit. Here, stuck together, they try to forge a life. It doesn’t go great.
Then again, nothing goes great. Some characters are alone, some are with friends, others are with caretakers. The movie focuses too much on Yago and Giovana to keep up with those stories. They provide contrast, but it’s a shallow distinction.
“When?”
Here is where I have to talk about the ending. So, for those who prefer to go in blind, this is the section of the review to skip.
In the end, Lilo and Yago strip Giovana of her last little bit of control, a virtual reality device that allowed her to pretend that she was no longer trapped indoors. She was slipping away from them, they felt, ignoring them in favor of a fake world. Why couldn’t she just accept the Cloud? Lilo and Yago have found a measure of happiness, but the film posits it as a fake happiness. Yago, content in isolation, has stopped contacting his aging father, who only sporadically recognized him through his Alzheimer’s. He never bothered to ask what happened with the corpse of his father’s caretaker. He just drifted away from his family and friends. This is not the way forward.
Giovana, on the other hand, tries to stay in touch with her friends and family. She is sure they will get out at some point. But a late film twist strips her last bit of hope from her. So in the end, she opens the door, walks out onto the balcony, and counts to ten. The movie ends there; we don’t know if she lived or died, just that she made it to ten.
Right away, this brings to mind the ending of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. There, too, we end on a question: Is Cobb in a dream, or has he returned to real life? But it’s not an uncertain ending at all, contrary to what film literalists would have you believe. Instead, the point of the ending is that he doesn’t care which it is. The actual answer — a dream or real life — doesn’t matter to us, because Cobb has accepted it as his reality.
There, that message was clear. In The Pink Cloud, though, it feels sloppier. Is the message writer/director Iuli Gerbase wants us to take away the shallow one, which to me is: In the end, she too no longer cared. And, of course, she counts to ten, stops, takes a deep breath — and she’s still standing. So perhaps the message is instead that it was all a hoax? That government was controlling everything? She could have chosen freedom at any moment and instead she lived in fear?
Those are radically different endings that can profoundly change how we view what came before. The latter is not really believable in the fiction of the world — people would absolutely have tested the waters — so I guess we’re just meant to accept that the point of the film is that we’re too weak to remain decent people in a broken world. But to me, that is neither clear nor particularly interesting.
“Do you like the Cloud?”
In the end, The Pink Cloud felt like a shallow, cynical film to me. It’s well made on a technical level — Renata de Lélis and Eduardo Mendonça give excellent performances, and Gerbase deftly handles the slow emotional undertones of the relationship between them. Indeed, the film’s most interesting moments come as we see their ever-shifting relationship. There, as a character study of how two people cope with catastrophe, The Pink Cloud excels. Scenes of a child’s birthday party spent surrounded by screens, each holding a different family member celebrating on their own, hit harder than they might have a year ago.
But it still left me feeling hollow in the end. Perhaps in a world where I hadn’t experienced lockdown myself, it would be different. In the United States, our catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic has meant that I, like many others, have almost fully given up on traditional socialization for over a year now. I should be able to relate to these two, to their situation.
Instead, The Pink Cloud felt numbing, almost alien at times. Granted, I don’t think I was in the best headspace for a movie about the harrowing emotional toll of lockdown. It is quite possible that this will hit different in ten years, or twenty. But for now, this may be one of a thousand other COVID casualties, an interesting experiment that can’t stand up against the weight of the world.
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