Whistler ’16: Le Cyclotron

It is like Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, but with more National Socialists. Life had never been as uncertain as it was at the climax of WWII, during the post-Heisenberg Principle, post-Schrödinger’s Cat era. For theoretical physicists engaged in espionage, the more they know, the scarier and less predictable the world looks. Quantum mechanics becomes a deadly game in Quebecois filmmaker Olivier Asselin’s The Cyclotron (trailer here), which screens during the 2016 Whistler Film Festival.

The Franco-German Simone Ziegler was once a colleague of Emil Scherrer and very nearly his lover, but now she works for the resistance. She is to make contact with the physicist on a train bound for Paris to assess how close he is to realizing an atomic weapon—and most likely liquidate him based on his response. However, she unilaterally changes her mission parameters when she learns the rogue Scherrer wants to defect. He has indeed completed an atomic weapon—a cyclotron—but on a much smaller scale than the Manhattan Project’s A-bomb.

Unfortunately, the Gestapo has the drop on Scherrer and they are also pretty sure Ziegler’s cover story is bogus. The Germans will interrogate them both with the help of collaborating scientist Helmut König, but Scherrer is not talking and Ziegler says just enough to create a sense of uncertainty, so to speak.

Le Cyclotron easily represents the cleverest cinematic use of Schrödinger’s Cat since Ward Byrkit’s Coherence. It is hard to explain outside of the film, but it is completely convincing in the cinematic moment, which sounds aptly Heisenbergian. There are also wickedly smart nods towards relativity and time travel, yet it still functions as an effective espionage thriller, which happens to be primarily set on a train, for extra genre bonus points.

Mathieu Laverdière’s mostly black-and-white cinematography (with select passages rendered in color for effect) is strikingly stylish, in an appropriately noir kind of way. As a result, in terms of its tone and visual vocabulary, Cyclotron is more closely akin to films like Kawalerowicz’s Night Train and the rotoscoped Alois Nebel.

As Scherrer and Ziegler, Mark Antony Krupa and co-screenwriter Lucille Fluet do not look like typical blow-dried romantic co-leads, but that is rather refreshing. It also means they more convincingly pass for nuclear physicists. Most importantly, they forge some compellingly tragic, ambiguously romantic chemistry together.

Admittedly, Asselin has trouble with the ending, but it is always tricky to stick the dismount when a film has this degree of difficulty. Regardless, he earns enough credit for his ambition and inventiveness to compensate. Highly recommended for fans of film noir, science fiction, and post-modern cinema, Le Cyclotron screens this Saturday (12/3) and Sunday (12/4) as part of the Whistler Film Festival in British Columbia.

Coherence: The Quantum Night of the Comet

Suppose Schrödinger’s cat threw a dinner party. He would probably serve tuna and quantum physics. The notion of quantum superposition made famous by the hypothetical feline becomes a question of life and death for a group of hipsters when a comet crashes their soiree in James Ward Byrkit’s sf mindtrip, Coherence (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Mike and Lee are hosting some of their closest friends, as well as Amir’s annoying girlfriend, Laurie, who also happens to be Kevin’s ex, before he started seeing Em. Although she is attractive, Em is highly insecure and nearly paralyzed with regret over her past mistakes. She is therefore less than thrilled to see Laurie, but the comet will provide some timely distractions, spontaneously cracking cell phones and knocking out the power grid.

Noticing a nearby house still has power, Amir and Hugh (the oldest of their circle) leave to investigate, but return thoroughly spooked. They also bring back a rather puzzling box. Panic and mystery ensue. However, a key clue might be found in some notes left by Hugh’s scientist brother referring to Schrödinger’s cat.

According to that classic thought experiment, given a certain set of Rube Goldberg pre-conditions, a cat placed in a box that has equal chance of being dead or alive when the container is opened, simultaneously exists in both states until an outside force interrupts, forcing the two existences to collapse into a single reality. Determining how it applies to them will be an unsettling experience.

Byrkit takes that cryptic premise and runs with it, steadily raising the stakes and cranking up the anxiety. Following Darren Paul Fisher’s Frequencies and Richie Mehta’s I’ll Follow You Down, Coherence heralds a mini-renaissance for concept-driven micro-budget science fiction with virtual no special effects. Eventually, Byrkit employs a bit of SFX trickery, but it is far from the point of the film and spoilery to address in any meaningful way.

Considering how head-spinning Byrkit & Alex Manugian’s story gets, it is hard to imagine sending the cast out to do it cold improv style, but that is largely what they did. Mostly just armed only with their prepared situation and character notes, the ensemble somehow makes it work. Indeed, it is certainly never a problem for them to look confused or panicked, which is required throughout most of the second two acts.

Frankly, casting Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Nicholas Brendon as Mike, a washed-up former Roswell co-star is so meta-inspired, Coherence could have coasted into conventional riff on Night of the Comet and still satisfied fans. In fact, Brendon loses his cool rather spectacularly as Mike.  

Although she initially seems rather vanilla, Emily Foxley’s Em deftly pulls off a critical pivot late in the game. Demonstrating consistency under difficult thesp circumstances, Hugo Armstrong anchors the film and handles the egghead material with authority as the more down to earth Hugh. Bill Clinton would also be interested to know former Miss America and elusive Paula Jones witness Elizabeth Gracen chews her share of scenery as Hugh’s New Agey wife Beth.

Coherence is a smart, tense genre outing that thoroughly shows up big budget tent-poles with its superior inventiveness. Byrkit and company take a lot of risks, but they all payoff significantly. Highly recommended for fans of sf and cult cinema, Coherence opens this Friday (6/20) in New York at the Village East.