"Dans la brume:" The Certainty of Uncertainty (film review)

Le Quartier Haussmannien dans la "brune", as French commentators sometimes joke about the movie...

By Cseperke TIKÁSZ
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The key to a good disaster movie may be how the creators combine the bigger picture with the micro perspective of characters we can care about. Think Kate and Jack in Titanic. In this French SF movie, Just a breath away (Dans la brume - 2018), we have a micro/family drama but we do not get anything like the bigger picture. We are left without answers as to the basic whys of the story.

After a sudden earthquake, Paris is covered by a murderous smoke. Everyone envoloped by this mysterious smoke, breathing it in, is dead in seconds, but it stops somewhere between the 4th and 5th floor level and only very-very slowly continues to rise. So there remain survivors. One of them is the character played by Romain Duris (you might know the guy from The Spanish Apartment/L'auberge espagnole), with his ex-wife (Olga Kurylenko) and his daughter who suffers from a disease, a newly common genetic disorder -- she thus lives in an isolated compartment. If she leaves this closed-off space, she dies. The problem is that her compartment is below the smoke level. The parents have to somehow keep her life support systems functioning... Tense drama and action result from this, and I am not going to tell you the rest.

Some basic questions that may be posed remain unanswered. Where did the smoke come from? Several times we see survivors around the Sacré Coeur basilica, on top of Montmartre, waiting for help from somewhere. But it does not come. Why? Is the entire continent or perhaps the entire world affected by the smoke?

So here comes the part where SPOILERs can no longer be avoided, after the picture...

Somehow, eventually, the survivors figure out that the children suffering from the genetic disease mentioned above are resistant to the smoke. (Again, we do not know how they figured this out.) So at the end we see the father in the isolator and the daughter outside of it. The roles are reversed. This, as allegory, carries a meaning that is pretty clear: generations change, they pass on responsibilities, a new generation takes ownership of the world from parents who used to worry about controlling everything, only to see their offspring ultimately cope better than they do. Arguably, this fable of life could have been told without the need to stage a disaster in Paris.

Of course, we can think about this further: in life, we do not always understand the bigger picture. We do not always get answers. Why does this or that happen to us? Why does God do something to us? And so on, however one may pose such questions. This fundamental existential uncertainty is certainly well-conveyed by the film.

Previously reviewed here in EUtopias and Other Futures: A Hungarian SF anthology