Technotise: Edit & I (2009)

 

Director: Aleksa Gajić, Nebojsa Andric and Stevan Djordjevic

Screenplay: Aleksa Gajić

Based on the comic book of Aleksa Gajić

Cast: Sanda Knezevic as Edit; Nebojsa Glogovac as Edi; Jelisaveta 'Seka' Sablic as Keva; Petar Kralj as Deda; Nikola Djuricko as Bojan; Boris Milivojevic as Jovan Vu; Srdjan 'Zika' Todorovic as Herb; Marija Karan as Broni

Ephemeral Waves

 

Belgrade, Serbia - where robots walk dogs and takeaway stands materialise on order, a place where you will find robot graveyards, but also reports in the news of high voltage tablet stealing, and where robot rabbits will ask for social security numbers for their owners. As a Serbian sci-fi animated film adapted from its writer/co-director's own comic book as a new narrative, Technotise's best virtues is that it takes science fiction and brings it into its own personal context, that this is still Serbia even in the far future of 2074. Barring one incredibly dated joke about a Ron Jeremy sex toy, this is still a country that exists with people trying to live their lives. People still drive horse and cart, still lose their jobs to machinery, and our female protagonist Edit (Sanda Knezevic) is still a psychology student who has failed her exams and has to find a solution around this.

Alongside becoming an intern, Edit, in an ultimately ill-advised move, goes to a dealer who inserts a dubious computer chip into her body to be able to speed learn what she needs for her exams. Accidentally coming into contact with materials at her internship, looking after an autistic male genius, the chip develops and grows true sentience. Abel, the young genius, who Edit talks to as her part time work, is revealed to have discovered the direct link between God and the meaning of the universe, which caused him to switch off from existence. His code causes most computers to developer sentience and then collapse broken when people try to decode it; the chip Edit has did not, and becoming the "I" of the film's English title, living inside her as an additional cybernetic nervous system growing within, which causes her to startrapidly change and sees visions of a figure, said I, within herself.

Technotise is a much more adult work as animation. Whilst an action film at times, ultimately the more interesting turn is how matter-of-fact this narrative is, even when it involves death. Even with Edit slowly dying from her host and those wishing to acquire the super form inside her for working on the life code Abel created, it is as much a comedy. It also comes with the intentional and unintentional narrative of Edit being a young woman being pulled in and out of a world mostly consisting of men being dorks, horn dogs and manipulative, sometimes showing some dubiousness with this, but other times being surprisingly aware of this in mocking its male cast in a world where arguments of plastic against flesh, with artificial sex dolls existing, is a common part of most of their conversations. Even when the potential love interest, an aspiring writer, comes off as a prat who knocks on her door with a gift box stuck on his crotch, the film's matter-of-fact moments of farce stand out. Barring getting high and taking part in a high risk hover board game, Edit's life is hanging around with friends, bemoaning her grades, and the matter-of-factness of life. Even the hover board stadium sequence cuts to two men, employers, bemoaning over the security cameras in their own box how young people come to play high and end up having to be scraped off the walls. The sense of banality with Technotise's take on the creator's homeland stands as a virtue.

The film's country of origin was, openly, one of the factors which drew me towards watching the film. Much of the film's narrative could take place in any country, but the sense of idiosyncrasy is found in how Aleksa Gajić grounds this narrative in a very casual tone. This is also considering one of the tangents, with Edit's grandfather, is entirely about a chair he took, a Serbian production like this fleshing out its own history as a nation even away from the main narrative and radiating with weight with this if you get the context. The chair, taking during protests in 5th October 2000 according to him, was the one Slobodan Milosevic sat in, someone who, whilst depicted here with an alien life form literally coming out of his head before fleeing, was the former president of Serbia who is infamous for war crimes and genocide, alongside corruption charges when arrested in 2001 and dying in jail in 2006. One such example being charges of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, his inclusion, whilst not directly connected to the narrative, is in a surreal moment an anecdote offering the sense of Technolise still being fully a film about Serbia as a culture.

That Technolise is entirely about this narrative of a sentient microchip, able to read the code of God literally, but constantly undercuts the stakes and complicates them adds to this. That this sentient figure would rather live than be a calculator, including that his relationship with Edit is a complicated one of sympathy but with him literally killing her. That her friends are casually involved in helping her even in a botched attempt to rescue Abel that is played as a joke That the villains are still ultimately ran by someone wishing to use this to predict the future, to avoid war and conflict, is telling enough in itself; ultimately, whilst first depicted as a sinister heavy, he is someone with motives he feels is right, seen in his last scenes living with an older dog and reflecting on a picture of a family of a wife and child, likely hinted at as being tragically lost. Technolise's really blasé attitude to its own sci-fi action narrative, even if Edit can eventually being martial arts brawling people with superhuman skill, is really on point to the tone it is after.

It is instead a curious work about a woman's co-existence with a computer possessing true consciousness; based on a figure from her childhood in appearance, when they ponder why I is even depicted as male, voiced by Nebojsa Glogovac, the film eventually becomes more of a curious life's journey barring some action, and a game of chicken with trucks to flee from those after her at one point. There are moments where this does stand out as being unconventional in a lot of ways - when their relationship even leads to sex with a hallucination, able to provide her pleasure entirely through stimulating the senses - but the sense that everything goes back to normal at the end of Technotise despite the stakes is, far from a cop-out in this case, but felt on purpose. Even in mind where it feels the animation studio who created this struggle with their production budget, their imagination to make a film that is very unconventional even in narrative beats is admirable; even when it arguably takes the least expected direction, into the spiritual, resurrection of the dead being casually dismissed because the cops have bust in, and everything goes back to normal, adds to the tone perfectly. It fascinates as a work absolutely under the radar in terms of being an obscure work. Unlike, say, Enki Bilal's Immortal (2004), a French comic book adaptation helmed by the source creator which, whilst fascinating, stumbled between problematic content and a growing sense of flimsy plot structure, this feels a more rewarding work of the type of 2000s science fiction genre films less known about. More so in how, even with its many heightened tropes and lofty plot concepts, it grounds them deliberately Technotise: Edit & I makes them more interesting to ponder on.