In the Flesh: Mars Express

“Jailbroken robots, all they do is get high and screw all the time,” says hacker Roberta Williams (Marie Bouvet) of her robotic partner LEM (Thomas Roditi) with a mixture of fondness and irritation. In a movie so concerned with reasons for being and with their dark, nonsensical corporate reflections, it can hardly be an accidental line. All anyone really wants is to feel good and experience connection with others. Is it any surprise that, given their freedom, these artificial consciousnesses want to revel in it? There are intimations of darker urges beneath these, but we never discover the context of the culturally mythologized “Novigrad Uprising”, an event in which sentient machines turned on their creators en masse. What the movie shows us is robots experimenting with sexuality, experiencing fear and humor for the first time, cursing their oppressors (it feels especially pointed that unmodified robots aren’t so much as allowed to use profanity, a fussily puritanical restraining protocol that reveals the insecurity of their creators), and delighting in physical sensation. In short, they’re people, and the vicious, hysterical responses of the humans around them clearly show that their oppressors know it and harbor suppressed guilt over their ongoing exploitation.

It’s a smarter and more nuanced take than we usually get in this kind of “what is a human?” narrative, and director/writer Jérémie Périn and co-writer Laurent Sarfati handle it deftly. So much of the film is concerned with the repression of knowledge, whether institutionally as in the case of student programmer Jun Chow (Geneviève Doang), through addiction as we see with ex-military private eye Aline Ruby’s (Léa Drucker) drinking problem, through simple denial and willful ignorance in the case of Chris Royjacker (Mathieu Amalric), or in the mass prohibition of thoughts and actions imposed on all robots. The world is in a constant state of forgetting and of being made to forget, of not knowing and of being made to not know. This is how society functions, building itself atop, as Hitler put it, “Big Lies”, truths too odious and reality-shaking to be accepted into the conscious mind. With each new distortion we twist further away from the fluidity and openness of living life on our own terms and for our own pleasure.

Gorgeously animated and with a serviceable plot and an understated but effective voice cast (I watched the subtitled French version), Mars Express doesn’t break any narrative molds, but it does manage to mine some of the moments of gut-churning horror and loss of faith that constitutes every great noir from its story of corporate greed and failing upwards. The moment in which we realize along with Ruby that there’s no man at the top of the conspiracy, no single thread to cut to end the encroaching madness of Royjacker’s (it’s a delight that his name literally means “guy who gives handjobs to kings”) plan, is genuinely gutting, as is the silence with which the company’s dozens of board members vote to ignore the CEO’s pleas for help in favor of gunning down his assailants, firing right through him if necessary. This is a world that has turned against itself, a dystopia like our own in which the corporate will to power has superseded pleasure, love, and all other human motivations as the dominant driver of history. It’s a bleak and beautiful mirror.