Everything is said in the title and in the poster for the third film by Portuguese Joao Nicolau. Technoboss satirizes technology while evoking rhythmic and synthetic music. Hence the poster, which sways a grandpa with dark glasses. He’s Luis Rovisco, manager of a video surveillance and electronic alarm equipment company that he sells to companies and / or communities. Especially in hotels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYD4j_Ktu1A
In his seventies near retirement, Luis is a deep fanciful, rather casual and approximate in his work. Mainly going back and forth between his home, his office and a hotel where he installed a formidably ineffective surveillance system, Luis embellishes his journeys with songs of his own, interpreted in a thin voice in different styles, including electro- pop, without forgetting a few scraps of heavy metal – giving rise to the irruption in his car of a gang of bearded and hairy musicos… This pseudo-musical, which we could call deadpan, which is an understatement, is characterized by its permanent unpredictability, the disparity of its registers. This being inseparable from a certain impassiveness, even atony, in contrast to the traditions of Western comedy, where everything is supported, extroverted and frantic.
Mechanical nonsense, cold burlesque
There is no gag, strictly speaking, or hard-hitting dialogue in Technoboss. Visually and dynamically, Nicolau is in the behaviorist and burlesque line of a Jacques Tati. See the last image where an automatic barrier, which has gone mad because of Luis’s frenzy, keeps going up and down. This mechanical nonsense is only one facet of a work as azimuthed, in another register, as the previous film by Nicolau, John From, who made a fixation on Melanesia and tropical madness taking as a starting point the idle vacations of a teenager in Lisbon. Once again, what prevails is the extreme formal freedom of the film. He only borrows his stylization from the musical when it suits him. See in particular certain Luis’s car journeys filmed in front of painted canvases. But often Nicolau pushes the experiment further. So in the chapter dedicated to Luis’s professional trip to Spain with his English boss, which comes down to a voice-over dialogue on a black background, then a cocktail around a table (where the boss himself remains invisible). Nodding at the cinema show, but also an expression of a sort of depressive aquoibonism which mixes the insignificant with the incongruous.
Inefficiency elevated to the rank of fine art
Luis is old, alone, incapable and almost useless. But against all odds, situations can suddenly turn around and a romantic process set in motion … Everything is possible for this filmmaker who does not seek narrative efficiency at all costs, and does not hesitate to start the film with a sequence almost neutral: Luis waiting in the middle of the countryside for a convenience store who will load his broken down car. That’s all. If he likes computer glitches and geeks’ gimmicks, Nicolau aims above all at the ridiculousness of human comedy, by accumulating the little downsides that make up roughly our daily bread. Chronic ineffectiveness is elevated here to the rank of fine art. This erratic fantasy, which will confuse fans of the dramatic move and comic timing, is due not only to the whimsical staging but also to the casting. In particular to the atypical main performer, Miguel Lobo Antunes, from a famous sibling in Portugal – to which Antonio Lobo Antunes, one of the greatest living Portuguese writers, belongs. Miguel is a bit of a family acrobat, he has never been an actor before, but has been involved in all arts as a cultural programmer. An electron as free as his character, where all the charm of the film comes from.
Technoboss, de Joao Nicolau, Portugal, 1 h 52, 2019. En VOD sur le site shellacfilms.com et sur universcine.com
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