Ainoa (2005)

This Austrian movie feels a little like a Hollywood s-f blockbuster remade as a European art film – it has a lot of beautiful imagery and good performances, but seems on the slow side and it takes very seriously third- or fourth-hand pulp ideas. In 2014, a scientist (Anton Nouri) creates a female android, Ainoa (Verena Buratti), who enables his nation (which has a vaguely Soviet feel) to win a coming, never-seen war by living through it and transmitting tactical advice from the future. The scientist realises this is a terrible mistake which will lead to dystopian tyranny and the destruction of most human civilisation but has to trust his unborn grandson, Yuri (Simon Licht), to hook up with Ainoa seventy-five years on and enable her to transmit another message through time, to his younger self to prevent him inventing her in the first place. The time-hopping, history-revising business is elaborate and complicated, but only a mcguffin – the meat of the film is the journey Yuri and Ainoa take across apparently unspoiled mountain scenery (no ruins here for this ruined Earth), aided by members of the usual Resistance and pursued by a few agents of the oppressors. Buratti's short, broad-beamed, sad pixie android is an interesting contrast with equivalent, robo-babe killer innocent figures like Leeloo in The Fifth Element or River in Serenity; at one point, she disposes of a whole platoon of bad guys offscreen, and Yuri finds her standing over broken corpses and later she engages in the closest thing to a martial arts fight a snail's-pace art film can handle, but more impact comes from her slow mimicking and then assumption of human emotions, learning how to smile and cry and, inevitably, falling for her sulky, bald, end-of-his-tether guardian. In the revised, high-tech utopian future created by their heroism, both characters still exist, but look happier and have a potential life together. Though it doesn't stretch to much in the way of effects, beyond a few strategic wrecks, it has breathtaking scenery, and the climactic time-untangling takes place in an especially beautiful glacial cavern which links to the creator's minimalist apartment in 2014.

First published in this form here.

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