Movie Melting Pot… ‘Dante 01’ (France, 2008)

Have you ever been really excited about seeing a movie based on you past experience with a filmmaker, only to be mostly disappointed and become frustrated by your wasted enthusiasm? Well, that’s sort of what my experience with Marc Caro’s newest film ‘Dante 01’ was like.

If you’re not familiar with the name, Marc Caro co-directed ‘Delicatessen’ and ‘The City of Lost Children’ with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but ‘Dante 01’ is Caro’s first feature film in ten years and he’s gone solo this time. The dark fairy tale fantasy elements that made ‘Delicatessen’ and ‘The City of Lost Children’ such fascinating experiences are absent in this science fiction thriller that attempts to draw more on Jeunet’s style and tone for ‘Alien: Resurrection’.

‘Dante 01’ takes place in the future. The title refers to a remote incarceration station deep into remote space that orbits around a fiery molten planet. The station houses two doctors, three security guards and seven mentally unstable criminal inhabitants. The station resembles a structure made of Rubik’s cube-like blocks with levels referred to as “circles of Hell” as the story is loosely based on Dante’s Inferno, although “loosely” is a term used here with much creative license.

A new prisoner arrives at Dante 01 accompanied by a new doctor Elisa (Linh Dan Pham) and is introduced into the world of it’s psychologically disturbed residents. Elisa attempts to encourage the residing doctors to embrace her new protocols for treatments, but Persephone (Simona Maicanescu) is already beginning to fear the worst for the entire station as the new prisoner, given the name Saint Georges (Lambert Wilson) by his fellow crazies, hides a secret and powerful force within himself. The cast also includes the regular Dominic Pinon (Delicatessen) as one of the seven inmates.

While the backstory of what happened to Saint Georges prior to his incarceration on Dante 01 is dealt with on minimal level, it is revealed that he was found on a ship alone and covered in blood and that he encountered some powerful alien force. Now, held on Dante 01, the “force” is taking him over and will ultimately bring upon the fate of everyone on board. The characters in ‘Dante 01’ are not very well developed and not a single character in the film inspires any empathy or likability from the viewer. Watching ‘Dante 01’ is sort of like watching ‘The Faces of Death’ in that you have no real interest in the characters other than to see the details of their inevitable deaths.

‘Dante 01′ is not all bad, though, despite my distaste for the story and disappointment with the overall outcome. Visually, the movie is actually very engaging and creative. The production design and cinematography are dark and morbid, as opposed to being cold and sterile as was the direction in George Lucas’ ‘THX-1100’, which was another futuristic film with lots of bald people. ‘Dante 01’ has the visual feel and tension of ‘Cube’ combined with the shadow-rich lighting and rich color palette of Jeunet and Caro’s previous two films.

Even with a small budget, ‘Dante 01’ manages to develop some great set design and special effects, even if they aren’t put to the best use. As the story develops further and the events unfold, the use of special effects increase to further enhance the interpretation of what is happening to Saint Georges. By the end of the film, ‘Dante 01’ begins to feel a bit like a French remake of Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ with it’s solitary depictions of Saint Georges, heavily entrenched in mesmerizing special effects sequences intended to convey the state of his mind and being as he drifts in space, approaching his own fate.

Caro clearly has taken much influence from his previous experiences on films with Jeunet as well as influences from other films to piece together what could be called his first widely released solo venture. In all honesty, the cast did a fine job with the story they had to work with, but Pinon (as usual) tends to stand out. All things aside, ‘Dante 01’ only manages to maintain interest through it’s visual appeal and would otherwise have failed on a more complete level than it did.

The 100-minute ‘Dante 01’ DVD released under the Dimension Extreme banner on April 21, 2009 and features the original French audio along with English and Spanish subtitles and an English dubbed track, which is quite a rare thing to appear on a French film. Aside from the movie itself, the only real perk of the DVD is a making-of featurette which is actually fairly interesting, maintaining the same hypnotic musical score by Raphael Elig and Eric Wenger that presides over the film.