Flora Lau’s labyrinthine second feature LUZ takes place in a near future, or perhaps an alternative present, in which the virtual reality game LUZ attracts players from all over the globe.
Is it a game? Luz’s participants refer to “playing,” as in, “I’m going over to my friend’s house to play.” As in “playing with friends.” As in being with other people. And there is a certain, limited amount of community in the game world, in such places as a virtual bar where players gather, not to drink the inaccessible liquor, but to show off their weapons and fashion—one might consider the former as accessories to the latter—some of the most notable choices to be made as one constructs an online identity. In Luz, the game, it seems, you can’t help looking like yourself, but you can choose your tools and clothes. You can also choose your world from a menu of alternatives, ranging from the urban to the arboreal. None of these environments are entirely fantastic or enhanced—except that they seem much emptier than reality, cleaner in the sense that no humans, no sentient life at all, populate the landscape, just a handful of other players briefly passing through. There are no obstacles to overcome in Luz, though there are puzzles. No bosses to defeat, though there is, apparently, at least one goal: to locate a translucent deer that wanders all the worlds, leaving behind it a trail of light, a signal that you’ve just missed it. The buck is a mysterious figure of great beauty and grace. Strange then that most players pursue it with weapons in hand as if they aim to kill it. Is it an innate human impulse or a requirement of the game, this form of winning? And what would happen if the buck were caught and turned into a trophy?
In the game world and the other, non-game one we’ll call Reality, LUZ the film, tracks two central pairs: Wei, a dissolute father, seeking to reconnect with his long-estranged daughter Fa, and Ren, a young art gallery employee adrift in disenchantment, and her stepmother Sabine, a gallery-owner living in Paris, suffering from an unknown illness. Like the mystical buck of the game, both Fa and Sabine are elusive prizes, physically and emotionally distant, magnetic, and necessary. Though Wei and Ren’s real lives touch in other ways they don’t suspect (they’re both residents of Chongquing), they meet by chance in a fantasy forest in Luz, the game, an encounter that initiates a more and less tangible partnership in their respective quests. Whatever fulfillment Wei and Ren can hope for, they discover, requires a new tactic, the only one that might win Fa and Sabine’s trust and love, bind the other to them, making both pairs whole. In this sense, LUZ is a film about contemporary isolation, not just in the real, bustling, alienating landscapes of the media-saturated, post-industrial metropolis (represented here by Chongquing and Paris—the latter seeming quaint by comparison), but also in the virtual worlds of social media and the film’s imagined tech environment, which promise community but can’t escape the chilling qualities of allowing participants to fulfill personal fantasies in a communal space without boundaries or responsibility. You join the quest for the buck as the “you” you want to be, but your fellow hunters only ever seem to appear at the edges of your vision, dark, armed apparitions with unknowable intentions. They could as easily be enemies. Or, worse, they may have no interest in you at all. You’re alone. Again. Worse still, you’re divided: your body is in a room somewhere while your eyes and mind are in fantasy, insensitive as much to the pleasures as to the pain of real life.
This is to say that Luz is also a film about spaces, how we inhabit these with others, and the value of presence. What good are the wonders of the real or the virtual if they aren’t shared? Visually, Lau’s film seems not to prefer one over the other, focusing instead on the concept of shared experience, wherever this may occur. The real, lurid night world where Wei works is far more enticing to the eye than the virtual forest or even a real, sunlit beach. And when a character states, “It’s beautiful,” what she seems to be referring to is a smog-obscured downtown, observed across the tracks of a noisy monorail just outside the window. But what’s really beautiful, LUZ wants us to understand, is how humans connect, how emotion, and love for another, is developed and expressed communally in all our unbeautiful worlds.
LUZ is a hypnotic film of ideas, which is to say its pacing can be slow, and what is said is maybe sometimes overly obvious, and what is unsaid might be better presented in subtle dialogue by its entirely capable performers, including Isabelle Huppert, as Sabine.
Some of the film’s most challenging moments for the performers, one assumes, as much as for the viewer, are those when we watch Ren or Wei, eyes hidden behind their VR glasses, seeing a world we don’t. It’s one thing to perform what you, the actor, is seeing. But for us out here in the dark, how should one also perform that kind of absence, obscurity, and isolation while still providing the emotional content we expect? Maybe the image itself is the answer—a body insensitive to its immediate environment, dead to the (real) world, is loaded with a crushing pathos.
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