Mika Rottenberg and Mahyad Tousi
On limited release
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FROM her high-rise in a future Kuala Lumpur, where goods flow freely, drone-propelled, while people stay in their apartments, Unoaku – in a brilliant, almost voiceless performance by Okwui Okpokwasili – ekes out her life.
There are herbs on her windowsill and vegetables growing in hydroponic cabinets built into her walls. If she is feeling lazy, a drone will deliver a meal that she can simply drop, box and all, into boiling water. Unoaku’s is a world of edible packaging, smart architecture, living rugs that she spritzes daily – and profound loneliness. She lives by herself, and so does everybody else.
Though Remote was filmed during the covid-19 lockdowns, it would be a mistake to consider it just another “lockdown movie”. Unoaku’s world is by no stretch a world in crisis, still less a dystopia. Her vibrant apartment – I want her wallpaper and so will you – is more refuge than prison. Its walls move to accommodate Unoaku, giving her at least the illusion of space. If it hadn’t been for the covid-19 pandemic, we might well be viewing this woman’s life as a relatively positive metaphor for what it would be like on a long space journey. One imagines lunar or Martian terraformers settling for much less.
Hers is, however, a little life: reduced to self-care, to hours gesturing at a blank wall – she is an architect, working in virtual reality – and to evenings in front of Eun-ji and Soju, a Korean dog-grooming TV show. Soju is the terrier and Eun-ji (Joony Kim) is its ebullient owner.
Things start to go very slightly wrong. Unoaku’s pan is returned dirty from the cleaning service. Eun-ji turns up drunk to her live show. Unoaku notices the goofy clock on Eun-ji’s wall has started to run backwards. When she points this out on the programme’s chat platform, she triggers a stream of contempt from other viewers.
Unoaku is far more fragile than we thought. Now, when she leans out of her window, bashing her cooking pan with a wooden spoon, celebrating, well, something – maybe just the fact of being alive and able to hear other human beings – she is left shaking, her face wet with tears.
Soon, other women contact her. They, too, have been watching Eun-ji and Soju. They, too, can see the clock going backwards on the dog groomer’s wall. Bit by bit, a kind of community emerges.
Commissioned by UK non-profit organisation Artangel and a consortium of international galleries, Remote is that rare thing, an “art movie”. It belongs to a genre streaming has made economically unviable and that has been largely forgotten.
Mika Rottenberg, one of twoco-directors, is an artist working in upstate New York, best known for short, cryptic video works, such as Sneeze, in which well-dressed men with throbbing noses sneeze out steaks, light bulbs and live rabbits. The other director, Mahyad Tousi, has a more traditional background: he was an executive producer on CBS comedy United States of Al, and is now writing a sci-fi adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights.
We can’t expect Remote to revive the art movie overnight, of course, but it offers an excellent argument for making the attempt. Like a modern Japanese or Korean short story, Remote explores the tiny bounds of an ordinary-seeming urban life, hemmed in by technology and consumption, and it surprises with a world of deep feeling that is bubbling just beneath the surface.
Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer. Follow him on Instagram @simon_ings
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