It all starts like a fantasy tale: in a small boat floating along a tropical river, an old man is talking about a world that is in the grip of multinational corporations for good, and about an environmental disaster filling waters with hairy creatures. When the old man turns into a narrator, another story begins: that of a scientist who is doing research on a new bacterium infecting a river. Once he has explained his research and the political and economic stakes of pollution, the biologist goes back to the field, followed by an artist-filmmaker and his assistant. Then we are under the impression that The Green Vessel has found its genre and pace: somewhere between a parody of a widescreen adventure movie, and a speculative sci-fi film forecasting the future of our planet, with any hope of emancipation and ecological conversation definitely laid to rest by the alliance between the food-processing industry and big data companies. Except that the mutation of that filmic organism is just getting started. The real toxic thing here is not the green and wet territory the characters are disappearing into, but rather the cinematic land that the double story comes up with to lose the audience. The old man on one side, the scientist and his sidekicks on the other: the maps of their progress through the rainforest come one after another according to some variation pattern, in the inevitable monotony of the forest and its slight di erences in textures and colors. Green wins, the plans and the minds get lost, speeches proliferate in absurdity like algae in the river. The travel knows no end, no other way-out than the arbitrariness of imagination raving about landscapes. (C.N.)
Etienne de France
