Planet B (Planète B) had its UK première at the Glasgow Film Festival, 5 Mar 2025
Writer/director Aude Léa Rapin’s Planet B (Planète B) may be set in the Grenoble of 2039, but the constituent elements that make up this world of tomorrow – the mainstreaming of authoritarianism, the proliferation of mass surveillance, the wilful ignoring of climate change, the ascendancy of lives lived online, the building of massive walls to keep migrants out and of prisons to keep undesirables in – are all easily recognisable from today.
A collective of environmentalists and activists known as ®ⱡ has been labelled “eco-terrorists” and outlawed by the state. One of its experienced members, Julia Bombarth (Adèle Exarchopoulos), is violently taken down during an action, and wakes along with her colleagues and accomplices in what appears to be a paradise: a ‘hotel’ with luxurious rooms, recreational areas and a swimming pool, as well as its own private beach on an idyllic Mediterranean coastline. Yet this is in fact “the world’s first virtual prison”, located somewhere between the Big Brother of George Orwell and of Reality TV. For the inmates, all avatars of themselves, are under immense pressure to identify others in their organisation, and are subjected to regular nightmarish psychological torments while also all turning on each other. In this oppressive atmosphere of paranoia, mistrust and betrayal, of plants and snitches among the traumatised and easily turned, at least half of the hell is other people.
Meanwhile, former Iraqi journalist Nour Hamdi (Souheila Yacoub), in her desperation to get cash together to travel to Canada before her French work visa runs out, steals a high-tech headset from the military facility where she works as a cleaner, and accidentally discovers that she can use it to enter and exit, at least virtually, the prison where Julia is being held. With a secret line of communication now open to Julia, Nour races to work out where the real prisoners are being held, and how to expose the extralegal institution, even as everyone, whether on the inside or the outside, must make choices which will change their lives forever.
Nour’s committed solidarity with a complete stranger seems so strange in this day and age that it has to come tinged with an erotic angle just to break through the viewer’s cynicism – and yet really it represents the only sort of hope, and the only exemplary model, for how humanity might rise above the mess that we are all facing. Here escape hangs on a series of narrow threads – delicate leaps of faith that bind together everyone in the precarious struggle against fascism – as once again, the ‘not too distant future’ of dystopian cinema is really just the present, extrapolated and exaggerated. Featuring an electronic score from filmmaker Bertrand Bonello, Rapin’s film offers more than one kind of escapism, on an alternative, digital planet that is simultaneously ideal and infernal, gamified and godless. Perhaps, after all, it is not so very different from our own world today.
strap: Aude Léa Rapin’s cyberpunk dystopia shows the whole world trapped in a totalitarian system from which solidarity is the only escape
© Anton Bitel
