Robots Rock!

The transfer of pop musicians to celluloid has often been an ignoble affair. A quick and derisory reminder of such cinematic dross as The Bee Gees’ misfired ‘rock opera’, their take on The Beatles’ Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band; U2’s ponderously awful Rattle and Hum and the Spice Girls crimson-inducing Spiceworld are examples to fear and dread. Only Slade’s cautionary music biz fable, Flame, comes anywhere near to giving the big screen the respect it deserves.

So it’s with some nervous trepidation that French disco-tech producers Daft Punk, namely Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem Christo, unveil their 73 minute art-house excursion, Electroma; nervous because, so far at least, Daft Punk’s reputation resides on their colossal influence, their peerless agenda setting on the dancefloor and in the charts. Can they also usher in a new era of credible, pop-based cinema? Or will they end up on the cutting room floor of cinematic history?

It’s been over ten years now since Daft Punk’s debut album, Homework, was unleashed and quickly grabbed up, gobbled down and shamefully copied time and time again. Daft Punk’s signature sound, a hyper-frenetic pinball of silvery, squelching synths and vocodo’s put through a mangled C-90 tape, quickly established itself as the way to ensure bank rolling cash and press-pleasing kudos. After all, where would Madonna and Kylie’s back-from-the-dead career revivals be without ripping off Daft Punk? The same is true of any number of young hopefuls today. This year’s much approved dancefloor acts Digitalism, Justice and MSTRKRFT seem to take their riffs and ideas solely from Daft Punk’s 2001 album, Discovery (nee Disco Very. Ha!). And then there’s New York’s LCD Soundsystem, whose fanboy fantasy single from 2005, Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, really says it all.

If all this sounds annoyingly hip, self-consciously ‘cool’ and all a bit Shoreditch Twat, think again. A big factor in why Daft Punk are so genuinely adored is their levity, their bare-faced cheek, their contrariness and their refusal to play by anyone’s rules. Long before London DJ Sean Rowley’s Guilty Pleasures clubnight, wherein North London 30somethings go misty-eyed for old Leo Sayer singles, Daft Punk were already outraging some critics by incorporating AOR dullards Supertramp and Prog-rock abominations Sky into their streamlined Gallic disco. Who else would decide to omit their most jaw-droppingly brilliant moment, Digital Love, from last year’s Greatest Hits set? Who sometime insist on giving (rare) interviews wearing their trademark Robot masks? And who else could get away playing big stadiums by simply miming to a mixed CD-R (and still make it sound great)? Daft Punk are slyly grin-stretching for all the right reasons.

So it’s with some relief, then, that Daft Punk’s idiosyncratic qualities can be found aplenty in Electroma. The plot is breathtakingly simple. Two robots, who you assume are Bangalter and de Homem Christo, but in fact played by actors Peter Hurteau and Michael Reich, drive through the Southwestern American landscape in a Ferrari 412. They arrive at a small town in Inyo County, California where the residents are also robot-like but living a perfectly becalmed suburban existence. The ‘hero robots’, though, appear to want something more. They drive up to a high-tech facility where liquid latex is poured over their heads and meticulously shaped into human faces (which actually do resemble our Daft Punk heroes). As the twosome stroll through the smalltown, the Robo-residents are non-plussed at these ‘humans’. When the duo’s faces start to melt in the sun, the locals realise they’re fake and chase after them. Once in hiding, the ‘hero robots’ reluctantly peel off the ruined masks, leave the town, their dream of becoming human behind, and begin a gloomy hike across the desert salt flats.

It doesn’t take a great deal of grey matter to decipher what Daft Punk are mulling over here. In many ways Electroma seems an outgrowth of Daft Punk’s third album, 2005’s Human After All, wherein the songs suggested a tension between being liberated and dominated by technology. In Electroma, there’s an obvious and simplified nod to Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and his tract that modern day technology has helped regiment and stifle our humanity and freedom. In particular, the suburban robots seem to play out Marcuse’s notion that ‘individuals identify themselves with the existence which is imposed upon them’ and that ‘the subject which is alienated is swallowed up by its alienated existence’. The two ‘hero robots’ attempt to break out of such ‘one-dimensional conformity’, by attempting to be more ‘real’ and ‘human’, plays on much of the counter-culture ethos that Marcuse’s book influenced.

As a genuine art-house film, interpretation is obviously in the eye of the cinema-seat-holder. So while it might appear that Daft Punk are endorsing over-familiar themes here, the film’s closing scenes suggests a critique of such ideas that has chilling contemporary resonance. As the ‘hero robots’ become obsessed by being ‘different’ to the suburbanites, their only way to fulfil this is by being estranged from them altogether - hence their isolated hike across the desert. But rather than this providing fulfilment and meaning to their existence, they eventually become suicidal and blow themselves up. Whilst it might be screamingly obvious to think of Islamic Jihadists here, the murder/suicide pact in Electroma echoes that of other loathers of modern society, Gert Bastian and Petra Kelly of the German Green Party.

The real strength of Electroma is that Daft Punk use these rather slender ideas to their advantage. By having no dialogue there’s an absorbing quality, even intensity, to the slow-folding action on the screen. We become highly curious as to the fate of the two placid robots on the Californian planes. Other than that, however, Electroma exists as a piece of pure cinematic eye-candy, an indulgence of aesthetic pleasure – and it’s all the better for it. As directors with no previous experience, Bangalter and De Homem Christo are remarkably accomplished behind the camera. Their ability to conjure off-kilter atmospheres has that same steady gaze that David Lynch brings to the screen, while the sun-bleached glare and slightly technicolour hues recalls Nicolas Roeg’s sci-fi masterpiece, The Man Who Feel To Earth.

And let’s not forget Daft Punk’s aforementioned humour here. In one scene that’s already become a talking point of Electroma - and caused outbreaks of laughter at the screening - is when footage of a naked woman is dotted amongst the sand dunes. The laugh of recognition is that Bangalter and de Homem Christo had clearly read our minds – those sand dunes really do look like an attractive, naked woman.

For all Daft Punk’s Robo-obsessions, technophilia/phobia and Electroma’s sci-fi subtext, it seems Bangalter and De Homem Christo really are ‘human after all’. Does this mean that Electroma is also flawed and self-indulgent, then? At times it can be, but in the slim-pickings of pop cinema, Electroma, like Daft Punk themselves, stand robot-head and shoulders above the rest.

Electroma is on at selected cinemas across the UK (see www.electronma.org). It is released on DVD on September 3rd 2007.