The Pink Cloud – first-look review

A par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable first date opens The Pink Cloud: a man and a woman awake in a ham­mock after their hook-up the night before to the sound of sirens. A city-wide tanoy blares, announc­ing that every­one should take shel­ter in the near­est build­ing and all win­dows and doors should be closed. If, at this moment of unknown threat, some­one hap­pened to be at the bak­ery or the super­mar­ket, that is where they must stay.

Brazil­ian direc­tor Iuli Gerbase’s sharp and allur­ing debut offers a view of a world we’ve become all-too famil­iar with. Locked down in an apart­ment after their date, near strangers Yago (Eduar­do Men­donça) and Gio­vana (Rena­ta de Lélis) work from home, video call their loved ones, and have their neces­si­ties deliv­ered to them.

Out­side, a pink cloud hov­ers, illu­mi­nat­ing the world in a soft, rose glow. Its warm hue and fluffy exte­ri­or dis­guise the hor­ror it has sud­den­ly inflict­ed on the world, a tox­ic gas that kills any­one exposed to it. Every­one has moved indoors for their safe­ty, con­fined to the near­est space for an inde­ter­mi­nate length of time. ​‘Any resem­blance to actu­al events is pure­ly coin­ci­den­tal,’ announces a title card at the begin­ning of the film.

Eerie pre­science aside, Gerbase’s film is remark­ably com­posed and the nar­ra­tive well sus­tained for what is essen­tial­ly a cham­ber piece. Time pass­es quick­ly in these cir­cum­stances as Gio­vana and Yago go through the motions of their bur­geon­ing rela­tion­ship. Fre­quent sex fades to bore­dom, life keeps on pass­ing, and sud­den­ly the cou­ple have brought a child into this cloud-bound soci­ety. Gio­vana gives birth with a doc­tor present via web­cam and their life spins for­ward again. Their son grows old­er, and the cloud lingers on.

The film is less con­cerned with the log­ic or mean­ing of the cloud itself than it is with Gio­vana and Yago’s respec­tive philoso­phies of life and the ways in which these are test­ed in their iso­la­tion. In an ear­ly scene, Gio­vana explains her lack of desire to have chil­dren with all the parental duties and oblig­a­tions that come with it. ​“If the cloud per­sists you won’t have to wor­ry about any of those things,” Yago replies.

It’s a brief moment that encap­su­lates every­thing that will come to break down between them; Yago’s will­ing­ness to embrace the life the cloud has forced upon them meets Giovana’s resis­tance and frus­tra­tion head on. Her lat­er preg­nan­cy, then, embod­ies the pres­sure placed upon her by this loss of lib­er­ty, the colour of the cloud a some­what obtuse nod to femininity.

Men­donça and de Lélis give affect­ing per­for­mances, har­monised in a clear char­ac­ter struc­ture that allows the nar­ra­tive to move eas­i­ly and con­vinc­ing­ly. Their rela­tion­al coher­ence bal­ances well with the ambi­gu­i­ty Ger­base allows the film to mel­low in, offer­ing no con­cise answers to the prob­lem of the cloud. As life goes on, Yago and Giovana’s innate dif­fer­ences become impassable.

The Pink Cloud is an assured first fea­ture, con­fi­dent in tone and adept in han­dling both a closed, inte­ri­or dra­ma and an expan­sive meta­phys­i­cal conundrum.