Com­put­er Chess

The Ter­mi­na­tor films famous­ly proph­e­sied a moment — some time dur­ing 2029, to be more exact — where the intel­lec­tu­al capac­i­ty of com­put­ers would tran­scend and sub­se­quent­ly dom­i­nate (vio­lent­ly) their fee­ble-mind­ed human oper­a­tors. Direc­tor James Cameron saw the upshot of this crit­i­cal junc­ture as an apoc­a­lyp­tic bout of man-ver­sus-robot com­bat which took (takes?) place with­in a hail­storm of bullets.

Direc­tor Andrew Bujal­s­ki (effort­less­ly chan­nelling the arch spir­it of Nashville-era Alt­man) has tak­en a more sedate approach to this por­ten­tous hypo­thet­i­cal, fram­ing the self-imposed destruc­tion of mankind as an eccen­tric week­end chess tour­na­ment that takes place dur­ing the 1980s and in the ample con­fer­ence facil­i­ties offered at a cut-price rate by a rinky-dink Austin chain motel.

Chron­i­cling an awk­ward assem­blage of the com­put­er pro­gram­ming pow­er­hous­es of the west­ern world (this is all tak­ing place dur­ing the lat­ter days of the cold war, remem­ber), the film appears to set out its stall as a must-win sports movie. It presents its key pro­tag­o­nists and then sim­ply explains the rules of the game with the help of crud­dy ana­logue sub­ti­tles. Each com­put­er chess pro­gramme enters into a round-robin tour­na­ment, with the over­all win­ner then get­ting to test its met­tle against a flesh-and-blood grand­mas­ter who — up to this point — has nev­er been beaten.

Yet, it soon becomes appar­ent that Bujal­s­ki has lit­tle inter­est in the facile, arti­fi­cial dra­ma of a genre film, and instead mounts a com­ic inves­ti­ga­tion into the pro­gram­mers’ lives and rela­tion­ships while explor­ing the intri­ca­cies, both moral and tech­ni­cal, that come with cre­at­ing strat­e­gy-based com­put­er pro­grammes. For some, the cre­ative appli­ca­tion of these ​“games”, it appears, is less than benign.

Many have seen this film as a brave new direc­tion for Bujal­s­ki, a writer/​director who honed his con­sid­er­able skills by mak­ing emo­tion­al­ly intri­cate, Rohmer-esque stud­ies of inad­e­qua­cy and roman­tic dis­ap­point­ment such as Mutu­al Appre­ci­a­tion and Fun­ny Ha Ha. They were movies in which, osten­si­bly, noth­ing hap­pened, but were about the tex­tures of dia­logue, the mechan­ics of human inter­ac­tion and the time peo­ple spend think­ing about what they’re going to say. A film like Beeswax, about a young woman deal­ing with the pre­car­i­ous future of her vin­tage cloth­ing store which she co-runs with an old friend-turned-ene­my, sup­plants the games­man­ship and tac­ti­cal prowess of chess into a real (and mun­dane) social situation.

In fact, Com­put­er Chess has less in com­mon with the actu­al game of chess than Beeswax does. Here, the ​“mun­dane” sit­u­a­tions which have been the sub­jects of Bujalski’s pre­vi­ous films are framed with­in a broad­er con­text, and the events it por­trays are seen as hav­ing roots which stretch out into the realms of the unknown. Though the peo­ple involved only have a mild inkling that their work has any rel­e­vance beyond a quaint pas­time, Bujal­s­ki cul­ti­vates an insid­i­ous sense of dread, a feel­ing that this joc­u­lar intel­lec­tu­al con­test is being covert­ly infil­trat­ed, mon­i­tored and documented.

The deci­sion to pho­to­graph the film on fuzzy, unsta­ble black-and-white video bol­sters the sense that what we’re watch­ing is a piece of found footage or an offi­cial secret doc­u­ment that was belat­ed­ly unearthed from the base­ment a con­demned gov­ern­ment build­ing. The way in which it is edit­ed, the tim­ing of the shots and the move­ment of the cam­era sug­gest an observ­er, some­one who maybe knows more about the future sig­nif­i­cance of the week­end that those involved in it.

There are longeurs and digres­sions which occa­sion­al­ly take you out of the dra­ma, such as an inex­plic­a­bly cheap and pro­tract­ed scene in which one of the google-eyed nerds is being unknow­ing­ly drawn into a three-way. It’s a fun­ny scene in its own right, and would’ve have made for A‑material in just about any con­ven­tion­al com­e­dy you care to men­tion. But it arrives at a point when Bujalski’s for­mal attack for­ma­tion appears far more com­plex and well defined, and the scene trans­lates as a mis­fired bluff.

Half way through the film, the out­come of the tour­na­ment becomes imma­te­r­i­al. And just as the sport ele­ment of the film is grad­u­al­ly drained away from the dra­ma, so is any sense that it’s an out­right com­e­dy. Amus­ing touch­es, such as the intro­duc­tion of the first female con­tes­tant into the tour­na­ment and that Amer­i­can sta­ple, the invet­er­ate rival­ry between Ivy league insti­tu­tions, make it eas­i­er to slink into the mate­r­i­al, but Bujal­s­ki has ideas that are big­ger, more sophis­ti­cat­ed and have more in com­mon with the films of Davids Cro­nen­berg and Lynch than they do the time-hon­oured, Sun­dance-approved, droll Amer­i­can indie.

If this isn’t quite 2013’s best movie, it’s cer­tain­ly its most plea­sur­ably cryp­tic and idio­syn­crat­ic, a work to sit down and spend time with in order to exam­ine from all poten­tial angles. The extra­or­di­nary final shot — and it’s one in which alters the entire mean­ing of the film if you decide watch it again — marks a per­fect dove­tail of form and con­tent. Just as ques­tions about an uncer­tain future of full-scale mechan­i­cal automa­tion take over from the jol­li­ty of com­pe­ti­tion, the film offers the chill­ing sug­ges­tion that maybe that future is right now.