Director/Screenplay – Iuli Gerbase, Photography – Bruno Polidoro, Music – Caio Amon, Visual Effects – Dot (Supervisor – Jose Francisco Neto), Production Design – Bernardo Zortea. Production Company – Prana Filmes/MPM Premium/If …/Ancine/BRDE (Banco Regional de Desenolvimento do Extremo Sul)/FSA (Fundo Setorial do Audiovisual)/Pro Cultura/Governo do Estado Rio Grande de Sul/IECine (Instituo Estadul de Cinema Do RS)/Locall.
Cast
Renata De Lelis (Giovana), Eduardo Mendonca (Yago Rui), Antonio Ranos (Lino Age 9), Gabriel Eringer (Lino Age 4), Girley Brasil Paes (Rui), Helene Becker (Julia), Kaya Rodrigues (Sara), Henrique Goncalves (Diego)
Plot
A pink cloud spreads around the world. Anyone that inhales it will die within ten seconds. In Brazil, people are urged to get indoors as quickly as possible. Giovana has hooked up with the masseur Yago and gone to her mother’s house for sex when the warning comes. As the cloud remains for days going into weeks, they are forced to deal with their confinement. The authorities arrange for supplies to be dropped in by drone. Over time, Giovana gives birth to a son Lino. As their confinement grows into four years, Giovana decides that she does not like Yago and they agree to live separately on either floor of the apartment. However, their son and the ongoing problems presented by their confinement brings them back together.
The Pink Cloud was shot during 2020 and appeared at Sundance and assorted film festivals throughout 2021. Given the timing, it takes zero imagination at all to substitute the pink cloud for the Covid-19 pandemic. When you do so, it is obvious that this is a film about the lockdown where people were being urged to stay indoors away from others for an extended period of time. There were a good number of films set during and about the actual lockdown from House of Quarantine (2020) to Locked Down (2021), Scenes from an Empty Church (2021) and Shelter in Place (2021) to the standout horror film The Harbinger (2022), even an entire anthology of Covid horror tales with Isolation (2021).
The Pink Cloud is the only of these Covid films apart from Songbird (2020) that imagines the lockdown dragging on years into the future. (At least ten years, given that the end credits tell us that the couple’s son is aged nine and adding nine months added for the duration of pregnancy). On the other hand, director/writer Iuli Gerbase does not imagine a terribly interesting Catastrophe – the major dramatic development is that the couple ‘divorce’ but cannot leave the apartment, meaning that they divide themselves between the upstairs and downstairs halves of the apartment. (I kept wondering how more dramatically interesting this would have been if they didn’t have the convenience of a two-story apartment).
I spent much of the film nitpicking the scenario. If nobody can go outside, how does such a society not entirely collapse in very short course? Drone deliveries are arranged by plastic chutes attached to the windows. But how does the supply chain not fall apart if people cannot go out and harvest crops and move food about? For that matter, surely the windows must have to have been opened or drilled through in order to attach the chutes for the drones, so how are people not exposed when that happens? If people cannot go to work, how does the economy not collapse? How is the power grid kept on?
Renata De Lelis and Eduardo Mendonca forced to live together under the pink cloud
If ordinary houses offer protection against the cloud, why are people not able to go outside without protective gear like gas masks or hazmat suits? For that matter, just how safe are regular houses – the people inside must be able to regulate some airflow otherwise carbon dioxide levels would build up to a level that would be toxic to the inhabitants, so if air can get in and out, how is it that does some of the pink cloud matter not as well?
Occasionally, the film debates some of these questions, showing the situation with those caught in supermarkets or wondering what has happened to homeless people, or the discussion of what their son would do with their dead bodies. The film works better when it is about the human element – Eduardo Mendonca’s dementia-ridden father (Eduardo Mendonca) no longer recognising him; Renata De Lelis’s teenage sister caught at an apartment where friends were having a party and become pregnant from unprotected sex with the father of the house.
Like Aniara (2018), this is a film about how people adapt over time to a situation in which they are trapped. The best parts of the story come in the last third where we see all three characters in the house have arcs that conflict – Renata De Lelis who hates the world she misses and retreats into Virtual Reality; Eduardo Mendonca who is happy because the imprisonment means that he has the family he wants; and young Lino who regards the cloud as good because he knows nothing else.
The Pink Cloud was a feature-length debut for Brazilian director/writer Iuli Gerbase who had previously made several short films.
