Director/Scenario – Enki Bilal, Screenplay – Enki Bilal & Dan Franck, Producers – Maurice Bernart & Christoph Meyer-Wiel, Photography – Eric Gautier, Music – Goran Vejvoda, Digital Effects – Medox Medien GmbH (Supervisor – Stephane Bidault), Production Design – Jean-Vincent Puzos. Production Company – Salome SA/Schlemmer Film GmbH/Nova Films/Canal+/Eurimages/Le Centre National de la Cinematographie/Sofica Sofinergie 3/Sofinergie 4/Filmstiftung Nordhein-Westfalen/Club d’Investissement Media/Procirep.
Cast
Johan Leysen (Anikst Soloko), Julie Delpy (Lena), Michel Piccoli (Mac Bee), Richard Bohringer (Glenbarr), Marie Laforet (Eva), Yann Collette (Alvin/Edward), Olivier Achard (The Concierge), Jean-Louis Trintignant (The Surgeon)
Plot
In the French sector of the lunar colony, someone has assassinated the dictator Mac Bee’s twin brother, followed by one of his sons. Mac Bee is ailing. Pamphlets are dropped all around the city saying that Tykho Moon, the person who provided Mac Bee’s organ transplants several years before but was believed killed in a hospital fire, is still alive. Mac Bee demands that his security forces find Tykho Moon so that he can be healed. Elsewhere, the sculptor Anikst Soloko suffers amnesia. He becomes involved with the beautiful Lena and Glenbarr from the American zone who both seemed to be tied up in the assassinations.
Enki Bilal is an interesting name that I have come across several times. Bilal was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia, but his family fled to Paris when he was at an early age. Bilal was encouraged to go into comics by none other than Asterix creator Rene Goscinny where he has had a successful career as a comic-book writer and artist since the 1970s, working for magazines like Metal Hurlant and accruing a number of awards. He has ventured onto film as director three times, first with the SF film Bunker Palace Hotel (1989), followed by Tykho Moon here. The only of his films to gain any wide interest was his third and last to date Immortal (ad vitam) (2004), based on his most famous comic-book the Nikopol trilogy.
I’m afraid I don’t much get Enki Bilal’s films. Immortal (ad vitam) was more conventionally plotted but both Bunker Palace Hotel and Tykho Moon befall a certain ‘Frenchness’. French Cinema seeks to eschew Hollywood models and plotting formula. Where a Hollywood film is usually driven by its plot and the progression of plot elements in a linear line from scene to scene, French cinema does not – it seems best summed up by Jean-Luc Godard’s famous quote “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order”. Scenes often feel like they lack a dramatic point, they are not about carrying the plot forward so much as they are a chiaroscuro where you are watching the characters and the world and story as conveyed through them. It is only when you pull back from the individual scene to a wider perspective that the nature of the film becomes apparent.
In this regard, it is well towards halfway through Tykho Moon before I could get a clear idea of what was going on and even then was not at all clear about the world we are in. Where we are seems divided into zones and that this is the French sector ruled over by Michel Piccoli. Someone is assassinating Piccoli’s family members – this could be the beautiful Julie Delpy or vulgar American Richard Bohringer. Piccoli’s dictator medical has a condition that is causing him to break out in blue blotches. He is seeking a cure from his donor, the titular Tykho Moon, who disappeared several years ago. Pamphlets have been appearing around the city proclaiming that Tykho Moon is still alive. In the midst of this, the amnesiac Johan Leysen, who appears to be some sort of sculptor, wanders about and gets involved with Julie Delpy.
Julie Delpy as the assassin Lena
These things happen but there is no real plot attached to them. I mean I could easily see a Hollywood film taking the same elements and assembling them into a brooding SF/film noir combination. But the film here never coheres into anything. The dialogue has littered clues about the world, but it is never clear why people are assassinating Michel Piccoli’s family, or what motivates almost all of the characters, or even who is dropping the Tykho Moon pamphlets. It is just a film of endless scenes that you feel are supposed to come together and mean something and seem to constantly suggest there is a big significance, but only arrives at a point where the film delivers very little.
It is only right at the end where we find we are on The Moon that Tykho Moon confirms it is an SF film. Otherwise everything could have been a mundane work about assassins in an unknown country. In going back to re-review, I see the opening subtitles that refer to Mac Bee as a dictator in his lunar city, which must have passed me by when I started watching. Without this however, Tykho Moon would not be an SF film.
