A cyber-woman is on the loose, and she's using random sex to collect sperm, leaving a trail of impotence in her wake. Perfectly formed, infuriatingly well-dressed, well-versed in foxy pick-up lines from classic films and somehow able to disrupt surrounding technology with a wave of her metallic fingernails -- you can't resist her.
But she only does it because she must, because in her experimental existence lies one flaw. To survive, she and her sisters must inject themselves regularly with male chromosome. And so she must go out and find it, in the form of spermatozoa.
Writer/director/producer Lynn Hershman Leeson's "Teknolust" plummets its viewers immediately into the quirky, color-coordinated world of three sister Self-Replicating Automatons (SRAs) named Ruby, Marine and Olive. Birthed from a computer but with their "mother's" human DNA, the sisters are equal parts human and software.
Hershman Leeson, a multimedia artist interested particularly in the ways technology can complicate human identity, reinvents Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" in this cyber-fiction film, her second of feature length. Once again she teams up with Tilda Swinton, who does quadruple duty portraying all three sisters as well as their creator, Rosetta Stone.
Rosetta is a lonely bio-geneticist who has been a virgin for 30-some years, and, giving up on men, decides she doesn't need any help to make babies. So she inserts her DNA into some computer software and brews it -- "like baking brownies," except what comes out of the oven are automatons, each with their own identity and will.
Although she tries to seclude them in a wired, color-coordinated warehouse, the SRAs become increasingly bored with their isolation and increasingly intrigued by the outside world, or "the jungle," as they call it. Soon Rosetta's creations become too much for her to handle, especially when Ruby, the firstborn and bravest of the trio, starts wreaking havoc on the male population of "the jungle" and gets on criminal investigators' "Wanted" list.
What works well in "Teknolust" is its visual lushness. Awash in vibrant color, practically every image is breathtaking in its own right. Hiro Narita, director of photography, is the one responsible for this ultra sharp, hyper real look, although his and Hershman Leeson's choice to use Sony's CineAlta 24P digital camera (used for "Star Wars: Episode II") must get some credit.
And Swinton's multi-role acting cannot go unnoted. She maneuvers through each role effortlessly, giving the sisters and their creator completely different identities and interacting with herself multiple times.
What doesn't work so well is the story line. About halfway through, the ending becomes clear, and the getting there becomes predictable. While at first interesting and fresh, the quirks quickly get tiresome, and what begins as a story about creator vs. creations turns into trite moralizing on the importance of "real" love, with a few elements of that dreaded genre, romantic comedy, making themselves apparent.
Yet "Teknolust" does not strive to become anything it's not. While it could have been an ambitious examination of the possibilities and threats of contemporary bio-genetics advances, Hershman Leeson's film instead simply explores the crux of such issues, complicating them, but never taking them all that seriously.
It is this lighthearted quirkiness that keeps "Teknolust" from being more than a visually stunning, semi-interesting venture into the cyber world. But, I suppose, one can't fail at what one doesn't try, and so Hershman Leeson's film succeeds exceedingly well at what it sets out to do -- raise a few challenging questions while having some fun with its characters. One has hope, however, that Hershman Leeson will go further next time, for she has the potential to create something as original and lasting as "Blade Runner," a cyber-fiction epic of grand proportions.
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