Meirelles: 360 (2011)

By this point in time, globalisation has ceased to be astonishing or sublime – it’s just a fact about our world, something we’re more or less used to. Of course, cinema still has the power to estrange us from it, but it seems increasingly the case that it needs to estrange us from the inside, making us realise just how comfortable we really are with this new world order. In a sense, that’s what Fernando Meirelles sets out to do in 360, a film that has a lot in common with globalisation cinema of recent years – an ensemble drama united by multinational finance, mass transit and the flesh trade – but is far more quotidian, much closer to an updated Naked City for the global era, a day in the life of the new world city. Set mainly in Slovakia, Vienna, Paris, London and Colorado, Peter Morgan’s screenplay jumps time zones so many times that morning and evening are states of mind more than anything else, but what’s striking about the film is how assiduously Meirelles preserves them as states of mind – we’re not in the limbic murk of, say, Olivier Assayas – to the point where it often feels like a study in the ingenuity with which global workers manage to wrest morning, noon and night out of lives that have been drained of any diurnal stimulus and momentum. As a result, watching the film is a slightly groggy experience, as Meirelles moves from sunrise to sunset in the abbreviated, artificial manner of long-haul flights, offering us periodic bursts of light hygiene to adjust us to each new scene or space along the way. Equally accomodating is the way Meirelles disguises his split screens within his mise-en-scene, with the result that even when the screen is divided into four sections you don’t really notice, or at least don’t regard it as anything more than a matter of convenience, a concession to realism in the face of a global system in which so many people are thinking in two time zones at once. Of course, there’s still the ennui of earlier globalisation films, endless airport queues and long stretches of emptiness that allow Anthony Hopkins in particular to put in one of his most electrifyingly understated performances since The Remains Of The Day. But it’s a more domestic, quotidian boredom, and always falls short of total alienation, much like all Meirelles’ experimental touches here. In fact, if there is anything deeply sinister or disturbing about the film, it’s in the way its breezy palette and upbeat world music score prevents you ever feeling totally alienated from the world it depicts, as Meirelles overlays everything with a balmy sheen that’s positively nauseating by the last couple of scenes, only a few brightness levels below Blindness.