MicroCinema Scene

Let me start describing the synopsis of this highly successful experiment: Sometime in the 1960s a comet approaches the earth and threatens to collide in what would result in the end of humanity. One man decides to chronicle the last days on earth with his Super 8mm camera. If that triggers a CGI epic in your imagination, you’ll be 100% wrong. The Comet is a monumental arrangement of random super 8mm documentary footage taken by amateur photographer Bror Jacques de Wærn between 1959 and 1971 in Stockholm.

Wisely put together, director Johan Löfstedt conveys a state of imminence, punctuated by a sad love story and nostalgia for a lost era. So, is The Comet Sci-Fi? Yes, as an excuse. The filmmakers do not alter any of the individual shots, but all of them are taken out of context. Footage that was once mundane (even if occasionally dark and abstract) is now placed at the service of the somber storyline, complemented tremendously by the evocative score by Leif Jordansson, which emerges as a powerful character in the otherwise almost silent piece.

People look at up at tabloids, reading the fatal news in the paper. The elderly pity the young (title cards are interspersed at strategic moments when characters talk). The story escalates as the countdown starts: People running, cars fleeing the city, red sunsets, empty streets, atmospheric skylines of sublime architecture appear weathered by the grainy, jittery, wonderful texture of the Super 8mm. There are some real images of dead people (used to simulate suicides after newspapers announce there are 24 hours until the catastrophe). Some of these segments invoke panic, but there seems to a consensus among the conceived narrative and its characters that the end is unavoidable, and this is quite interesting: People march to their doom drowned in sadness more than distress.

Great percentage of the effectiveness is due to the fact that the world depicted is a Stockholm that no longer exists, a metaphor for the comet crashing in, destroying the past. Note how many elderly characters appear throughout.

More than Sci-Fi, it is an ode to a city and people that no longer exist. Not documentary nor fiction in the strictest sense, The Comet is a triumph of manipulation towards the creation of a rare kind of hybrid. The result is extremely haunting: A true work of poetry in motion.

Four and a half stars. 

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