Grief and heartbreak easily lend themselves to stories rooted in the dreamy potential of the counterfactual. The loss of another demands you ask yourself (over and over again, perhaps) a simple question with infinite answers: “What if?” What if I’d said this? What if I’d done that instead? Would they have stayed? Would they still be here? In Nacho Vigalondo’s ambitious if baggy and imperfect lo-fi sci-fi romance “Daniela Forever,” Henry Golding’s Nick isn’t just stuck asking himself those questions. He is actively rewriting his story with his titular girlfriend (Beatrice Grannò) in a dream world where he controls any and all possibilities.
That isn’t hyperbole. Nick, a British DJ living in Madrid who’s been mourning the loss of Daniela for weeks on end, learns of a new type of drug that may help his situation. With just one pill a night, he’s told, he’ll be able to engage in lucid dreaming. The treatment helped a friend deal with her divorce. Why wouldn’t it work for him as he sorts through his grief? Only he doesn’t quite follow the guidelines put forth by the experimental study he signs up for. Instead, when Nick finds himself face to face with his late lover, Daniela, he begins building a world for them both where the tragedy that took her away from him never happened. After all, he’s in full control. That’s the promise of lucid dreaming. He can change the weather, the soundtrack, even the physics of this dream copy of his life in Madrid.
Of course, dreams are mere figments of our subconscious. Nick can only re-create what he knows. And so he travels to more and more side streets so he can walk them with Daniela as he sleeps. He peruses books he knows Daniela loves so she can enjoy them in his dream world. He goes online to watch a full set of his favorite band performing (Hidrogenesse, here also serving as the film’s composers) so he and Daniela can enjoy a concert together in the middle of Madrid. No matter that he constantly fibs his way through the debriefing sessions he’s required to attend with the researchers hoping to figure out what this pill could do if made freely available to the public. Nick is happy with Daniela, if only while he’s asleep.
This exercise in self-delusion (or self-soothing, if you’d prefer to be kinder) cannot last forever. Soon, Nick’s dreamy exploits begin to spill into his waking life. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, the fragile balance between his two lives begins to unravel. Vigalondo’s screenplay, thankfully, doesn’t shy away from the clearly murky ethical waters Nick wades himself into. Nor does it ignore the existential questions that underwrite his endeavor. What kind of life is he giving his Daniela if he’s the one pulling all the levers? Where is her agency in all of this? And, what, really, is he gaining by playing God in a world of dreamy make-believe? “Daniela Forever” confronts many of these questions head-on, thrusting plot and character alike into an introspective journey that won’t provide tidy answers for anyone involved.
But that’s ultimately what bogs down the film as well. Heady almost to a fault, “Daniela Forever” is all concept, all the time. Vigalondo’s screenplay is much too schematic and analytical for its own good. Visually, for instance, the Spanish filmmaker opts for a neat distinction between Nick’s split lives. DP Jon D. Domínguez shoots Nick’s dreary “real” life in digital, in a boxy ratio that cramps the character’s every move, confining him to a kind of early-’90s visual vibe. Meanwhile, Nick’s dream life is constantly sun-dappled and highly vibrant, shot in high-definition cinemascope; Madrid has rarely looked quite so radiant or as inviting as it does here. There is something quite intriguing about positing a sharper version of one’s world as existing in one’s subconscious. Dreams here are neither hazy nor surreal (give or take a few whimsical sight gags throughout). They are crisp copies of Nick’s reality. They’re more Nolan than Amenábar. Indeed, one aches for the whimsy of Gondry or the surrealism of Buñuel. Instead, “Daniela Forever” feels oddly stilted and stunted.
Structurally, the film spends too much time guiding Nick and the viewer on the many rules of his newfound dream-like powers. The focus is on the “how” of it all, which serves to obscure the wispiness of the “why.” Because Daniela only exists as a figment of Nick’s dreamy imagination, the romance at the heart of “Daniela Forever” remains frustratingly elusive. Grannò, left to play a hollowed-out character defined only by what’s demanded of her, tries her best to imbue Daniela with some personality. But next to Golding, who flounders as he tries to keep his Nick grounded amid a screenplay that gets stranger and more maudlin the more it trudges along, Grannò cannot keep Daniela’s relationship with Nick from fraying at the edges. There’s an intentional lack of cohesion in her performance as to what she is supposed to mean to him — or to the film, for that matter.
Vigalondo has suffused “Daniela Forever” with some provocative questions about love and grief, jealousy and control, agency and abandon. But with its myopic focus on Nick (there’s rarely a frame when Golding isn’t front and center, for better and for worse), the film cannot quite grapple with them with the depth and rigor they require. Instead, this two hour therapy experiment quickly starts to wear thin. Vigalondo tries his best to wrestle Daniela from collapsing into that overplayed “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope. But ultimately, film and character alike are stuck in a flattened vision of the world meant to go on, as its title suggests quite banally, forever and ever.
variety.com
#LoFi #Grief #Lucid #Dreaming
