Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem denounce the evils of technocapitalism

VeniceThirty-four years after presenting Jamón, jamón, by Bigas Luna, at the Venice Film Festival, the couple formed by Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz has returned to tread the red carpet of the Italian event for the premiere of Bunker, the new work by the French playwright and filmmaker Florian Zeller. This is the seventh time the Spanish acting couple has shared the big screen. In this case, they play a married couple consisting of a successful architect and an editor. The couple lives in London, with their two daughters, in a situation of privilege, a “comfort” that seems to have torn apart the woman's existential well-being. This unstable situation is struck by the appearance of a tech mogul who offers the architect the construction of a bunker in Hawaii.

The generous remuneration and the pharaonic proportions of the work captivate the yearnings for grandeur of Bardem's character, but the wife, played by Cruz, immediately notices the dark side of the assignment. It is not just about the obscene accumulation of capital by the technology guru, but the evidence that the most powerful sense the collapse of our world, and that instead of trying to do something to fix it, they prefer to build bunkers to protect themselves from the apocalypse.

“When I read the script, I was especially interested in the treatment of the tech mogul figure,” Penélope Cruz explained at the film's press conference. “It seems that the people who make the big decisions that mark our lives can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” the actress denounced. And she went even further: “These semi-aliens say that, with artificial intelligence, we will all have more free time. It scandalizes me that they do not take into account the jobs that will be lost. Are they missing a gene that has made them lose every shred of empathy?”. Bardem, pulling on the thread of the lack of empathy raised by Cruz, pointed out that Bunker speaks, in essence, of “the need to connect with the other”.

Bunker is an ambitious project that does not realize its pretensions due to an overly explicit exposition of its theses. When the film immerses itself in marital drama –picking up echoes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema–, the level rises, and the same happens with the study of the protagonist family’s dynamics –fortunately, the teenage daughter is not reduced to the cliché of the social media addict–. However, when the film plays with the codes of the thriller (with Stephen Graham as a humble neighbor who threatens the well-being of the protagonist family), the metaphor of the domestic bunker becomes too evident. Curiously, in the final stretch, the film recalls Michael Haneke’s studies of the bourgeois bad conscience, although in Bunker the fatalism is balanced by a faint halo of hope. Despite the magnitude of the problems that Florian Zeller presents, Penélope Cruz has shown a certain optimism about the future: “Young people are realizing the manipulation to which they are being subjected, and they are rebelling”.

The ghost of Elon Musk

Without abandoning the darker side of global capitalism, the festival has hosted, outside the competition for the Golden Lion, the presentation of the documentary Musk, directed by the American Alex Gibney, Oscar winner for Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) and an expert in portraying technology gurus –he is the author of Steve Jobs: the man in the machine (2015) and The inventor: Out for blood in Silicon Valley (2019), about the figure of Elizabeth Holmes–. Now, courtesy of HBO, Gibney dedicates a nearly four-hour film to Elon Musk, a prominent member of the technocapitalist pantheon. Without hiding his personal disagreements with Musk –the documentary opens with a hostile exchange of messages between the director and the businessman on the X network–, Gibney constructs an exhaustive and non-chronological study of the character, with a huge amount of archival material and interviewing people who, for the most part, have suffered the despotism and narcissism of the richest man on the planet: ex-wives, former collaborators, and workers of the United States Agency for International Development, dismantled by Musk during his time in Donald Trump's government.

Navigating through the personal and professional life of the tech mogul, Gibney achieves the goal of alerting about the evident threat of a man who has accumulated immense power without having proven his worth. The documentary presents Musk as a misogynist with delusions of grandeur who has conquered Silicon Valley, cyberspace, and the White House with broken promises. Especially chilling is the part of the documentary that Gibney dedicates to the "legion of children" that Musk has fathered, while pursuing a kind of genetic conquest; Vivian Wilson, Musk's trans daughter, appears in archival footage calling her father a “fascist,” and in the final stretch of the documentary the mogul appears at a rally for Alternative for Germany. However, Gibney ends up being a victim of an animosity that leads him to create a digital double of Musk –made with artificial intelligence– that agrees to answer the questions that the filmmaker wants to but cannot ask the mogul. This ridiculous avatar introduces into the film a satirical, almost frivolous component, which does not quite align with the alarm that Gibney intends to inspire.