Effacer l'historique

Saw this at the Berlinale 2020, where it was part of the official competition for the Golden Bear. I'm in limbo whether this is a movie getting cheap laughs at the expense of digital illiterates, or can it be an intentional satire how lowly educated people get into unsustainable debts, or does it want to demonstrate how modern times subliminally influence our society in more aspects than we think. Anyway, everything is exaggerated and enlarged upto the point that it is not funny anymore, for me that is, but a considerable part of the venue (over 1,750 seats) loudly disagreed several times with me on this point.

The primary topic of this movie is that Internet is changing more things in life than ever imagined. Let's call it cyberisation. Think of support- and helpdesks (on average supportive nor helpful), local branch offices disappearing, every task requiring access to a computer, and more along that line.

A positive point of this movie is that the main protagonists are neither the elderly with grey hair nor the baby boomers who are usually associated with computer illiteracy, because of not adapting to contemporary society that becomes more and more Internet-centric nowadays. It could have really been a matter of cheap laughs when they had casted old people in these roles. Luckily, they didn't. We saw people in their 30/40-ies doing stupid things with computers and telephones, having useless discussions with helpdesks and branch office employees, and so on.

A second topic, although it does not say it explicitly, is the underlying message that those lowly educated people are getting in deep debts merely by not understanding how money works, yet still wanting all sorts of things they cannot really afford when they really had done the math. A loan may be a quick solution on the short term, but eventually it all adds up to unsurmountable debts. A fortiori, a 10,000-euro loan to pay a blackmailer may seem a quick solution, but it is a very bad idea in the long run. It is a good thing that the woman in question did not get any, for all sorts of reasons like branch offices with no people authorized to help her. We were happy to see that a different solution came to the rescue.

I doubt this movie provides much news to the not-so-illiterate viewer. Everything that passed by is easily recognizable and certainly not far-fetched. An exception may be the implicit joke about a hacker calling him-self god, living in a wind-power generator and thus able to (illegally) get cheap electricity for mining bitcoins, all of this humor is bound to go over most people's heads. But there are ample hilarious scenes in stock for an enjoyable experience, albeit the continuous undertone is pessimistic and depressing, but not so much that you need a psych after leaving the venue. The depressed feeling may not be shared by everyone, but that was the way I felt it overall.

What is shown about privacy and the inability to remove something that has already appeared on Internet, should be known to everyone. Still, I'm not sure everyone has got that message already, and therefore it is good that the film makers rub it in. Even aforementioned hacker (god) declares himself unable to hack into the "cloud" as that needs more powers than even he has. The visit brought to a data center in the USA is not only completely redundant but also overly simplistic, seeing her freely wandering between the racks in a server farm without a guard around her. Eventually, she finds a rack labelled with her country (can you im-agine that??). She even tries to fit a USB-stick she brought along (for what purpose??) in one of the servers, but none of the holes on the front panel seems to accommodate her, so her mission failed.

Another good thing to be added to general knowledge is that clicks, likes and 5-star ratings can be bought. It is good to be reminded of this phenomenon, if only to cast doubts of high-ranking reviews and other ratings advertised as awarded by normal users like you and me. We see that said hacker seems to be able to implement similar things, for example to help the unfortunate über taxi driver, suddenly receiving 5-star ratings, unlike previously when only 1-star ratings was what she got. And the same hacker did even more than that to the "sextape" mother, who suddenly appeared in all sorts of news articles as a champion of all trades, all of which we know not to be true to reality.