Review: Singing a bit of Harmonie in the weirdest world imaginable

Something that's fun, and still crazy to me, is that sometimes, when I'm reaching to out to various production companies, distributors, whatever, to see if I can get a screener link of a movie to review, the response will come from directly from the filmmaker. I'm always a little tickled, and feel honored, to get to talk to the person behind the vision, and it's cool when I like their movie and can send them a link to the review like, "Hey! I dug it!"

Director Bertrand Dezoteux (a very cool surname, if you ask me) sent me a link for his trippy opus, he ended his email with "I wish you a good trip to Harmonie." I found it such a charming turn of phrase, and I was holding it in my heart as I booted up the link to see where this movie would take me.

And boy, did it take me places.

Harmonie is an absolutely wild ride, a free-wheeling sci-fi odyssey that is so boundlessly creative, so strange to look at, so genuinely hard to describe, that even writing a review feels like a waste of time. It feels kind of like it should be playing in an avant-garde art museum rather than in a movie theater (I'm not actually sure if the film is getting any sort of theatrical release). Maybe more than that, it feels like something I would've found in some dark, weird corner of the internet when I was in middle school and subsequently built my personality around, gleefully sharing it with my friends, daring them to like it, too. Knowing that if I found someone else who could get on its very, very specific wavelength and have a good time there, that I had found someone I want to be friends with for life.

I guess it's worth getting out of the way: this movie is not easy on the eyes. It's not supposed to be, I think. It looks like a PS2 game took acid. It reminded me of Journey of Shadows in that, I think a lot of people will reject this at face value because they can't imagine looking at it for 74 minutes, much less watching it for that period of time. I get it. But man, if you can just go with it, it really is a lot of fun to watch. It's just so fucking bizarre. The main character is named Jesús and is 33, and he looks just like another famous Jesus who did something notable at 33. Like, I think his face is from a painting of Jesus. His dick probably isn't.

Jesús is a Frenchman on a mission through the galaxy to explore other planets and make contact with any creatures he finds. We join him as he lands on the planet Harmonie, so named for a few reasons, including two that play a big part throughout the movie. First, all of the creatures who can speak do so in beautiful singing voices (sadly, they can only say "yes" and "no"). Second, all of the creatures on the planet can reproduce with each other.

So yeah, this planet is covered with some of the gnarliest-looking creatures you've ever seen. Pretty. much no one's face is where you expect it to be, and some of them have multiple. One particularly aggressive dude has heads for hands, which he uses to punch Jesús into a pulp before capturing him. Turns out, life on Harmonie is maybe even stranger than it looks.

The film unfolds over 11 short chapters, along with an interlude where Jesús (very humorously) recounts the entire movie up to that point. This guy really goes through it, but he also seems like he's pretty insufferable, so you kind of don't mind watching him go through it. The film gets so much mileage out of yes-and-no questions, often to extremely funny effect. The questions also feel like they get to the core of something the film is poking at: humans' obsession with being able to categorize things and understand them in human terms, even when that isn't really possible. Jesús is persistent, you gotta give him that, as he tries to understand this culture, communicate with them, and figure out how and if he can fit in there. 

By showing you so many things that are decidedly not human, Harmonie ultimately quite clearly articulates what is it to be human: self-absorbed to the point of only understanding the world around us in relation to ourselves. But the film isn't unkind to Jesús, or even judgmental -- I think that's mostly me. And he's a pretty good guide through this absolutely surreal place: curious, questioning, adaptable, ultimately a little tragic. Personally, I would never ever ever want to go to Harmonie, but I'm glad I got to visit it this way.