★★★★★        By Pavita Millimuff                November 4, 2089

As a film critic, it is your job to live, breathe, and think movies. You see literally hundreds of them every year, in every conceivable genre and style. More often than not, the films are completely transparent. You predict almost every shot before it happens, and every story is a retread of something you have already seen a dozen times before. As the volume and breadth of what you see grows ever larger and wider, it becomes increasingly difficult for anything to surprise you. But every now and then it happens. Sometimes it is just a single scene or shot that catches you off guard, other times a film will find a unique voice through an ingenious combination and development of elements from the art form’s vast history. Then, there are those rare cases, maybe one film every few years, where you see a film truly unlike any you have seen before, which does things you did not know films could do, which is irreducible to comparisons to other previously seen movies. Uluvu’aroiya is one such film.

Uluvu’aroiya, whose title translates roughly to “The Merry Life,” is the debut feature from Venusian director Malaya Bubbi. What it represents is the potential genesis of a new movement in cinema, one that is a distinct statement from the first generation of Venusian natives coming into their own. Films produced on Venus for the past forty years have tended to be only trivially interesting side dishes to the established film industries on Earth and Mars. They have been mostly derivative pulp stories with interest strictly in being agreeable entertainment, with neither the resources nor the artistic acumen to make something striking. Venusian cinema seemed to be caught wanting to produce something original in accordance with their larger cultural mission as a refuge from the hyper-capitalist efficiency of the rest of the solar system, but too tied to the traditions of the planet from which they came to know how to effect that originality. Evidently, all it took was time. Time for a unique Venusian culture to develop and time for a new generation to grow up entirely as Venusians. Now, the film that Venus seems to have been waiting for is finally here, in its own stylistic category, a declaration of Venus as its own rich culture with the art to back it up.

The film’s six-hour runtime is loosely plotted. It follows a teenage boy who drops out of school and gets a job refining raw ore from the planet’s volcanic craters. He socializes with his group of friends around their habitable dome, goes through a few romantic relationships, gets in some trouble with the law. The film is one of those episodic youthful hangout pictures, only set in the environmentally brutal yet culturally extravagant world of Venus. The best comparison I can make is that the film is as if The 400 Blows was made as part of the Glitterganja movement. Scenes can go on for a half-hour at a time with little dramatic agenda railroading them into some conflict and resolution. Instead we are asked to simply exist with the characters as they go about their lives at their own leisurely pace. The film could be called a musical; really there is no distinction between song and speech. Scenes will glide between spoken dialogue, patter song, and long smooth dance numbers fluidly, often layering these various modes of storytelling on top of each other. The sets are bathed in pink, orange, and green light; the camera seems to levitate through space, turning its focus to and fro on its own time just as the characters and the film act on theirs.

Time is really the key feature that distinguishes this film. With the Venusian day lasting a full eight Earth months, the people there do not exist on the same kind of regimented schedule as we do. Time flows freely; lives are not dictated by schedules down to the hour. Instead, people eat, sleep, work, and play as they see fit, creating a societal structure in which there is no mandate that anyone be doing anything at any particular moment. This is the perspective on time one must adopt in order to embrace this film. One needs to let go of their paradigms of tightly constructed two-hour films which advance along a determined path at a dictated pace. Instead, we must just let the film come to us and follow where it leads. To watch this film is to take up a Venusian way of looking at the world. Here we have a prime exemplar of how art can broaden our perspectives on the universe and make us more empathetic people.

What excites me most about Uluvu’aroiya is what it might mean for the future. The docket of films I am obligated to see as part of my job has become saturated in the past few years with studio films from Earth made on as close to an assembly line as is possible in cinema with no artistic vision at the helm save the nebulous secret sauce methods that the studios make their intellectual property. It is healing to see that at least elsewhere in the solar system, artists are still making new, inventive films from the heart that speak to who they are and the perspective on the world they want to put across. If this is the start of a new wave of long, colorful, leisurely Venusian films, all the better for cinema. But even if it is just a flash in the pan, it is proof that art is not dead just yet, and that we can still break new barriers in cinema if we are brave enough to try.