Locarno 2019 Review: TECHNOBOSS, Lo-Fi Surrealist Musical Road Movie screenanarchy.com/2019/09/locarno-2019-review-technoboss-lo-fi-surrealist-musical-road-movie.html September 16, 2019
The latest film by the Portuguese auteur JoĂŁo Nicolau, Technoboss, falls into the category of film festival oddities with a cult film predisposition. The peculiar style of Technoboss is close to an anti-film poetic, as Nicolau channels Quentin Dupieux in lo-fi surrealist and deadpan staging. What remains of a linear storyline can be summed up as the struggles and delights of a septuagenarian LuĂs Rovisco, divorced, alone and about to retire from his job as a commercial director of Segurvale. (Saying the whole name of the company, Segurvale Integrated Systems of Access Control, soon becomes a running gag.) Rovisco drives around a car tending to his customers and puts up with what he considers sabotage from his colleagues until he meets a receptionist named Lucinda, an old flame. The condensation of almost two-hour running time sounds like a love story veiled as an existentialist tale. That is the shortest and easiest description of the fairly perplexing film experience. The director reveals he created the film while surrounded with "a set of conflicting, or outright impossible aspirations," among them a story about a man in his sixties suffering from excessive youth, to make a film where the protagonist sings a lot but the film is not a musical, to make a film where the protagonist is in a car but the film is not a road movie, "to make a film set within the world of work but which doesn't set out to interpret it morally and which, above all, doesn't make a single reference to any reality outside the film" and to make a film in which all these "aspirations" are in service to a love story.
1/4