Let’s make this clear from the outset: being a fan of Daft Punk’s superlative music won’t necessarily mean that you’ll have an equal adoration of their debut directorial feature Electroma. It’s a vehemently single-minded film with scant regard to commercialisation that doesn’t feature Daft Punk on screen or on the soundtrack.
Electroma follows two robots who embark on a road trip in their quest to achieve humanisation. With a minimalist plot and no dialogue, Daft Punk focus on stunning backdrops, captivating visuals (a scene showing a robot child shocked at the main character’s human faces is particularly effective) and loaded metaphors to convey a tale of android dreams. The pacing is slow, painfully so at times, but it gives Electroma a hypnotic pulse, a rhythm dictated further by an ambient soundtrack. Time will tell whether Electroma becomes an icon of electronica-tinged art on the big screen, but for now it’s a fascinating curio.
