Hotaru
2015 · 22m · France
Directed by William Laboury
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Martha, a hypermnesiac teenager who remembers everything and forgets nothing, is sent into space by scientists as humanity's living memory — electrodes on her temples, carrying the world's most beautiful images for any extraterrestrials — while her inner world unfolds in vivid color against the sterile black-and-white of the exterior.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be a mind-bender—human memory as cosmic artifact—but Laboury plays it too straight, too reverent toward the sci-fi conceit instead of demolishing or inverting it; the color/monochrome split is obvious where it should be corrosive.
Hotaru situates itself in a precise lineage of poetic sci-fi (Tarkovsky's weight, Miyazaki's chromatic consciousness) and executes that ambition with formal discipline—the chromatic counterpoint between Martha's interior and the sterile exterior isn't decoration but the film's entire argument about memory, selfhood, and extraction.
The decision to trap all of Martha's inner life in saturated color while the mission exterior bleeds to monochrome is the hinge on which everything turns; it's a single formal choice that transforms a teenage-girl-in-space into something about visibility, testimony, and what parts of us stay hidden when we're asked to be vessels.
Reviews
Si le film de William Laboury reste l'un des plus marquants de ce début d'année, ce n'est pas seulement pour son sujet original mais surtout pour la manière dont il arrive à toucher aux questions existentielles, au caractère éphémère et immanent de l'être humain qui au-delà de la matière continue à habiter le temps et l'espace grâce aux souvenirs qui l'ont construit. Hotaru rejoint ces grands mythes littéraires et cinématographiques et, c'est à mi-chemin entre un Chris Marker et un René Barjavel que Laboury a tracé sa voie, nous livrant un film hypnotique délibérément envoûtant, à l'image du cinéma lui-même.