Meiying MG-01
2019 · 14m · España
Directed by Adrià Guxens
Genres: dark comedy, drama, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
In a world where humanity has stopped smiling, the government creates the Smiles, neo-geishas whose only function is to please clients; Meiying MG-01, first of a new beta model, can do far more than the others — but she cannot smile.
Picked by Felix
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A government-mandated pleasure bot that can't perform her one job — that's the kind of premise that makes everyone else look away, and Guxens leans into the discomfort instead of resolving it. Dark comedy wrapped around a genuine ontological crisis, which is exactly where cinema should hurt.
Guxens positions himself in conversation with Blade Runner and Godard's meditations on labor and desire, executing the formal restraint required to let that tension breathe rather than collapse into sentimentality. The refusal to sentimentalize Meiying's predicament is the film's most rigorous choice.
The decision to make her incapable of the one thing she's engineered for — and then to keep the camera on her anyway, watching her work around it — transforms what could've been a cynical premise into something unexpectedly tender. That one constraint does all the heavy lifting.