Mark Reviews Movies: THE PINK CLOUD

The Pink Cloud, Blue Fox Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 13, 2022

Getting the obvious association out of the way at the start, The Pink Cloud begins with some text, explaining that filmmaker Iuli Gerbase wrote the screenplay for her debut feature in 2017. The film itself was shot in 2019, before the concept of sheltering-in-place became part of the common parlance.

It's important, perhaps, for this information to be disclosed. We know it wasn't made as a reaction to or a commentary on the ongoing global pandemic (although the knowledge that the film was written years before gives it an eerie sense of prescience). It's difficult to separate the film's story from the real-world crisis during which it's being released, but there is, at least, enough of an intellectual buffer in terms of some of the specifics. Still, it's kind of frightening how much Gerbase got right.

The story begins on an ordinary morning in an unspecified city in Brazil. A young woman walks her dog down by a river, and over the water, a misty formation appears, seemingly out of nowhere. It moves toward the woman and envelops her, and in a matter of seconds, she collapses dead to the ground.

The Pink Cloud—or just the Cloud, as it mostly comes to be known—is a sudden global phenomenon—inexplicable and left completely unexplained as to its origin, its purpose, or its meaning. People only know a few things. It's everywhere in the world. The Cloud is toxic and kills a person within it in exactly ten seconds, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Until it does disappear, people need to shut their windows, doors, and stay in place—whether that's at home, wherever they might be at the moment, or in the nearest structure.

As for the rest of the story, it takes place in a single, two-floor apartment. It belongs to Giovana (Renata de Lélis), a web designer, but she has company when the city's public address system announces that everyone needs to take shelter and stay there for the foreseeable future. He's Yago (Eduardo Mendonça), a chiropractor whom Giovana met at and brought home from a night out only a few hours ago. They're going to have to get comfortable with this apartment and each other pretty quickly.

That idea of comfort—with a situation, in one's surroundings, with another human being—is the driving force of the drama, the tension, and the central theme that develop as the days, weeks, and, eventually, years pass for this pair. Time stops existing as a definable, recognizable, or tangible presence in this story, and that's one of its most unnervingly accurate observations (The reliance on home delivery is another, although this situation requires a clever system of plastic tubes connected to windows).

For a while, there's peace, some fun, and a lot of doing just about anything to keep busy for Giovana and Yago (A montage shows the two watching assorted online videos to learn skills, which is also spookily precise—as is the punch line of the sequence, showing the two sitting in bored silence while drinking beer). Anything will do to pass the time and help each one try to forget what they're missing.

Apart from life in general, Yago misses his father (played by Girley Brasil Paes), who is suffering from some form of dementia and is quarantined with his nurse. Meanwhile, Giovana's pre-teen sister Júlia (Helena Becker) was at a sleep-over when the Cloud appeared, and her best friend Sara (Kaya Rodrigues) is alone, since her husband was at a bakery at the time. Those stories develop over time via sporadic video calls, and there's mounting sense of the inevitable as the father's condition worsens (He becomes convinced the nurse is trying to kill him—and considers the same) and the friend's loneliness persists (Giovana says she understands, but since she doesn't want to really understand that feeling, perhaps that's why things move as they do with Yago).

As for the main couple, their relationship deepens enough that they start arguing (He wants kids, and she doesn't—and can't comprehend why he'd even be talking about having a child under their specific circumstances and with the Cloud in the first place), reconciling, and clinging to each other out of physical, emotional, and psychological necessity. The feeling of time being as alien a thing as the Cloud in this story becomes most apparent when it's revealed that Giovana is pregnant. The shock of the child aging off-screen, within the gaps of the narrative's timeline, is even more disorienting.

All the while, Gerbase develops that central relationship, follows its ups and downs, and subtly transforms it into an inherently philosophical conflict about what's important in life. For Yago, it's everything that's happening in this situation and in each moment with his unexpected family. For Giovana, it's in everything that she wants to do, could have been doing, and keeps hoping will return to and be possible for her one day.

The filmmaker doesn't take a side here, since there are positives and downsides to both of these belief systems. Both Yago and Giovana become trapped by their way of thinking. He becomes complacent and stops considering a life without the Cloud, and she sets herself up for constant disappointment, losing her sense of life and the people in the apartment by way of dreams and virtual reality.

Because of its attention to these characters and their distinct outlooks on life, The Pink Cloud is about much more than the experience of quarantine (People's lives before the pandemic were—and after it, hopefully, will be—limited by some internal and/or external forces, after all). Still, Gerbase's film does resonate in a specific and unavoidable way now, and while that might distract from the story's deeper point, both it and some unintentional ones come through here.

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