| Nirvana | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Gabriele Salvatores |
| Produced by | Vittorio Cecchi Gori, Maurizio Totti |
| Written by | Gabriele Salvatores, Pino Cacucci, Gloria Corica |
| Starring | Christopher Lambert, Diego Abatantuono, Stefania Rocca, Emmanuelle Seigner, Gigio Alberti, Claudio Bisio, Silvio Orlando, Paolo Rossi, Sergio Rubini, Amanda Sandrelli |
| Music by | Federico De Robertis, Mauro Pagani |
| Distributed by | Vittorio Cecchi Gori |
| Release date(s) | 1997 |
| Running time | 111 minutes |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | Italian |
Nirvana is a science fiction film, produced in Italy in 1997 by director Gabriele Salvatores, starring Christopher Lambert, Diego Abatantuono, Sergio Rubini and Stefania Rocca. It was screened out of competition at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.[1]
Contents |
The movie tells the story of a virtual-reality game designer, Jimi (Lambert), who finds out that the main character of his game, Solo (played by Abatantuono), has achieved sentience due to an attack by a computer virus. Asked by his creation (who feels everything the character in the game feels, including multiple deaths) to eliminate its existence, Jimi sets out to erase the game from his employer's server before it's commercially released, and thus spare Solo further suffering.
Jimi feels desperate because his wife Lisa (played by Emmanuelle Seigner) left him. He starts to search for her as he tries to delete Solo from the game. These two paths of his life complement in the story throughout the whole movie. By the end, Jimi hacks into one of the company's servers. This hack is in the world of virtual reality interpreted as encounters with persons from Jimi's life. That is the way the network defends itself. It tries to keep the hacker's mind in the loop of his own memories as it burns the hacker's brain. The only way to pass through the network defence mechanism is to free one's mind. To forget about life before or after; to forget about bodily feelings; to enter a state of pure concentration, where one focuses only on the target (in this case the server with the company's money account). It is similar to meditation where one tries to concentrate on breathing. People who are able to do this are called angels (they are invisible to the system, they can go anywhere they want and their possibilities are limitless). In the end Jimi feels enlightened. He is in inner peace with himself. He saved the character, understood why Lisa left and understands why the things happened in the way they happened. He is in the state of Nirvana.
Nirvana is one of the rare Italian science fiction films to use extensive computer generated special effects. The director, Gabriele Salvatores, shot the movie mainly in "Portello" the old Alfa Romeo assembly plant in Milan. The whole place was converted in this sci-fi set where many ethnic sides of the city are shown. From the Indian to the Japanese to the Chinese, the movie moves around the dynamic and the futuristic realms that the future created.
The storyline itself exemplifies several main themes of cyberpunk, such as the Philip K. Dick quote "Living and unliving things are exchanging properties", meaning computers are becoming human, and humans are becoming less so, both by the influence of technology.
Despite a poor box office reception amidst accusations of weak plotting and simplistic rendering of the main themes, Nirvana has achieved something of a cult status, especially in Europe. The title of the film is key to understanding its comparison of reincarnation with being endlessly reborn in a video game.