Jason Sondhi
The original Lost Memories took Vimeo by storm in late 2012, on its way to well over 1M views. The premise took threads of simmering discomfort with our newfound digital distraction and powerfully dramatized them into a succinct and plausible 3min short. The film, visualized a couple’s vacation breakup when the man completely ignores her, managing his photo collection amidst a dizzying array of holographic UX. The film arrived at the perfect time to strike a nerve with viewers — smartphones were becoming ubiquitous, and many felt a deep connection to the conflict at the heart of the film, causing them to examine their own complicated relationship to the digital present.
It now feels passé to complain about the disconnection that arises from burying oneself in one’s phone, but when director Francois Ferraci was making the film, Instagram had yet to be bought by Facebook, and few people knew what Snapchat was. The trends that undergirded the first film’s appeal are, if anything, more pronounced then ever — vinyl outgrosses streaming, and the most buzzed about item from CES this year was a new Super 8 camera, so is Lost Memories 2.0 a welcome chapter in the ongoing conversation?
While the film is a huge step in ambition, with its runtime swelling from 3min to 15min, and its world-building depicted in much further detail, the core message of the film remains somewhat frustratingly the same. The film picks up a few years after the events of its predecessor. After the devastating crash that deleted much of the world’s digital data, things have largely returned to the way they were before, but our protagonist’s girlfriend has managed to stay “off the grid”. Haunted by his lost love and yearning for the tangible authenticity that was her reason for parting, he searches for her off and on, until a dramatic breakdown convinces him to seek her out once and for all.
While I wish Ferracci had chosen to further complicate the first film’s core fetishism for tangible artifacts (such as polaroids), two things personally fascinate me with Lost Memories 2.0. One, it is a treat to inhabit Ferraci’s world. A vfx artist for many years, responsible for terrific opening sequences to major French films like Goal of the Dead, Ferracci develops flashy, but insightful depictions of near-future digital technologies run amok (see his vfx breakdown). His vision of “The Cloud” extends past the first film’s consumer applications to touch more fully upon how such a concept extends to enterprise and advertising, even penetrating the world’s oldest profession.
From a storytelling standpoint, the film hinges upon two monologues that are a bit dicey, one with an android sex worker, and another that serves as the film’s denouement. Both are overwritten, but the impulse feeds into the second very interesting aspect of the film which is its sheer existence as a sequel. To an internet short. That’s incredibly rare! Despite the success of the original installment, Ferracci must have felt that there was more to prove. We’ve dutifully reported on a huge number of short properties and directors in the vfx, sci-fi arena that have been optioned for development over the past 7-8 years, but even the success stories to arise from the trend — Wes Ball, Fede Alvarez and now Tim Miller, are generally not succeeding in getting adapted shorts off the ground. Last year’s Pixels got made, but lost it’s originator Patrick Jean along the way.
It seems there is a large gap between a short and a feature that is difficult to bridge. Ferracci in his second go at the Lost Memories world seeks to show that there is more to his concept than a clever premise, and writing issues aside, he succeeds in his aims, showing that his imagined universe is richer and more flexible than imagined. In doing so he further solidfies his claim that he has the directorial chops with which to showcase it. With a feature script in the works, only time will tell if others agree.