Guidance
Honesty is certainly the best policy, but it’s hardly absolute. Yes, in many cases, it’s the best course of action, but not every moment of dishonesty leads to cataclysm. In “Guidance,” society is struggling to put itself together after The Great War. For one technological visionary, the best way to avoid the next war is through a technology which will bring humanity closer together, by pointing out when we’re lying to one another; after all, it was a lie that led to the destruction of the last war.
Han Miao (Jia Sun) is a reporter who’s going away for a weekend with her boyfriend, Mai Zi Xuan (Harry Song). On the trip, she has brought with her Guidance, a nanotechnology app that, when ingested, works to bring people closer together by inhibiting their ability to deceive one another. The apps creator, Su Jie (Francesco Chen), has done that because he wants to avoid another major war, but events between he and Han- whom have known each other since childhood- where they spent six hours together is a safe room after a potential attack on Su Jie’s building could threaten the weekend for the couple, provided they can’t work around Guidance’s systems.
Director Neysan Sobhani has two single-location dramas going on concurrently; one in the present, between Han Miao and Mai Zi Xuan, and one in the past between Han Miao and Su Jie in the safe room. Both are equally compelling, as well as seem to feed into one another in how the characters interact with one another. That we feel that tension, and connection, between the past and present, is a credit to the smart editing of the film, and the nature of the film’s world in general. All three actors are terrific at bringing the respective characterizations to life- we feel their passions and anxieties, their intelligence and (sometimes) helplessness, and we understand where all of them are coming from. Everyone’s actions make sense as the film progresses, especially as we get to the heart of each one.
As with “After Yang” earlier this year, “Guidance” looks at human emotions and nature through the ideas of science fiction, but do not over-emphasize the sci-fi of the world. How both films succeed is a tribute to how they allow us to accept this as an extension of our world, and a possible direction moving forward. That way, we can easily see ourselves asking the same questions as the characters are. That is my favorite type of science fiction story.
