Soylent Green

Richard Fleischer: Soylent Green (US 1973).

Richard Fleischer: Soylent Green (US 1973) avec Charlton Heston.

Soleil vert / Maailma vuonna 2022 / Världen år 2022.
Richard Fleischer / États-Unis / 1973 / 97 min / 35 mm / VOSTF
D'après le roman Make Room! Make Room! de Harry Harrison.
Avec Charlton Heston, Edward G. Robinson, Leigh Taylor-Young, Chuck Connors, Joseph Cotten.
25 indispensables de la science-fiction
Lundi 27 mar 2023 - 18h30 Salle Henri Langlois
New York, 2022. Les hommes ont épuisé les ressources naturelles. Seul le « soleil vert » parvient à nourrir une population miséreuse qui ignore tout de cet aliment. Accompagné de son fidèle ami, un policier va découvrir au péril de sa vie l'effroyable réalité de cette société inhumaine.

Générique
Réalisateur : Richard Fleischer
Assistants réalisateurs : Daniel McCauley, Gene Marum
Scénariste : Stanley R. Greenberg
Auteur de l'oeuvre originale : Harry Harrison d'après le roman "Make Room, Make Room" (1966)
Société de production : MGM - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producteurs : Walter Seltzer, Russell Thacher
Directeur de la photographie : Richard H. Kline
Ingénieurs du son : Charles M. Wilborn, Harry W. Tetrick
Compositeur de la musique originale : Fred Myrow
Compositeurs de la musique préexistante : Edvard Grieg, Piotr Ilitch Tchaïkovski, Ludwig vanBeethoven
Directeur artistique : Edward C. Carfagno
Décorateur : Robert R. Benton
Costumier : Pat Barto
Maquilleur : Bud Westmore
Monteur : Samuel E. Beetley
Directeur de casting : Joe Canutt
Coordinateur des effets spéciaux : A. J. Lohman
Conseiller technique : Frank R. Bowerman
Interprètes : Charlton Heston (le détective Robert Thorn), Edward G. Robinson (Sol Roth), Leigh Taylor-Young (Shirl), Chuck Connors (Tab Fielding), Paula Kelly (Martha Philipson), Brock Peters (le lieutenant Hatcher), Joseph Cotten (William Simonson), Stephen Young (Gilbert), Roy Jenson (Donovan), Whit Bissell (le gouverneur Santini), Lincoln Kilpatrick (le prêtre), Mike Henry (Kulosik), Leonard Stone (Charles), Tim Herbert (Brady), John Dennis (Wagner), Carlos Romero (le nouveau locataire), Celia Lovsky (la bibliothécaire), Dick Van Patten (l'employé du "Home"), Forrest Wood (un subalterne du "Home"), Faith Quabius (un subalterne du "Home"), Morgan Farley (un "livre"), Belle Mitchell (un "livre"), Cyril Delevanti (un "livre"), John Barclay (un "livre"), Joyce Williams (un "mobilier"), Beverly Gill (un "mobilier"), Cheri Howell (un "mobilier"), Jennifer King (un "mobilier"), Erica Hagen (un "mobilier"), Suesi Eejima (un "mobilier"), Kathy Silva (un "mobilier"), Marion Charles (un "mobilier"), Pat Houtchens (le gardien de l'immeuble obèse), Jane Dulo (Madame Santini), Jan Bradley (la femme au foulard), Joseph Mell, Bern Hoffman, Nora Marlowe, Guy Way

AA: There is special pathos in a prophecy about a future that has already happened. Escape from New York... Blade Runner... Tonight: Soylent Green.

We see landline telephones and cathode ray television sets. But there is such solidity and gravity in the vision and the structure of Soylent Green that anachronisms turn into bonus features.

The greenhouse effect has taken place. The ecocatastrophe has reached the last frontier: the ocean. The ocean is dying, no longer able to produce plankton. Pollution and smog destroy conditions of life. Overpopulation, mass poverty, famine and homelessness are everywhere.

Investigating the murder of the executive William Simonson (Joseph Cotten), detective Robert Thorn (Charlton Heston) gets a look into the way of life of the power elite who live in an existence separate from others.

Simonson had lost his will to live having learned the secret of his Soylent corporation, producing synthetic food wafers. That is why he had to be eliminated, and why he did not resist.
 
Reportedly Harry Harrison, the author of the novel on which Soylent Green is based, was unhappy that MGM turned his serious dystopia into an action thriller. I can understand that, and yet the themes are so powerful that even the chase action format does not harm them. Retrospectively, the thriller approach connects Soylent Green meaningfully with the great American political thrillers of the 1970s. As does the gritty realism with which the world of the future has been imagined.

Charlton Heston became a superstar incarnating mythic heroes of Antiquity (Moses, Ben-Hur, John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told). "Charlton Heston is an axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself" (Michel Mourlet)*. In the 1960s Heston became a science fiction superstar in the dystopia Planet of the Apes, followed by The Omega Man and Soylent Green. In Soylent Green he is an antihero, a rogue cop, a corrupt and violent police officer, yet with a mission to save the world.

Robert Thorn is a loner, but he lives together with Professor Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson), "the Book". Like in Fahrenheit 451, books are getting extinct, hardly being printed anymore, in another sign of the downfall of society. But there is still a small team of ageing book people with access to a library.

Soylent Green was the last movie of Edward G. Robinson whose film career had started in the silent era. His character is proudly Jewish with expressions such as "l'chaim". Robinson was great till the end, his is the heart of the movie. Sol Roth's extraordinary assisted death sequence is the last in which he acted, two months before his own death. Roth's "death movie" is a nature montage on a huge wall-sized screen accompanied with his favourite music (Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, Tchaikovsky's Pathétique, Grieg's Peer Gynt). Thorn and Roth exchange final confessions of love, a redeeming feature in the stony and brutal Thorn.

The wonderful Leigh Taylor-Young is the female lead as the slave woman Shirl. The apartments of the power elite come equipped with live-in concubines such as Shirl. They are called "furniture". The movie (the aspect does not appear in the novel) enters the territory of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but there is no feminist viewpoint, no resistance. The women are soft and submissive. The movie even seems to share patriarchal attitudes of its dystopia in the way the scantily clad women are reduced to objects of visual pleasure. Leigh Taylor-Young would have deserved roles in the league of Offred. Instead, she was cast as a token woman. She interrupted her successful film career for seven years after Soylent Green.

Richard Fleischer was a director of many genres and idioms. He was no stranger to dystopian science fiction: his breakthrough into the big league took place in Jules Verne's 20.000 Leagues Under the Sea, produced by Walt Disney. He discussed slavery unflinchingly in the controversial and pathbreaking Mandingo. The ethos is always the one best summed up by Hegel in his master and slave dialectics: in conditions of slavery, no one is free.

Having recently seen Fleischer's early B movie gem, Armored Car Robbery, it is striking to compare its admirably compact cinematic storytelling with the more loose and relaxed epic mode of Soylent Green. Its most appealing feature is that it provides time to reflect. Although an action movie, the tempo is often tranquil, the opposite of the current ADHD fashion of action cinema. The exception is the opening rapid fire montage covering the history of the world from the 19th century to the year 2022 in fast forward accelerando.

I wrote about Armored Car Robbery that I hesitate to call it a film noir, because there is no transcendent dimension of evil, no cosmic agony and the streets are not dark with something more than night. In Soylent Green, they are.

It was a great pleasure to view the 35 mm print, slightly worn, not quite brilliant, but with juicy and vivid colours intact.

After the screening, the movie seemed to continue on the streets of Paris. Giant garbage heaps pile up, beggars and the homeless inhabit sidewalks, and massive strikes and demonstrations go on since months. An exceptionally big strike action day is announced for tomorrow. Officially it is about the pension reform, but the background is the neoliberal turn of 1971 (the period in which Soylent Green was made), the end of regulation and the start of increasing inequality, accompanied with an awareness of an imminent ecocatastrophe and a quietly growing "no future" ambience.

* "Charlton Heston is an axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself, his presence in any film being enough to instil beauty. The pent-up violence expressed by the sombre phosphorescence of his eyes, his eagle’s profile, the imperious arch of his eyebrows, the hard, bitter curve of his lips, the stupendous strength of his torso - this is what he has been given, and what not even the worst of directors can debase. It is in this sense that one can say that Charlton Heston, by his very existence and regardless of the film he is in, provides a more accurate definition of the cinema than films like Hiroshima mon amour or Citizen Kane, films whose aesthetic either ignores or repudiates Charlton Heston. Through him, mise en scène can confront the most intense of conflicts and settle them with the contempt of a god imprisoned, quivering with muted rage.” Michel Mourlet: "Apologie de la violence", Cahiers du Cinéma 107, May 1960.