A visual marvel, Flora Lau’s “Luz” is likely to send you out of the theater in search of palpable reality: some grass to touch, maybe, or a hand to hold.
Nearly all of her characters are shatteringly isolated, divided even in their faltering attempts at connection. But they are bound, at minimum, through a mystical deer created by a celebrated Chinese artist before he died. The deer sits at the center of a giant painting in a seedy Chongqing club, where strangers escape into virtual reality alone and together.
The club’s most popular VR world — called Luz, which means both “Light” and “Separation” — also involves the deer, who has to evade participants hunting it. Among the players is young camgirl Fa (En Xi Deng), whose livestreams are persistently interrupted by Wei (Xiao Dong Guo), a middle-aged man claiming to be her lost father. Since she won’t agree to meet him in real life, he has to learn how to seek her out in the game.
Meanwhile, the late artist’s lonely daughter, Ren (Sandrine Pinna), is in Hong Kong, until she gets a call that her former stepmother — her father’s equally creative ex-wife, Sabine (Isabelle Huppert) — is ailing. Somewhat reluctantly, she travels to France to help Sabine, only to be shocked when the patient wants no aid at all. Sabine’s plan, in fact, is to embrace life as wholeheartedly as she can, for as long as possible. Stubbornly refusing any attempts to curtail her active existence, she instead pulls Ren into the tactile delights of a Parisian artist: galleries and dances and gardens, music and food and adventures.
Lau (“Bends”) and her talented cinematographer, Benjamin Echazarreta (“A Fantastic Woman”), treat the screen like a canvas themselves, building layer upon layer to evoke multiple mediums. An electro-eerie score is the perfect match for Chongqing’s dark, neon-lit streets, which call to mind “Blade Runner” in their futuristic alienation.
But since “Luz” is, more than anything, a study in contrasts, Sabine’s Paris is as verdant and lush as Chongqing is stark and disaffected. The people we meet in her world are older and more engaged with their senses: individuals converse rather than text; pulsing techno gives way to sentimental French pop; the palate shifts from shades of black to vibrant color. As actors, Huppert and Pinna are both luminous. But while Sabine shines as if lit from within, Ren is dimmer, visibly lacking vitality even as her dynamic stepmother is the one living with a potentially fatal aneurism.
Because Lau is so intent on drawing distinctions between their ways of life, her script can occasionally feel black-and-white in its themes, too. And her artistic perspectives are idiosyncratic enough that we do notice when she lapses into clichéd terrain. Most of the time, though, she keeps us suspended in a state of awed anticipation. Even as her intentions are to nudge us back into real life, the images flickering on screen continue to hold us rapt.
