brilliant geneticist, Rosetta Stone (Swinton) has succeeded in creating life from just a few human cells and some well-designed artificial intelligence. Identical in appearance to their creator, Rosetta's "offspring"—named Ruby, Marinne and Olive—nonetheless have their own distinct personalities and are actually better than human in a number of ways. What they lack, however, is a real understanding of the world at large.
Having yet come to terms with the ethical implications of her actions, Rosetta keeps her creations hidden away from society—with one exception. The sisters require continual infusions of spermatazoa in order to survive, and so Ruby goes out on the town on a regular basis, seducing men (armed with lines from classic Hollywood romances, which Rosetta conditions
Ruby with in her sleep) and collecting "donations" (via condoms) to bring home for her sisters and her.
But things start getting tricky when the scores of men Ruby's been sleeping with start suffering from the same symptoms—impotence and tiny barcodes on their foreheads. The outbreak triggers an investigation, which puts even more pressure on Rosetta to keep her creations under wraps. But the sisters have ideas of their own. Growing increasingly bored with their
sheltered life, they long for connection with the outside world, no matter how dangerous it might be.
Tragically flawed and confused
Feminist science fiction of the cinematic variety is a very rare thing, a fact that makes this film's shortcomings that much more tragic. Teknolust is a narratively and intellectually ambitious work, but perhaps it shouldn't have been, or maybe it just should have had a few
more revisions of its script. Though the movie can be smart and funny at times, its numerous plot lines and themes are born only to die or disappear with little or no explanation. Its science fiction, like its story, is often simultaneously goofy and confused. (Are Ruby, Marinne and Olive clones or robots? If the story actually knows, it's not saying very clearly.)
Teknolust is somewhat successful in the visual realm, however. Many of its sets, costumes, uses of color and special effects are striking and appealing. From the sisters' Japanese-influenced decor to Ruby's mesmerizing and sirenic web portal, the film can often be very nice to look at. But even though Hershman-Leeson's use of digital video works for the most part from a visual standpoint, overall its hyper-real feel often clashes with Teknolust's numerous surreal, and at times stagy, scenes.
Tilda Swinton is to be commended for successfully portraying no less than four characters, all of them wonderfully weird in their own ways. Jeremy Davies (who plays a lonely copy store employee who falls in love with Ruby) and James Urbaniak (who plays one of the investigators of the outbreak) also successfully bring their own characteristic eccentricities to this movie. Occasionally dodgy direction, however, sometimes undoes even these fine performances.
The several complex issues Teknolust explores get uneven treatment, with some rough dialogue and ham-fisted symbolism. The intersections of genetic engineering, human relationships, sex and ethics that the film explores are important ones, and it's very important that women's
voices get heard in these explorations. It's just a shame they didn't get represented in a better product than this.
