Sorrow and sorrow lend themselves to stories rooted in the dream potential of the counterfeit. The loss of another requires that you are wondering (again and again, perhaps) a simple question with endless answers: “What if?” What if I said that? What if I had done this instead? Would they have stayed? Would they still be there? In the ambitious and imperfect science fiction romance of Nacho Vigalondo, “Daniela Forever”, Nick d’Henry Golding is not only stuck to ask these questions. He actively rewrites his story with his holder friend (Beatrice Grannò) in a dream world where he controls all possibilities.
It is not a hyperbola. Nick, a British DJ living in Madrid who has been crying for Daniela for weeks, learns a new type of drug that could help her situation. With only one pill per night, he said, he could engage in the lucid dream. The treatment helped a friend to face her divorce. Why wouldn’t that work for him when he sorts his sorrow? Only, it does not quite follow the directives published by the experimental study for which it is registered. Instead, when Nick finds himself face to face with his late lover, Daniela, he begins to build a world for them both where the tragedy that distant him never occurred. After all, he has total control. This is the promise of the lucid dream. He can change the weather, the soundtrack, even the physics of this dream copy of his life in Madrid.
Of course, dreams are just simple fruits from our subconscious. Nick can only recreate what he knows. And so he goes to more and more side streets so that he can walk them with Daniela while he sleeps. He travels the books he knows that Daniela loves so that she can enjoy it in her dream world. He goes online to watch a complete set of his favorite group performing (Hidrovenesse, here also as composers of the film) so that he and Daniela can enjoy a concert together in the middle of Madrid. It does not matter that he is constantly making himself through the debriefing sessions he forced to attend researchers in the hope of understanding what this pill could do if it was free available to the public. Nick is satisfied with Daniela, if only while he sleeps.
This self-illusions exercise (or self-owners, if you prefer to be nicer) cannot last forever. Soon, Nick’s dreamy exploits begin to spread in his awakened life. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Anyway, the fragile balance between his two lives begins to collapse. Fortunately, Vigalondo’s scenario is not afraid of ethical waters clearly troubled in which Nick turns. Nor does he ignore the existential questions that subscribe to his business. What kind of life does he give to his Daniela if he is the one who draws all the levers? Where is his agency in all of this? And, what, really, does he win by playing God in a dream dream world? “Daniela Forever” confronts many of these front questions, pushing the intrigue and a character in an introspective journey which will not provide well -stored answers to any person involved.
But that is ultimately what also embraces the film. Heady almost has a fault, “Daniela Forever” is the whole concept, all the time. Vigalondo’s scenario is far too schematic and analytical for its own good. Visually, for example, the Spanish filmmaker opts for a clear distinction between the divided lives of Nick. DP Jon D. Domínguez shoots Nick’s “real” life of Nick in digital, in a square relationship that cramms the character of each movement, bordering him on a sort of visual atmosphere in the early 90s. Meanwhile, Nick’s dream life is constantly pleated by the sun and very dynamic, turned in a high definition cinema; Madrid rarely looks as radiant or as welcoming as here. There is something quite intriguing to put a clearer version of your world as existing in its subconscious. The dreams here are neither misty nor surrealist (give or take some fanciful gags everywhere). These are clear copies of Nick’s reality. They are more Nolan than Amenábar. Indeed, it is hurt for the fantasy of Gondry or the surrealism of Buñuel. Instead, “Daniela Forever” feels strangely managed and slowed down.
Structurally, the film spends too much time to guide Nick and the spectator on the many rules of his new dream powers. The emphasis is on the “how” of all this, which is used to obscure the thrill of “why”. Because Daniela only exists as a fruit of the dreamy imagination of Nick, the romance in the heart of “Daniela Forever” remains frustrating and elusive. Grannò, left to play an hollowed out character defined only by what is asked for him, does his best to impregnate Daniela with a certain personality. But alongside Golding, which wades while he tries to keep his Nick in the earth in the middle of a scenario which becomes a stranger and the more Maudlin, the more he throws himself, Grannò cannot keep Daniela’s relationship with Nick de Falchant on the edges. There is an intentional lack of cohesion in its performance as to what it is supposed to mean for him – or for the film, by the way.
Vigalondo has imbued “Daniela forever” with provocative questions about love and sorrow, jealousy and control, agency and abandonment. But with its Myopic development on Nick (there is rarely a frame when Golding is not at the front and center, for better and for worse), the film cannot quite tackle them with the depth and rigor they need. Instead, this two -hour therapy experience quickly begins to be thin. Vigalondo does her best to fight Daniela to collapse in this trope “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”. But in the end, the cinema and the character are stuck in an flattened vision of the world intended to continue, as its title suggests rather banal, forever and forever.
