In the film La Belle Époque, which is now showing in UK cinemas, a French comic book artist called Victor (Daniel Auteuil) seeks refuge from a foundering marriage and faltering career in a meticulous facsimile of 1974. He finds himself in the bar where he first met his wife, when the world was at his feet, and where customers and staff are all still puffing away on Gauloises. It’s like a peculiarly French mashup of Westworld and The Truman Show.
Unlike Truman, though, Victor is aware that his surroundings have been artificially created, and they help him come to terms with his present. Travelling into the past is a conscious decision on his part, one that has been specifically ordered and paid for, albeit from “Les Voyageurs du Temps”, an outfit that sounds like something from a story by Philip K Dick – Rekal Incorporated, perhaps, from We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (the inspiration for Total Recall and its 2012 remake) – or from one of Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays, such as Lacuna Inc. from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Indeed, the plot of La Belle Epoque is so improbable it could almost be sci-fi, but the film has muscled its way to mainstream attention by refashioning its premise as a romantic comedy of manners.
In the forthcoming fantasy-adventure comedy sequel Jumanji: The Next Level, three high-school students go back into the role-playing game to rescue a friend. This time, unlike in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017), they make a conscious decision to immerse themselves in an artificial world, where you can be sure a fresh set of life lessons will be learned. And in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, due in UK cinemas next month, TV personality Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) dispenses benign aperçus and life lessons from the studio where he presides over a pastel-coloured toy village complete with model railway, “Owl Correspondence School” and puppet population. No one is under the illusion that the village is real, yet it’s not an escapist theme park so much as a safe place of emotional honesty and positive thinking.
These characters use their simulated realities in a therapeutic way, just as Mark Hogancamp (Steve Carell) in Welcome to Marwen (2018) deals with the brain damage he sustained in an attack by white supremacists by building a village in his backyard. Not just any village but a Belgian one in the second world war. No longer able to paint or draw because of his injuries, Hogancamp works through his unresolved trauma by setting up and photographing melodramatic scenarios in which the village’s Action Man and Barbie doll inhabitants, as avatars of himself and the people he knows, repeatedly fight back against the Nazi invaders.
Such scenarios stand out amid one of the most pervasive cinema trends of the past 30 years, in that they’ve added a layer of awareness to the “rubber reality” syndrome. From The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) onwards, the cinema has always dabbled in alternative realities and imaginary worlds, but towards the end of the 20th century this tendency went into overdrive. In film after film, characters discover that their world is not what it seems. That it is, in fact, a fictional construct sparked by psychological or pathological conditions (Jacob’s Ladder; Fight Club; A Beautiful Life), or created by aliens (Dark City), an artificial intelligence (The Matrix), psychiatrists (Shutter Island), the supernatural (The Sixth Sense; The Others), self-delusion (Mulholland Drive) or friends and relatives (Good Bye, Lenin!; 50 First Dates).
Rubber reality also crept into crime movies such as The Usual Suspects, Wild Things and at least two thrillers with the tip-off title Deception (2000 and 2008). Such films are fanciful, more personalised updates of the political paranoia thrillers of the 1970s. In preposterous thrillers such as Malice (1993), 88 Minutes (2007), Trance (2013) and Side Effects (2013), the criminal masterplan is so elaborate and requires such insane levels of plotting that you almost feel sorry for the villains, who really ought to have channelled all that preparation and ingenuity into a more lucrative, less risky undertaking, such as politics.
Classic film noir, in which the antihero is entangled in a web of deception, often spun by femmes fatales in cahoots with the bad guys, was a shadowy precursor to the reality-is-not-as-it-seems scenario. And just as that genre in its 1940s heyday reflected the anxiety and alienation of a society still traumatised by the second world war and undermined by shifts in moral certitude, so the rise of rubber reality cinema coincided with the evolution of the conspiracy theory from a minority pursuit into a mainstream interest fed by the internet, The X-Files, 9/11, falsified WMD reports, the Panama Papers and Wikileaks.
With so many films pedalling the scenario that the narrative is not to be trusted, audiences have become almost addicted to the “twist”, expecting or demanding one even where it doesn’t exist. Thus they’ve also been primed for a situation in which reality can no longer be trusted, facts are indistinguishable from fiction, everyone has a hidden agenda, the moon landing was faked, vaccination causes autism, the Earth is flat, and Britain can return to a great and glorious past in which the rest of the world falls over itself to shower it with amazing trade deals.
With or without a narrative twist, films already offer alternate realities in which audiences can seek refuge, whether it’s an idealised vision of class-ridden Britain in the Downton Abbey movie, the extended Lucasverse of the Star Wars franchise and its TV spin-offs, or the Marvel films, where might is always right and the good guys come out on top. In this context, it’s heartening to see a few pioneers such as La Belle Époque and A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, which suggest to audiences that they themselves can control the narrative, rather than be controlled by it, and that - rather than requiring an army of servants, a full set of Infinity Stones or the Force, all it will take is emotional honesty and clear-eyed thinking.
• Jumanji: The Next Level is released in UK cinemas on 13 December. A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood is released on 31 January.
