Synopsis
The French computer programmer Laura inherits the task of making a computer game of the Battle of Okinawa in Japan during World War 2. She searches the Internet for information on the battle, and interviews Japanese experts and witnesses. The extraordinary circumstances of the Battle of Okinawa lead Laura to reflect deeply on her own life and humanity in general, particularly the influence of history and memories.
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Cast
- Catherine BelkhodjaLaura
- Kenji TokitsuSelf
- Nagisa ŌshimaSelf
- Junichi UshiyamaSelf
- Kinjo ShigeakiSelf
- Chris MarkerSelf (voice) (uncredited)
Recommendations
- 100
Slant Magazine
Level Five pictorializes the cruel moment when curiosity encounters tragedy, and the all-too-human abandonment of interest that can follows. - 100
Time Out
By using Laura as an avatar, Marker actually helps us see the visuals and their knotty meanings much more clearly. The more we watch, the more Laura softens, until — in a mind-bending conceit — her very status as a fictional creation is called into question. The effect is ecstatic. - 100
Los Angeles Times
It humanely, intelligently questions the very nature of our desire to make sense of the past with the tools of the present, when the human mind remains the most aggressively obliterating battlefield of all. - 88
RogerEbert.com
If you can hook into it, Level Five is not just witty, insinuating, and penetrating; it’s also unexpectedly moving and, as deliberately threadbare as it often looks, cinematically rich. - 83
The Playlist
The theories in Level Five simultaneously thrive in realms of computer science, ethnography, and cognitive psychology, while the picture remains cloaked by the emotional weight of a historical tragedy that marked an entire nation. - 80
The Dissolve
Level Five doesn’t achieve the poetic heights of Sans Soleil, but that might be because its project is more desultory; where the earlier work merely hints at the difficulty of looking at history without a filter, this sister film all but gives up the ghost. - 80
The New York Times
Its themes are a bit nostalgic and some of its technology looks dated, but there is nothing else in theaters now that feels quite as new. - 63
Chicago Sun-Times
Level Five (1996) is a poetic if occasionally opaque film essay on the 1945 Battle of Okinawa.
