The Age of Stupid: New Climate Film Shames Us
SYDNEY | In Sydney for the Australian release of her latest film, The Age of Stupid, 37-year-old British filmmaker Franny Armstrong exposes the ’stupid’ self-destructive legacy that current society will leave, if climate change is not controlled.
A social activist, Armstrong’s previous documentaries include McLibel (1997, 2005) which followed the infamous McDonald’s libel trial and Drowned Out (2002), a film tracing an Indian family’s fight against the Indian government’s plan to build the Narmada Dam.
The Age of Stupid, futuristic quasi-documentary, quasi-drama stars Pete Postlethwaite as a man living on Earth in 2055. In a final message to us, he chooses to view six different stories, all true stories filmed in a documentary-style in 2007, at a time when “we could have saved ourselves.”
Armstrong creates a sense of urgency but thankfully refrains from preaching. The film is simply a reality of current society’s legacy. And it is shameful. The opening scene of the film introduces the world in 2055: the once-majestic Taj Mahal is in diabolical ruins, Sydney Harbour is burning and the Arctic ice caps have melted and become a raging ocean.
It begins with an 82-year-old French mountain guide Fernand Pareau, who lives at Mont Blanc and takes an English family for a tour. Then there is Layefa Malemi a young Nigerian woman living in putrid squalor, who dreams of earning enough money to study medicine. Young Iraqi refugee children Jamila and Adnan Bayyoud try to make sense of their post-Saddam Iraq whilst wealthy Indian tycoon Jeh Wadia is creating a low-cost flight company. American Alvin DuVernay, a former Shell employee who helped them search for oil, paddled on a boat through the flooded streets of his New Orleans neighbourhood to save people after Hurricane Katrina. And Piers Guy, who lives on a farm in south Britain, unsuccessfully fights his local community to build windmills on the farm to generate wind electricity.
The ironies of the film’s characters are at the crux of the film’s messages: DuVernay is profoundly touched by the suffering he encounters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, an environmental disaster, yet defends his work at Shell, drilling deep beneath the Earth’s surfaces for oil. Nigerian Malemi lives in utter poverty without running water or electricity despite that Shell profits marvellously from her country’s vast oil resources. Englishman Piers Guy vehemently fights his local community who block the construction of wind farms because it spoils the view, despite the community being “absolutely concerned about global warming.” Pareau grows his own potatoes, whilst a truck transports potatoes across the Mont Blanc tunnel into Italy for processing.
For, despite their foibles, hypocrisies and defeats, Armstrong beseeches that the need to do something about climate change transcends all and ultimately empowers all viewers to do something, short of being remembered for our gluttonous consumption and ignorance. v
