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Tesla. 2020. USA. Directed by Michael Almereyda. With Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Eve Hewson. 102 min.
“Maybe the world we are living in is a dream that Tesla dreamed first.” Michael Almereyda, who has long been drawn to stories of melancholy genius (Hamlet and William Eggleston spring to mind), finds in Nikola Tesla an American tragedy of money, power, celebrity, and thwarted ambition. The Serbian inventor who in late-19th-century New York illuminated the world through his alternating-current technology died in poverty and scorn, a crackpot who proposed a system of “worldwide wireless energy” that would harness the earth’s electromagnetism—only to be regarded today as a cult hero who imagined the Internet and inspired a tech manufacturer of space rockets, electric cars, and locomotive hyperloops. Unfettered by cinematic conventions of time, space, and genre—who else could evoke Buster Keaton, Pierre Bonnard, Derek Jarman, and Henry James in a single film?—Almereyda has created a work of incandescent brilliance and ineffable mystery. Courtesy of IFC Films
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