Director: Roland Bergeys
Writer: Roland Bergeys
Cast: Roland Bergeys, Leentje De Coninck, Peter Holvoet-Hanssen
Running time: 28mins
Well, this is a curio. It’s a period piece, with a mixture of live action and animation. So far, so Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
But it also claims to be “zero budget”. As in no budget at all. As in a budget of 0 (NOUGHT) Euros. But that can’t be true because Leentje De Coninck, as Mit, glugs her way through probably a tenner’s worth of wine. Real wine (or at least real fake stage wine). Not computer animated wine.
And that’s important. Because if the wine had been like all the bits of this film that ARE computer animated, we would have struggled to take it seriously. The bobbly, floaty, deeply unreal avatars in Albert! make Sims look like creations from the mind (and budget) of James Cameron. They’re distracting and irksome and it was a huge relief when the animated intro gave way to live action and we met Leo, wandering through a garden.
Leo (writer and director Roland Bergeys) is a gardener. He tends the grounds at a “castle” where Albert Einstein (during his 1930s on-the-run era) is a brief house guest. Leo’s wife Mit lives there too and the pair of them spend much of the film ruminating to camera about the fate of their son Lu. Leo is delighted to have a mind the size of Einstein’s to probe for answers. Mit is more confident of finding the solution at the bottom of the bottle.
For some reason, there’s a framing device where these goings-on are being recorded for posterity by a sub-Sim typist. Lu, similarly vaguely rendered, appears in cutaways and flashbacks while Einstein floats along for a bit of back-and-forth with Leo.
The lack of budget partly explains the use of CGI, both in the animation and using green-screen backdrops for some of the Leo and Mit scenes. It saves money on locations, costumes and getting all the actors together.
But, even in the age of freeware and packages that can run on standard computers, there remains the film-making rule that you tend to get what you pay for. And that means that “zero budget” is normally less of a boast and more of an apology.
As soon as I realised the film was going to include animation, I figured that it would stand or fall on the strength of the writing. The three things any good film needs: the script, the script and the script. And of course that applies to more conventional pieces as well.
And to its credit, Albert! does transcend the limitations of its form. The story is slight but touching. The characters have weight (yes, even the floaty ones). The film overall manages to evoke a mood. The voice actors do OK with the limited scope they’ve got and the two leads that we actually see are engaging, increasingly so as the film progresses.
This is clearly a film made with love and commitment. Bergeys, as writer, director and lead, does the heavy lifting. If he’d come up short, we’d really be in a pickle. As for Marc Kerkhofs, who handles both the cinematography and the animation, I prefer his ‘real world’ work but I applaud his sense of adventure in trying an unusual approach.
This could have been a bog-standard period drama. And that might have made it a better film. But it wouldn’t have challenged any expectations. And it wouldn’t have done anything that hasn’t been done ten thousand times before. Albert! is different. It’s intriguing. I don’t think it works as well as it could. But it raises some interesting questions for film-makers.