Boys Go to Jupiter

Greyish-blue and pale pink are the colours I feel after watching Julian Glander’s Boys Go to Jupiter. The film actually gathers a broad palette of colours, the yellows being probably the prevalent ones, that has us dive into a suspended Florida winter. However, I’ll keep the greyish-blue for the cool cynicism or, more accurately, the cynical coolness of its young protagonists, who oscillate between an indeterminate, chilling wandering and convoluted divagations on economy, from penny pinching to Marxist erudition.

At stake is a pretty clear photograph of a younger generation that seems to be trapped in a system of exploitation that frustrates any higher motivation beyond the one of getting minimal financial independency. Apparent laziness conceals the inability to cope with the obtuse standards of efficiency of the world, and paves the way to existential boredom. On this level, the film provides a clever, pamphlet-like criticism of modern capitalism, whose humorous exaggeration involves a science fiction story where a super-intelligent dolphin – the alter ego of super-powerful AI machine perhaps? – is the hidden mastermind behind a super-efficient fruit industry. Is this, for Glander, the reason for importing a good amount of Lego aesthetics in figures and landscapes that bear resemblance to an architectural model?

With this layer of social realism, Boys Go to Jupiter attaches an emotional layer, essentially made out of multiple stories of friendships. For this I’ll keep the pale pink, which here expresses tenderness – oh, how overflowingly tender is this film! – a tenderness that marks the animation with its smooth movements, pastel colours, and slow pace, a mixture of elements that eventually speaks of the winter in Florida and this “world-in-standby” feeling. In addition to this, the dramaturgy of the film, with its surprising cuts, lateral perspectives, parallel storytelling, and a touch of sweet absurdism in the dialogues, is so curvy and diverted that it conveys a lunatic mood to the story. For this reason, the insertion of surreal elements is felt as natural and doesn’t give the impression of breaking the narration (which is sustained by a remarkable casting of voices).

This pale pink is probably nothing more than the colour of the skin, and the entire landscape of the film could be made of skin – soft, permeable and perspiring – the entire animation could be nothing but one body. This filmic object is a queer body, where queer amusedly rhymes with weird – and not only on a formal level. In fact, the ultimate existential choice that gives the main protagonist the chance to emancipate himself from the strictures of this particular Florida (“No Country for Young People” could be the anti-Coen Brothers subtitle of the film), and from the strictures of capitalism, is for him to accept an engagement with a family of luminescent “beings” – the Gumbies. Queerness meets more-than-human!

“Girls go to college to get more knowledge; boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider”: this adolescent motto is the open secret behind Julian Glander’s original title: with Boys Go to Jupiter we land on a weird planet, both real and fantastic, both familiar and unlikely. A planet where people are not properly stupid but floating in stupor – the Latin root for “stupid” – which means astonishment. Jupiter is in fact an enchanted world.