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The Truth Hurts: A Review of the Film Guidance
What puts love and peace at peril?
Posted June 13, 2022 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
The stunning, languid imagery of Guidance may mesmerize you, as it did me. But don’t let it distract you from the existential dilemma that runs like a river throughout its vivid cinematography.
The screen displays a spectacular home, a hide-away; spare film sets in the whitest of whites; lush, forested country-sides; a leaf with a sole beetle, crawling without direction; a stone obelisk and pond; and soft artificial intelligence graphics placed like halos above the head of its “host.” Highly stylized.
It is China, sometime into the future. The film’s location is principally a modern home, the kind owned by the richest of the rich, surrounded by forests, not far from a City. Two new lovers are on a weekend retreat. Their baggage, however, includes secrets. The camera pivots from them to a “safe room." And to a minimalist TV studio, where a reporter’s questions begin to reveal a monumental plan for the world.
Ten years have passed since the “Great War.” Between who, for what reason(s), and with what methods(s) of annihilation carries no moment. There are no freaky apocalyptic landscapes, no carnage or anarchy as evidence of the war’s consequences. But we do have, in the war’s aftermath, an AI entrepreneur who has taken it upon himself to create a society without war.
The film’s writer-director remarked that he wanted to "tell a simple and small story of an ordinary couple placed in an extraordinary situation.” This couple is grappling with the dilemma of whether love can exist, and be sustained, in the face of lies and deceit, which serves as a segue to a greater human conundrum, namely, what would it take to achieve a world without war.
The lovers are part of a triangle of 30-something, beautiful people: two young men, Su Jie (Francesco Chen) and Mai Zi Xuan (Harry Song), hold, in common, a love for a woman, Han Miao (Sun Jia). But romance is not the only fire in this film; there are the hot embers from truth and trust tangling with lying and deception.
One of the men, Su Jie, has his eyes set on creating a world without lies, the precondition, he believes, of a world without war. A small capsule, looking like medicine for a cold, contains the AI app he has developed, which he has named Guidance. The other man’s ambition, the love of Han Miao, is more modest but also may be unattainable.
Each member of the threesome has secrets, contained by lies and deceit. Do secrets threaten love? Do lies and deceit create a fundamental impediment to a future of global peace? Guidance is the trope that means to answer the conundrum of what puts love and peace in peril.
Guidance was written and directed by Neysan Sobhani, whose short-form work has appeared in over 40 international festivals. Guidance is his first feature film. Mr. Sobhani was raised in Asia and North America. As a young man, he twice fled war and conflict. His work represents today’s multicultural world: Guidance is not solely a film about China, but about our worldwide humanity.
The film was released throughout China in 2021, and will soon appear on streaming services* in the US and Canada.
Can artificial intelligence deliver on the promise of ending war? Remember, this is a science fiction film, the genre that calls for suspending everyday logic.
A promising AI technology, designed for humans and scalable globally, had been prototyped by Su Jie’s father. But that invention backfired, giving one side in the Great War more power than the other, leading to its ruinous end. The father’s sins, however inadvertent, are visited on the son: Su Jie seems determined to redeem his father (and himself). His updated AI program, Guidance, indeed, can transform human nature, he reckons.
Su Jie has concluded that lying is the fundamental cause of human conflict, whether personal or global. Guidance’s technology will disclose deceit, thereby putting an end to the lying that is destroying the human race.
This app is voluntarily installed into the brain by its human host, simply by swallowing a small pill, a capsule shown to be full of small grains. Guidance is the app for attaining enlightenment, progressively, at the host’s request. Once this AI app is implanted in the brains of “23 percent” of the world’s population, we are told, good will trump evil as lies disappear from the face of the Earth.
To bring this concept down to earth, back to the couple on retreat. They both install Guidance and go for the ride. Through them, we can observe if Guidance is the remedy to lies (little white and big lies), secrets, and deception. As viewers, we witness an existential study in human dynamics, told through a mere two members of the world’s population.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.—Plato
