The Covid lockdowns brought a deluge of earnest, polite, socially distanced films shot under proper pandemic protocols. But director Eugene Kotlyarenko waited until last year to shoot what may go down as perhaps the most funny and accurate pandemic movie, The Code, because it presents the pandemic as many of us truly experienced it: Extremely, paranoiacally, online.
The Code, which just premiered to a delighted reception at Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival, is the multilayered story of a fledgling filmmaker named Celine (Dasha Nekrasova) who flees during the pandemic to the Southern California desert with her boyfriend, Jay (Peter Vack.) In the opening, Jay confesses (to his phone) an inability to have sex with Celine anymore.
Almost as soon as she announces plans to make a film about life during lockdown, and its bearing on relationships, an anxious Jay begins recording counter-footage of their relationship, for fear that Celine may be out to cancel him. We see them from many perspectives, especially each other’s. The film takes place in 2021, in the early days of Covid vaccines, which affords many opportunities for flexing, competing and conspiring.
Kotlyarenko’s films, including the 2020 lockdown hit Spree and 2018’s Wobble Palace (co-starring Nekrasova) are packed with on-screen screens, frequently filled with text messages, DMs, and anonymous crankery: Kotlyarenko personally wrote 7,000 of the internet comments that pop up during Spree as rideshare driver Kurt (Stranger Things’ Joe Keery) murders his way to social media infamy.
One of Kotlyarenko’s missions as a filmmaker is to make sure you never glance away from his films to look at your phone. If you do, you’ll likely miss what’s on the characters’ phones.
“I don’t ever want to make what they call a second-screen movie,” he says. “We kind of accept or have come to acknowledge that a lot of viewing experiences at home become second-screen experiences where the film is ambience to your more important narrative experience, which is ‘I am the central character of my social media life, where I am the director, the editor, of my doomscrolling on my phone.’”
He adds: “The themes of this film are about that sort of central character syndrome that we all experience through the agency of the social medium, rather than the film medium.
What’s fun, I think, is that it interrogates who the author of the film is, and foregrounds editing and these cinematic concepts in ways that normally aren’t spoken about or considered in a movie.
“By having all of these maximized and loaded elements in the movie, I hope that the part of people’s minds that is itching for second screen dopamine hits is being hit by the movie. That’s my goal.”
We talked with Kotlyarenko in Montreal, after his second The Code screening, about using a film to interrogate film, replicating the lockdowns era, and reuniting with Nekrasova, best known for acting on Succession, directing The Scary of Sixty-First, and co-hosting the often-provocative podcast Red Scare.
MovieMaker: What was the first spark of an idea that led to The Code?
It started over 15 years ago, when I first read a book by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki called The Key, and then I got obsessed with all of his work. It’s about a couple whose relationship is breaking down and has certain sexual problems and complications. And the whole story is told through alternating diary entries of the couple.
And I thought, Oh, what a brilliant concept. I wonder if I could ever do anything like that, explore the perspectives on a relationship through both parties. Fifteen years ago, I was like, Oh, there’s got to be like emails, and there’s got to be secret blog posts. I could never really, for lack of a better expression, crack the code on how to make it cinematic, and in the kind of language that I was interested in.
“And then during COVID, I thought, well, this is a great setting for that story I’ve been trying to tell about that couple, because I just saw all these couples trapped together and really strained, and complicated relationships that seemed like they were coasting and functional. And then I thought, Well, what if she’s making a documentary about lockdown, but really, it’s interrogating their relationship?
So once I thought of that as the backbone structure I knew I could hang all those other elements, like posts, and text threads and memes onto the documentary. And then I got really deep into it thinking about reality TV and surveillance and Nest cams. So it’s really just trying to figure out how I could make my own kind of Tanizaki-theme story.
MovieMaker: But you didn’t shoot it during Covid.
Eugene Kotlyarenko: I wrote it during Covid. But it’s a little bit of Shampoo syndrome [the 1975 Warren Beatty film was set in 1968], where you start the thing in the thing, and then you luckily have the perspective of a few years later of knowing how it turned out. So the satire becomes a little bit more insightful.
MovieMaker: The stuff about NFTs in The Code feels more dated than Shampoo.
Eugene Kotlyarenko: [Laughs] It’s pretty clear what was a joke at the time. But, for example, for Wobble Palace, a film that I shot, basically, right during the 2016 election, I ran out of money for some of the post stuff. So it actually took me two years to finish it in post.
And so it came out in 2018. But having that distance from the moment where everyone thought Hillary was gonna win, and we were gonna have our first female president, made the satire of that relationship hit different, and I think more palatable for people than if it had come out five months after the election or something.
MovieMaker: Where did you shoot The Code?
We were in Joshua Tree, where a lot of people went during the whole staycation of COVID. If you could afford it, it was a great time to say, “Hey, maybe we could escape from the brutality of the existential crisis here by going somewhere else. That’ll fix things!”
So yeah, we decided to get a staycation home in Joshua Tree. And we found that really interesting house built into the boulders. We looked at about 10 houses, and one of them was the house where they ended up throwing the party in the film.
I was like, wow, this is like a layer of hell, this house. There’s no way they can stay here. But we have to document this portal into hell.
We had a wedding ceremony sequence at Palm Springs City Hall and it was 118 degrees. And I dressed up in a suit. And the actors were like, “What the hell are you wearing?” And I said “I’m just wearing this heavy suit to be in solidarity with you guys.” And they were like, “That’s stupid.”
You can’t tell it’s 118 degrees, because they’re so cool. These actors I love — Vishwam Velandy and Ivy Wolk and Dasha and Peter — they just pull it off so — not effortlessly, but they exude personality. I love working with them.
Eugene Kotlyarenko on the Gaze and The Code
MovieMaker: There’s an energy with you and Dasha particularly where you’re sort of focusing on a couple of layers at once. The thing that’s happening is happening, but there’s also kind of a wry understatement on it, almost like Beatles songs. They’re almost commenting on songwriting itself, within the songs.
Eugene Kotlyarenko: It’s a huge compliment. I mean, I think Dasha and I are both really kind of earnest people. But we love jokes, and we love comedy. And we see the world in a kind of comedic way as a form of survival. And we’re different.
We handle things differently. I think she’s a little bit more of a provocateur, but I think we both consider ourselves kind of humanists in a tradition of mocking reality while having sympathy for the people who participate in it, including ourselves.
So yeah, we’re able to riff. I just think Dasha is a really wonderful actress. And I just was motivated to give her some opportunities to be emotional and desperate, and, you know, not just comedic, or not just mysterious.
The movie has, because of the characters, or the filmmakers making the movie that you’re watching, a unique gaze. The idea of how characters are objectified in the film is actually part of the story. And the way that characters are edited to appear and seem is part of the story. Because you’re constantly shifting the representation of different characters, depending on who you think is in control of the filmmaking.
The gaze of Dasha’s character onto Peter’s character, Jay, is different than how you see people kind of objectified and desired in movies, generally. And I think that’s a cool position I wanted for her to have and she knew how to play with it.
MovieMaker: When the characters are objectified, they’re kind of objectifying themselves — or promoting themselves.
Eugene Kotlyarenko: Totally. There’s a kind of competitive narcissism, the anxiety of self representation versus someone else controlling your narrative. That is the theme, right? This paranoia that if someone else takes control of how I’m represented, I could be canceled. I could be destroyed. I could be misrepresented.
I mean, this is an anxiety we all have. Because we’ve all become brand managers. We all have a corporate board that lives in our minds and tells us how to behave.
MovieMaker: And in relationships, so much comes down to listening.
Eugene Kotlyarenko: Why are people wrestling for narrative control in the culture at large? Why do people craft narratives? Because it gives us a voice. Because it says, This is the way I see the universe, and I want that to be the dominant way.
All relationships are give and take, and a bit of a brainwash: You kind of want the other person to see the world through your eyes. And if they can’t see the world through your eyes, and you can’t see the world through their eyes, then it’s not meant to be.
Cinema is all about how we see things. … Especially with our phones and stuff, we have all these opportunities to kind of nostalgically reflect on lived experiences. And I don’t know if you’ve ever had the thing where you’ll wake up one morning and your phone will say, Here’s a memory from six years ago, and suddenly you have this really impactful picture of you and someone you were madly in love with.
It really hits, and the memory it hits different, because you’re kind of distant from the drama or your joy or grief that you were going through in the moment.
Main image: Peter Vack and Dasha Nekrasova in The Code, directed by Eugene Kotlyarenko.