“Computer Chess” may be the strangest — and most wondrous — film of the year so far, and its director, Andrew Bujalski, doesn’t think it has much to do with chess.
The film takes place at an early-’80s computer-chess tournament, at which different programmers’ chess-playing machines go head to head over the course of a weekend. It takes the form, for much of its running time, of fake found footage from an old video camera, an aesthetic Andrew O’Hehir described as “deliberately unlovely.”
With the tension of actual chess-playing removed from the convention — the machines, until one begins to display an unsettling intelligence, are just acting according to their design, and nothing the programmers do can change the outcome of the tournament now — there’s time for a group of indoor kids to run wild in a depressing motel, taking drugs and wandering upon other folks at the hotel, swingers undergoing a sort of New Age revival meeting.
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“Computer Chess” director: “I’m fixated on outdated technology”
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