User Reviews

This film has high aspirations and gives the viewer plenty to think about (both good and not so good) but the story's execution by the director is a mixed bag that has rightly given this film it's cult status. Story is about Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) who's a scientist in biotechnology and she's made three computer clones of herself by downloading her DNA. The three clones are Ruby, Marinne, and Olivia (all played by Swinton) and they live in Rosetta's computer but at night Ruby sneaks out into the real world as a hooker and collects sperm samples from men which she takes back to make tea with that refuels them.

*****SPOILER ALERT***** The men that have had encounters with Ruby all become impotent and get a rash on their forehead resembling a barcode which prompts Agent Hopper (James Urbaniak) to investigate and it leads to Rosetta whom he quarantines. Meanwhile, a nerdy and virginal copy-shop guy named Sandy (Jeremy Davies) meets Ruby and they talk of how difficult intimacy is and leads to them falling in love.

This film is directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson who is making her second feature film effort after "Conceiving Ada" (also with Swinton) and while she shows great promise in her ideas it's the manner in which her films are told that comes under scrutiny. I'm definitely not one that wants a script to be obvious and dumbed down for general audiences (God forbid) but I do believe that this story could have been a tad more self explanatory. It does take a concentrated effort to follow some of this story but I do think that if viewers stick with it they might find enough substance to keep them interested. One is the casting of actress Karen Black as a transsexual private eye which has become typical in some of the roles in her career. Leeson's film does have an interesting look to it not because it was shot on high-definition video but just a uniqueness from the bar that Ruby ventures to and the living quarters that the three clones live in. None of this means much without the performance of Swinton who's presence alone is worthy enough to give this a look and she does an exceptional job of giving all four of her characters a distinctive persona of they're own. The films script asks enough interesting questions about making copies in our own image and what people really want (or need) in terms of intimacy but the end result is a film that's amusing but comes across slightly cockeyed.

Why do the female computer programs have to inject themselves with sperm? And how do you get sperm inside of a computer program, anyway? These kinds of questions needs answering. It's not the sort of thing you can gloss over.

This film is weird and silly and stupid. It's watchable -- I sat through the entire thing -- but it's utterly baffling. Things happen for no reason, problems are resolved effortlessly, no real tension to speak of, the science is glossed over and meaningless, the dialogue is goofy, there are holes in the plot that can swallow suns, and it's all very strange.

Some of the sets are interesting, some of the acting is just plain bizarre. John Kornbluth -- the fat, bald man from "Haiku Tunnel" -- is particularly out of place. The picture's well filmed, and overall it's a very unusual movie -- but not unusual enough to be good. But not so bad that it's painfully bad.

I have this odd feeling that there was some sort of metaphor at work here. Is it all about feminism? Technology? Lust? Finding yourself? What the hell is it about? I don't know -- and neither will you, if you can bring yourself to watch this film.

Warning: It's cheesier than a mouse convention.

Well, it is science fiction, woman-centric in concept and execution. It features an abundance of Tilda Swinton.

So it should be something worth watching. Yes? But I have to warn you off. This is written and directed by someone with such a shallow understanding of the issues involved that it is a self-parody. There are some truly interesting concepts that could have been explored if the science in this science fiction was actual science — or even if the concepts had been coherent and the writing good.

The general idea here is that seduction, identity, experience, cinema and something she calls "technology" are coupled in a way that matters and is interesting and embodied in a "virus." Also that what it means to be a woman and to desire desire circumnavigates these four points of a compass.

Although Tilda is more than capable of layered seduction, what we have here is manikin attraction. There is no hint of real seduction, either among the characters or with the audience. There are copious references to films, important and influential films. But they might as well have been posters on the wall as they are not integrated in any way with the film we see.

The real problem is that the idea of self-aware beings, vlogs (here called "portals"), human and computer viruses, DNA, and semen are somehow conflated as if they somehow were equivalent.

Tilda stars as a young woman in a university near San Francisco who is a programmer/AI researcher. She is a hidden genius who is profoundly lonely, so creates three clones of herself, independent robots consisting of code made flesh. The three each "are" a primary color and are named so. Tilda plays these women as well.

At night, they "download" selected seduction scenes from movies as dreams, but are generally bored as they are cooped up in our genius's basement. Oh, our genius is named Rosetta Stone. One of the replicants, Ruby, goes out at night — Jess Franco-like — and harvests semen from males she seduces by repeating scenes from movies. The semen is needed to feed the clones and to reinforce their immune systems. Those systems are "infected" with the virus that created them — the self-replicating virus being what brought them into being. The men in question become infected with this virus, which leaves them impotent and with a bar code on their foreheads.

I'm not making any of this up.

After several dozen cases of infected men show up, some goofy agency is called that inspects these sorts of things, and a gaggle of incompetent males is flummoxed. At the end, the key investigator is seduced by our heroine (the real one), while our vampiress falls in love with a guy who works on a "duplicating machine" (what we would call a xerox).

Oh, the investigative agency calls in a disenfranchised expert: "Dirty Dick" played by a sixty two year old Karen Black, who scopes things out, but does not interfere.

So much of this is designed to resonate with me, just by the accident of what I do and who I am. But it is such incompetent storytelling, so lacking in seduction and coherence, so empty of insight that it harms, a disease. "The Love Virus," is better, as bad as it is.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Teknolust is like someone wrote a terrible script for a sci-fi sex comedy and then handed it to someone with the sense of humor of a pine wood box. Since Lynn Hershman Leeson was both writer and director here, I can only conclude she has a split personality. One of them must be a talentless hack and the other a Trappist monk whose funny bone has been surgically replaced with a rod of boron.

Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) is a research scientist. Yes, that's her name. No, neither she nor this story has a blessed thing to do with language or translation. Rosetta has created three copies of herself; dark-haired Ruby, blonde Olive and redheaded Marinne. Are they clones? Robots? Some sort of virtual constructs? Even if you haven't seen this film, your guess is still as good as mine. They're referred to as viruses in the movie, but this script also suggests computer viruses can infect human beings, so take that for what it's worth. Rosetta keeps her copies hidden away in color coordinated rooms, subjects them to old Hollywood movies as they sleep and communicates with them through her microwave. Yes, her microwave.

Rosetta doesn't appear to have anything for her copies to do, so they basically just lounge around until nightfall. That's when Ruby goes out to find food for the copies. What do they need to survive? Human sperm. Ruby goes out, picks up a random guy to have sex with and then brings the used condom home so she can use it to brew up some tea. Ruby also runs a website, called an "internet portal" in the film. It's not entirely clear what Ruby does on her site, but it's enough to make a fan of Sandy (Jeremy Davies), a loser who lives with his mom across the street from Rosetta and company.

The guys Ruby boinks start going impotent and sterile with red rashes between their eyes that turn into bar codes. That sparks an investigation by one of Rosetta's colleagues (John O'Keefe), an undefined federal agent named Hopper (James Urbaniak), and Hopper's even more undefined associate Dirty Dick (Karen Black). There's a whole bunch of floundering around where it's never all that clear what's happening with any of the characters, leading to what I can only assume is theoretically meant to be a happy ending for all involved.

Despite the nature of the story I just described, Teknolust has no nudity or sex scenes. There's also no real profanity or violence. The dialog stinks and the actors mostly appear to be engaged in some sort of competition to see who can look and sound most like a department store mannequin. There's some decent set design but when you notice that, you know you're watching an awful motion picture.

I could never tell the difference between when Teknolust was trying to be funny and when it was trying to be dramatic, which obviously means it failed at both. As best I can figure it, this film is an attempt at willful oddity, like one of those off, off, off Broadway plays where everybody's wearing galoshes and speaking Esperanto. This movie isn't really that odd, though. Even with the whole used condom tea thing, Teknolust is like some suburban housewife's tame concept of weird. It's the crazy ramblings of someone whose creativity was burned out by watching too many middle school plays.

Unless you're entertained by stuff like a character who whispers for no reason or another who constantly has a band-aid over a different part of his body, like Les Nessman from WKRP in Cincinatti, you should stay away from this movie. It's boring and gets more boring every time it pathetically tries to be interesting.