With his debut feature, Arco, Ugo Bienvenu puts a unique, thought-provoking twist on the solarpunk genre. He gives us a glimpse of the sort of sustainable utopia that one would expect from the genre: clean air, luscious gardens, thriving wildlife, and cities in the clouds (think Jack and Victoria’s pad in Oblivion, with a lot more greenery). But instead of contrasting this paradise with our contemporary society, Bienvenu shifts his reference point by 50 years, to a world desperately struggling to adapt to ferocious wildfires and biblical storms, and lamenting its failure to act when it mattered most. It is a slight but poignant change in perspective, which gives the playful adventure at the heart of the film a sobering air of contingency.
We begin in the far future, where humans have not only mastered the rudiments of sustainable living but also developed the power of flight (through time as well as space) by harnessing the power of rainbows. Ten-year-old Arco (voiced by Juliano Valdi) wants to get in on the action in order to see some dinosaurs, but he isn’t yet old enough to fly. Undeterred, he steals his sister’s cape and a special flying crystal, and leaps off into the clouds. After a 2001-esque time-warp sequence, in which his body is spaghettified into a kind of psychedelic human tadpole, he comes whizzing through the clouds and crash-lands in a forest. There, he is found by a young girl, Iris (Romy Fay), who informs him that while he has gone back in time, he hasn’t gone back as far as he had hoped. The year is 2075.
Compared to Arco’s idyllic world, 2075 leaves much to be desired. There are plenty of green spaces and futuristic cars, and humanity seems to have assimilated sentient robots into everyday life (as construction workers, nannies, and emergency service personnel) without simultaneously destroying itself. But communities also seem to be completely at the mercy of the elements, with extreme weather seen as an unwelcome but ineradicable aspect of a changed climate, and the restrictions on how many identical items you can buy at the grocery store suggest that little progress has been made in the way of sustainable food practices. It is an all-too-familiar society of blissful, often deliberate ignorance, and it isn’t heading anywhere pleasant, as Arco well knows.
It is against this chaotic backdrop that Iris and Arco set about finding the special crystal that Arco lost when he crash-landed, and which is his only means of getting home. What follows is a classic journey-to-the-underworld-and-back adventure, with all the quirky character types that that entails. Chief among these are the heroic helper, in the form of Iris’ devoted nanny bot, Mikki (Natalie Portman and Mark Ruffalo, in an eerie vocal blend), and the disarmingly affable villains, in the form of the brothers Dougie (Will Ferrell), Stewie (Andy Samberg), and Frankie (Flea), who have devoted their lives to spotting and chasing the legendary rainbow people, and whose clumsy machinations serve as the perfect foil for Iris and Arco’s burgeoning friendship.
The similarities between Arco and E.T. are numerous, and go far beyond mere plot mechanics. The theme of the broken family made whole again, for example, which runs through so much of Spielberg’s work, has its obvious equivalent here: Arco wants to reunite with his parents, who are lost in the future; and Iris wants to reunite with her parents, who both work in the city and only visit her on weekends (though they kindly beam themselves into the house as holograms at dinner time). This Spielbergian parallel starts to break down towards the end of the film, though, as Bienvenu’s variation on the theme moves from the interpersonal and into the political, with the restoration of the nuclear family reinterpreted as just one element of humanity’s larger reunion with Mother Earth.
This striving for peaceful co-existence is also reflected in Arco‘s delicate sound mixing, which balances the warm strings of Arnaud Toulon’s score with the natural soundscape of birdsong and rustling leaves. Equally considered are the cinematic effects that Bienvenu employs. A front-on shot of Iris and Arco sitting on a bench quickly transforms into a dynamic tableau when Iris moves her head and we see Dougie, Stewie, and Frankie in the background, eavesdropping on the kids’ conversation. It is a beautiful layering not only of images but also of atmospheres––of hope in the foreground and disaster in the background. It brings to mind what Bertrand Bonello called the “limbo state” in his film Coma (co-produced by Bienvenu): the feeling that so many young people have of being caught between optimism and pessimism––of looking at the world’s problems and feeling powerless, but not being ready to give up hope just yet.
Arco has one-week qualifying runs in NY and LA beginning Friday, November 14 and opens in January 2026.