She elects to accompany him up to the surface, not knowing that he has infected her.Įventually, having pieced together most of the puzzle, Tolbiac is recognised – and, at last, named – by the guards he used to command. He is appalled by what he has done, and what he is becoming. Tolbiac’s struggle against transformation wavers when he finds an uninfected woman (Vimala Pons) and, suddenly abhuman, rapes her. The plant has been responding to its escalating exploitation by releasing a toxin that mutates the workers into strange, no-longer human creatures. Tolbiac triggers a recording of the final confrontation between the technicians and the guards: when faced with an information leak over their corporate malfeasance, the nature and extent of which will only later become clear(er), Eden Log overrode all protocols about the relative autonomy of the subterranean levels and sent in guards to destroy the evidence and eradicate the threat. One man, suspended from a wall, claims to have brought down the system, but it is not entirely clear where he ends and the plant (in either sense) begins. The plant is both a miraculous tree of vast proportions, its roots reaching far underground, and the industrial complex which extracts sap with ‘infinite energetic properties’ from the tree so as to power a city.Īs Tolbiac ascends through underground levels – a trajectory that materialises the vertical integration upon which the Eden Log corporation’s gradually unveiled monopoly depends – he encounters various others from whom he begins to piece together the world and its story. This pun on plant, which works in French as well as in English, opens up one of the several fields of ambiguity in which this often elliptical film nestles. Look after the plant and it will look after you. It is thanks to your work below that you will build your paradise above. In the ominously bland idiolect of a corporate shill, one of them states, He presses through heavy turnstiles and is greeted by projections of half a dozen women, immaculately clothed and coiffed, who address him in multiple languages. On the wall behind him, a half-seen diagram describes a process which seems to involve humans descending below ground and then later ascending. Cables and roots, difficult to tell apart, hang from the ceiling, industrial detritus devolving into, merging with, the subterranean-organic. He finds a torch on a nearby corpse and in its intermittent light he creeps and crawls and climbs up out of this cave into the lower levels of a seemingly derelict industrial complex. (Later, much later, we – and he – will learn that his name is Tolbiac, but for now he has no idea who or where he is.) Conferences, keynotes, research presentations, plenaries and papersįlashes of light reveal a man (Clovis Cornillac), caked in mud, waking, staggering to his feet.Join 1,283 other followers Follow Mark Bould on Publications