“The internet was okay when it was only half of our life, but today it’s 90 percent of our life,” Timur Bekmambetov told Vulture last year, early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bekmambetov’s latest directorial effort, Profile, feels like it could have been made at a time of social distancing, but it actually premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2018.
As the film breezes through the key points of their relationship and Amy is increasingly drawn to Bilel, her transformation is hard to buy.
That makes Profile’s formal brilliance also one of its near-fatal limitations: Just because our world is now entirely online doesn’t mean that reality is actually there, too.
As Amy switches between her real profile and her fake one, she gets text messages and Skypes and FaceTimes from her anxious editor, her friends, her boyfriend about accidentally sharing screens, or sharing the wrong file, or having an embarrassing moment of your life broadcast on social media or a Zoom call, might feel an anxiety attack coming on during any one of Profile’s many scenes of Amy switching rapidly between profiles, opening and closing files and windows.
Melody and Bilel’s social-media interactions and Skype calls speak to the Potemkin-village intimacy of modern life: to the identities and worlds we build all around ourselves, fueled not by our own desires Through his ever-smiling, devil-may-care charm, Bilel begins to hold sway over how Amy imagines herself.