From glory to nerdy: the film “Blackberry”, in competition on Friday at the Berlinale, takes an ironic look at the saga of a telephone that became the emblem of the super executive of the 2000s before falling into oblivion.
After the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network” (2010), or that of Apple Steve Jobs (2015), interpreted in particular by Michael Fassbender in the eponymous film by Dany Boyle, a digital saga once once more inspires cinema.
“Blackberry”, in the running for the Golden Bear, has chosen to retrace the history of a fallen icon, whose founders revolutionized the telephone market at the turn of the 2000s, before burning their wings at the end of the decade.
The director himself, Matt Johnson, plays in the film the role of Doug, one of the retarded teenagers as good in computers and in hacking as deprived of business acumen, who tinker with telephones in the suburbs of Toronto.
“Blackberry does not come from nowhere, the smartphone does not come from a person who would have had the idea by chance that everyone has a telephone to be able to contact the others” permanently, underlined the Canadian filmmaker by presenting his film in Berlin. “They watched Star Trek, and they thought, it would be cool if we had that.”
Generally speaking, “the people who were going to be at the forefront of technology were also the people who were real nerds, science fiction fans”.
Filming them is a way of remembering that we “live in a world that we inherited from young technology enthusiasts, which they built from the films they watched”.
– “Nothing cool” –
Adapted from a book-investigation on the history of the Blackberry, the film, which avoids the pitfalls of the biopic and sometimes takes on the appearance of a mockumentary, goes back to the origins of the Canadian company Research in Motion (RIM), which launched the product.
The meteoric rise begins when a computer genius, Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel) meets an unscrupulous businessman, ruined and determined to rebuild, Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton).
With its large keyboard to easily send emails, typing with two thumbs, Blackberry is a hit with many business leaders, celebrities but also politicians. Former US President Barack Obama even wanted to keep his at the White House following his election in 2008.
Behind the commercial success, the film also shows the conflict between a schoolboy and cool culture of the beginnings, and the requirement of profitability which comes to corrupt it. Little by little, a toxic and ruthless work environment sets in, in an ultra-macho world, from which women are almost absent.
It’s “a world that I know very well, there is a culture of boys’ locker rooms, of male competition, which I know very well from having grown up in the 1990s”, explained the director.
The fall will be as dazzling as the success, with in particular the release in 2007 of the Apple iPhone and its touch screen which immediately outmoded the Blackberry.
As one of the characters in the film cruelly puts it, Blackberry goes from being the device everyone wants to have, to the one everyone owned before buying an iPhone.
Everyone ? Except for a few refractories, like actor Glenn Howerton, who confided in Berlin that he “never wanted a Blackberry for the very reason that everyone had one: to be reachable at any time to communicate”.
“I just wanted to be left alone most of the time! Seeing that damn thing beeping all the time was a real nightmare!” he said. “For me there was nothing cool in the Blackberry”.