The topical story and strong leads in David Verbeek’s “R U There” feel like a great short stretched into a feature that cannot sustain the tension for which it so earnestly strives.

The best target audience for this “R U There” film about a young gaming champ should be the enormous gaming/”Second Life” community. Yet gamers, for one, inhabit virtual worlds that are far faster and far more action-filled than the slow-paced, moody “R U There.” Ominous music throughout sets up a thriller, but it’s actually a “boy meets girl but does better with her avatar” story.

Professional gamer Jitze (Stijn Koomen) is in Taipei for a tournament. A terrible accident he witnesses and a sore muscle take their toll on his psyche and body and he’s forced to withdraw from the tournament for a few days. While resting, he meets Min Min (Ke Huan-Ru), a beautiful, older woman who sidelines as a prostitute and, in Jitze’s case, a masseuse.

Wanting to spend more time with Min Min, Jitze even pays her to take him with her for a weekend in the country with her family. Ke’s Min Min is intriguingly vague and although she seems attracted to Jitze, she acts maternal and standoffish. Only when their avatars meet in the virtual world of “Second Life” is she openly flirty and physical with him.

Lennert Hillege’s camera sticks tight to Koomen, who offers an assured, nuanced performance: he is both hard to read and vulnerable. Whether Jitze is alone or wandering through the gray, bleak streets of Taipei, Verbeek drives home the point that gamers, like most of us who are glued to our computers, even when playing or communicating with others are always cut off from actual human contact. In fact, Jitze, a prize-winning master soldier in game life is paralyzed before real suffering, the accident victim, and cannot even offer help.

The serenity that pervades their “Second Life” environments — rarely if ever yet seen on the big screen — wonderfully renders yet another way we can suspend time and even life nowadays. To boot, while Jitze’s avatar is his gaming soldier self, Min Min’s is a silver-haired, bright-eyed knockout with Western features. Again, life is easier/better in a fake world you create than in the real one.

What is novel, though, is seeing gaming competitions for those unfamiliar with them. Surrounded by screaming fans, the teams strategize their plays beforehand, dress in matching running suits and are even treated for sports injuries like real athletes. Yet once the match begins, they could just as easily be playing alone at home, over the Internet.

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The juxtaposition of the real and “imaginary” lives of four heavy Second Life users was fascinating. Watching the film was like taking an imaginary vacation to some other planet, with a complete society including beaches and dance clubs, fashion and real estate, friends and strangers. The graphics were very utopian, with clean lines and computer generated images. It was basically a binge of collective imaginations.

Life is much easier in Second Life than it is in the physical world. For instance, while dating in Second Life, a woman gets upset because the private beach won’t allow them to fly.

Second Life resident Caitsu Manga flies a kite in th fields outside of Zero Style Hair. Second Life is a virtual world where users can create a persona all their own while interacting with other players. JESSICA LUTHI / THE GUARDSMAN

After this couple failed to make a real-life relationship work, the man speculated that if they hadn’t ventured out of Second Life, they would “have a nice house in Second Life somewhere with lots of friends,” and would probably be still together, emotionally if not physically.

One of the subjects in the film is the fashionable avatar, Asri Falcone, who designs high-end skin, fashion, and housing products for Second Life denizens.

In stark contrast to her avatar, the camera pulls back to reveal the real-life Falcone, snoring in her unkempt bed before her alarm goes off at 6 p.m. All of the subjects in the documentary seem to spend most of their nights staring into a computer.

Living your life as an avatar is like the ultimate in plastic surgery.

In reality Asri Falcone is pretty, but she’s overweight, lives in her pajamas and chain-smokes. She also lives in her parents’ Detroit basement.

Falcone says she earns well into “six figures” by selling her products, but I wonder if that includes decimal points or is in game dollars, since about 250 Second Life dollars is equal to one US dollar. She lives with her parents because they’ve all had some health problems and her mother is an excellent cook specializing in soul food and fried chicken.

Filmmaker Jason Spingarn-Koff also follows a young man strangely obsessed with building a Second Life persona of an 11-year-old girl. At one point this avatar spends time as a suicide bomber and eventually plans her own death.

The documentary doesn’t judge whether ultimately Second Life, is healthy or non-healthy but it definitely has the power to take over people’s lives. For all of the individuals profiled, their Second Life experience was almost more important and more “real” than their physical surroundings.

One of the founders of Linden Labs, the San Francisco-based company that created Second Life, said one of the biggest differences between the virtual world and first life is that you can’t physically hurt someone or be hurt.

The film is not an encyclopedic expose of how to use the tools in Second Life. For me, the virtual experience of the movie was enough to know about what goes on in this “new reality.” And I’m satisfied that I’m not missing out on anything.

By Angela Penny/The Guardsman

“Chatroom”, the first of a trio of cyberspace thrillers chilling the film festival, sees a dysfunctional youngster (upcoming British star Aaron Johnson) obsessively watching Japanese suicide videos in a dark locked bedroom.

He sets up a chatroom with four other troubled teenagers, but seems only to want to mess with their heads.

Directed by Japanese master of horror Hideo Nakata, but panned by many Cannes critics, the British movie brings a note of caution to fans of the virtual world both on the Internet and in video games.

“The Internet has been increasingly amplifying negative emotions: anxieties, fear, envy, hatred and anger,” said Nakata, whose movie was screened at the festival’s “Un Certain Regard” section.

“It is now proven that this can result in the most extreme acts, either of killing yourself or other people,” he said in production notes.

In “Black Heaven”, by France’s Gilles Marchand, a teenager is attracted to a beautiful but deranged young woman who lives a double life in an online game called “Black Hole”, where she seduces avatars into committing real-life suicide.

Marchand said he came up with the idea of making a film mingling real life with virtual worlds after watching a teenager, oblivious to shoppers in a department store, playing a videogame in which his avatar had just committed murder.

His movie is set in sunny southern France, counterposing the light and colours of the Mediterranean coast with the dark, highly stylised world of the online game.

Dutch offering “R U There“, also screening in “Un Certain Regard”, is director David Verbeek’s tale of a professional gamer forced to pull out of a wargame tournament in Taipei — where the watchword is “kill!” — for several days due to muscle strain.

Normally locked up in virtual worlds he suddenly comes face to face with the real world where he is drawn to a local woman, Min Min.

A Taiwanese doctor suggests “he lives too much in his mind and needs to live with his body” but Min Min instead convinces him to follow her example by relaxing as an avatar on Second life.

“What he surrenders in the end is his need to always control his environment,” said Verbeek.

But while the pair have a common need to feel free from the constraints of life “they cannot accomplish this in real life,” the director said.

“Only virtual reality enriches their experience, despite being an imaginary world.”

Trailer here

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Following on the heels of Chatroom comes another movie with a foot in the virtual world. Here, though, the realms of cyberspace are represented literally rather than metaphorically. The movie features a sprinkling of scenes from Dutch gamer Jitze (Stijn Koomen)’s exploits in a war sim contest and another handful from the artificial reality of Second Life. However, in this case, the fact of computer-based worlds and their effect on our essential being is the message of this movie, rather than a device for a more plot-driven tale.

Jitze is competing in a gaming tournament in Taiwan and is the star of his team, which is easing through the early rounds. His split from his surroundings evokes that of Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation – only Jitze isn’t really a stranger in a strange land. As his response to witnessing a motorbike accent shows, his disconnect is in fact with other people and himself. A (psychosomatic?) shoulder injury then pushes him to the sidelines, and towards Min Min (Ke Huan-Ru), who he attaches himself to in what seems like a desire to feel. She urges him to join her on Second Life, but it’s the time they spend together and the reality of her physical touch which arguably reconnects him with the world and himself.

The film is evenly-paced but languidly so. Long, dialogue-free scenes are spread throughout, which does tend to drag despite the brisk 87 minute runtime. You do get a fair sense of Jitze’s isolation, but the ideas in the movie sometimes feel lost in its self-consciously arty direction. Despite that, R U There is just about thought-provoking enough to keep things interesting.

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