Andrew Bujalski’s COMPUTER CHESS is a bizarre curio. The 1980s period setting is deepened by a visual style that directly mimics the recording technology of the time. And the story raises big questions about technology, competition and the nature of intelligence within a scenario full of petty, low-stakes oneupmanship.

The film’s visual style is similar to Pablo Larraín’s fact-based Chilean drama NO, which used 80s-vintage video cameras to give the film the junky aesthetic of a well-worn VHS tape. But where NO’s glaring, saturated colour palette sent up its ad-agency protagonists by giving everything the garish look of a TV commercial, CHESS, with the exception of a short segment near the end, is entirely shot in austere black and white. Overlaid with the fuzziness of analogue video, the film is at least in part meant to be diegetic footage from a documentary crew attending an artificial intelligence conference-slash-chess tournament.

CHESS opens conventionally, introducing us to the eccentric collection of computer programmers and chess masters who’ve come together to challenge each other (there’s a touching irony in Bujalski extending his gaze back from our era of social network billionaires and all-conquering superhero franchises to a time when nerds were truly uncool). Within the group a few characters and their journeys are placed in the foreground, including Peter Bishton (Patrick Riester) and Martin Beuscher (Wiley Wiggins), who worry that their machine is sabotaging its chances in the tournament, and abrasive loudmouth Mike Papageorge (Myles Paige), whose neverending quest to find a room for the night is a great running gag. But the characters remain fundamentally opaque; we know next to nothing of their backstory, only what comes across in their awkward, stilted interactions with one another. The audience is kept at arm’s length like the documentarians, rather than being fully caught up in the drama of the competition.

the touches of surrealism imbue this lo-fi experience with an unpredictable oddness

As the weekend wears on, the conversations between groups and individuals break out from the narrow scope of the competition to encompass more profound matters. Whispered gossip between the participants spreads rumours of Pentagon funding up for grabs for one or more teams. The nuclear paranoia of the period setting is an ever-present element in the background. At one point chess is explicitly compared to Cold War geopolitics; a rule-bound, zero-sum conflict viewed literally in black and white.

The presence of a New Age group holding a seminar in the hotel at the same time adds a note of culture clash to the proceedings, with the interactions between hippies and geeks coloured with mutual incomprehension. As the New Agers practice spiritual rebirth in the conference room, Bishton and Beuscher worriedly discuss their machine’s idiosyncrasies; it will throw games against other computers, only bothering to play well against human players. Is their programme birthing a personality of its own?

At odd points strange visual flourishes creep into the film like glitches in the machine, disturbing the flat, affectless tone of the film. Just as the the randomness of the human element creeps into Bishton and Beuscher’s programme, the touches of surrealism imbue this lo-fi experience with an unpredictable oddness.

Unfortunately, all of these promising directions peter out rather than build to something greater. The various points on artificial intelligence and free will are left unresolved, and the disconnected flashes of surrealism lead to dead ends. Maybe this non-committal approach is a willful endorsement of the messiness of real life over the ordered sterility of a computer programme.

The final shot, in which a cameraman shines his camera directly into the sun, burning out the image as we watch, has shades of Olivier Assayas’ IRMA VEP and Monte Hellman’s TWO-LANE BLACKTOP, which both end with the physical disintegration of the film. It’s an aggressive rejection of traditional notions of “closure”, but with so little to hang a coherent plot or theme on, COMPUTER CHESS is an ultimately frustrating, quixotic experience.

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