‘Synthetic Pleasures’ Delves Into a Chaotic New World

The key word in Iara Lee’s ambitious but often tedious documentary “Synthetic Pleasures” is control: control over the environment, the mind and the body, over the life span itself. This, Lee suggests, is manifesting itself in myriad ways: virtual reality, cyber-sex, cryonics, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, the Internet, smart drugs. The list goes on and on.

And that’s a problem: Lee spreads herself too thin. She’s too eager to shift from the serious to the trendy, say, punkers who go in for body piercing, to the outright freaky--for example, a pretentious performance artist who sees plastic surgery as part of her art.

Lee could argue that such people are all part of the desire to change one’s self as well as to change the world, but it would have been helpful if she had made distinctions among fads, popular culture and serious scientific and philosophical speculation.

We need more of a sense of the dizzying political, economic, social and psychological implications of the explosion of artificial reality.

“Synthetic Pleasures”--that nifty title is its strongest asset--needs more organization, more context, more definition. Intentionally or not, it’s a film for people who have already dived into cyber-culture, not an introduction to it. It’s also often monotonous, combining clips of popular Japanese controlled environments, Las Vegas’ fake environments and interviews, with a preponderance of increasingly boring computer-generated imagery.

Lee is onto something of surpassing importance, but “Synthetic Pleasures” doesn’t develop much coherence or depth, and it isn’t much of a pleasure to watch.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: It includes some mild sexuality.

‘Synthetic Pleasures’

A Caipirinha presentation. Director Iara Lee. Producer George Gund III. Production team: Jennifer Weiner, Kiyo Joo, Andrew Hall, Margarita Ochoa, Brian Bumbery, Taylor Deupree, John Kelsey. Cinematographers (USA) Marcus Hahn, Kramer Morgenthau; (Japan) Toshifumi Furusawa. Editors Andreas Troeger, Stacia Thompson. Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.