DAFT PUNK, the Paris-born dance-music duo, is obsessed with robots. Not just any old heaps of metal that will vacuum floors but high-fashion, house-music-loving robots who move with silky, metronomic timing in mod helmets, black leather pants and jackets with "Daft Punk" emblazoned on the back in rhinestones.
Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have been appearing in concert and the occasional on-camera interview as these robots since their 2001 album, "Discovery," the follow-up to their landmark debut, "Homework." Last year Daft Punk brought the robots on screen in its directorial debut, "Electroma," which will be shown at midnight Friday at the New Beverly Cinema and will be available on DVD this fall.
For live shows, Daft Punk's automaton alter egos are a blank screen ready for projection, a perfectly vacuous counterpoint to the precise fury of their club anthems.
"When we come on stage as robots, it's really powerful," De Homem-Christo said from Paris. "We're not idols onstage. We're not the Rolling Stones.... The audience gets very touched by the idea that it's robots playing this emotional, energetic music."
In "Electroma," it's not Bangalter and De Homem-Christo inside those apocalypse-cool outfits.
Instead, Daft Punk stayed behind the camera for the richly visual, dream-paced feature about two robots on a quest to become human. Bangalter, who lives in L.A. with actress Elodie Bouchez, served as director of photography while De Homem-Christo checked his shots from the monitor.
With zero dialogue and none of Daft Punk's own propulsive beats, "Electroma" has been met with some ire by critics and fans expecting one of the group's high-energy music videos, such as the Michel Gondry-directed "Around the World" or Spike Jonze's "Da Funk." Most of the audience walked out during the movie's screening at last year's Directors' Fortnight, a sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival.
De Homem-Christo isn't bothered by the reaction. "We wanted to make a different kind of movie, one that would leave more question marks than answers," he said. "With American blockbuster cinema, everything is very fast, there's a lot of action and narration.... Here, there are all these gaps the audience can fill."
De Homem-Christo and Bangalter also wanted the robots to remain mysterious. Without dialogue, body language -- along with the music from Todd Rundgren, Brian Eno and some dusty tracks from the '70s -- can take on heightened meaning.
