A WEEK after Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg opened at the IFI, another quirky black-and-white silent movie pastiche arrives at the same venue. Argentine writer-director Esteban Sapir's The Aerial is silent with good reason, given that it's set in an unnamed city where all bar two of the inhabitants have lost their voices. The exceptions are La Voz (The Voice), a singer without a face, and her young son Tomás, who has no eyes, writes Michael Dwyer.
The villain, Mr TV, runs the only available television service, which broadcasts hypnotic images to stimulate compulsive consumption of his TV Foods products line, the definitive TV dinners. When
Mr TV kidnaps La Voz, the incident is witnessed by one of his employees who, with the help of his wife and daughter, organises a plan involving Tomás to thwart the unscrupulous megalomaniac.
At the outset, this film seems as inane and laboured as the Eastern European shorts RTÉ showed as time-fillers decades ago. Director Sapir, however, runs Guy Maddin close when it comes to conjuring up surreal imagery. Mr TV's hooded henchman has a long tail jutting out from his uniform. A renegade scientist, Dr Y, has a TV set instead of a mouth. A nightclub singer mimes to a vinyl recording, even when the stylus sticks in a groove. And in a recurring, amusingly playful device, words are expressed as speech bubbles blown up on the screen in the style of comic books.
The Aerial is an obvious but timely allegory on the power of media control and how it can be abused to expand business empires. It draws on a profusion of movie references, most notably silent classics Voyage to the Moon and Metropolis. And its defiantly oddball images are accompanied by Leo Sujatovich's gorgeous score, which is reminiscent of Michael Nyman's work, yet firmly rooted in the traditional style of silent movie soundtracks.
