Reviewed by Anne Wollenberg
Stars Valeria Bertuccelli, Alejandro Urdapilleta,
Julieta Cardinali, Rafael Ferro, Florencia Raggi | Written by Esteban Sapir
UK certification PG | UK RRP £14.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 95 minutes | Directed by Esteban Sapir
“Once upon a time there was a city without a voice. Somebody had taken away the voices of all its inhabitants. Many, many years went by and nobody seemed bothered by the silence.” This is the simple, intriguing premise of Argentinian fantasy drama La Antena (The Aerial). Writer/director Esteban Sepir counts Shakira: Live and Off the Record among his previous endeavours, but don’t let that put you off - this surreal, monochrome fairytale is sublime and as much a coup for Spanish-language cinema as Pan’s Labyrinth was before it.
Nobody has a voice in this nameless dystopian city, because media mogul Mr TV has stolen them all. This tyrant owns the city’s only TV channel and is using it to brainwash all the inhabitants into eating nothing but TV Foods, sugar cookies topped with a hypnotic swirl of icing sugar. Now he wants to step up the mind control and take the words right out of their heads as well. But a boy with no eyes stands in his way, along with the boy’s mother, who has no face, his young friend Ana and her father.
Very few people speak; the city’s inhabitants communicate through ingeniously-placed speech bubbles and intertitles, while the score is haunting and flawless. La Antena takes clear inspiration from the likes of Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang and George Melies as well as mixing in more modern, pop culture imagery with shades of Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, but manages to blend all these influences together without losing focus or becoming a messy mishmash. The statements it’s making about consumerism and mass media are at times diluted by a tendency to ladle on the symbolism far too heavily, but this is a gloriously strange homage to the masters of silent cinema. And with its cartoonish whimsy, it’s also a visual and musical treat.
EXTRAS * Just a trailer. No making-of documentary, no director’s commentary. They would have been far too interesting, wouldn’t they?