The Aerial (Esteban Sapir, 2007) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Daniel

One of the reasons I enjoy the subscriber lottery so much is that I end up watching films I almost certainly wouldn't otherwise see. And even when I don't like those films -- and indeed, I did not care for The Aerial -- I find myself thinking about my preferences and why certain things rub me the wrong way. After all, taste is subjective and we shouldn't pretend otherwise, and a number of very smart folks liked The Aerial quite a lot. That makes sense because Esteban Sapir's film is nothing if not individual, a complete vision that determines everything that happens onscreen for an hour and a half. In other words, it's a film that is fully determined from the outset and it doesn't ever change, so it's either going to click for the viewer or it's not.

The Aerial is another in a handful of contemporary silent films. Not only is speech kept to a minimum, with most communication occurring through onscreen titles. Sapir makes extensive use of the stylistic tropes most commonly associated with the silent era: highly artificial, Expressionistic sets and costumes; exaggerated pantomime performances; and a plot that lends itself to concentrated set-pieces, which are pretty much presented one after the other. There are explicit nods to several silent era masterworks: Metropolis, A Trip to the Moon, and M which, although technically a sound film, is a hybrid work that maintains most of the trappings of silent cinema in terms of editing and art direction. So The Aerial is what we in the biz call a postmodern pastiche.

While watching The Aerial, I tried to engage with it beyond a glib dismissal: "thanks, we've got Guy Maddin at home." But the thing is, like a lot of works in this sub-subgenre (The Artist, Dr. Plonk, even  Tuvalu, which I liked), there's not a great deal of cohesion or depth to the project. The films address their viewer by putting everything in quotation marks and practically demand that you sit there awestruck. In fact, I think these films largely dispense with narrative logic altogether on the assumption that the "cinema of attractions" energy will pull the spectator through the many rough spots.

This means that, if you are not all that impressed with the visual style, there isn't much else to hold onto. That almost never happens with Maddin's films, because they have a lot more going on that "doing silent film." These early film aesthetics are part of a larger project for Maddin, and he uses them to explore other creative problems. The Aerial, on the other hand, comes across as pure gimmickry, donning the silent mode as a kind of mask. We see the separation, the aggressive gap between this outdated style and a film that is really just trying it on as a lark.

The Aerial is about a city that has been rendered mute by an evil media mogul called Mr. TV (Alejandro Urdapilleta). For some unknown reason, taking away the voices of the people in the city gives him power, despite the fact that the citizens communicate clearly with hovering words and phrases. There is a woman called The Voice (Florencia Raggi) who sings over the TV airwaves, and Mr. TV kidnaps her and plans to put her into a device that will steal the people's language once and for all. But this action can be counteracted by the Voice's son Tomás (Jonathan Sandor), a blind boy who also has a voice, presumably due to some genetic resistance to Mr. TV's magic beam.

Despite the fact that the plot is so basic, The Aerial just keeps layering in other material, posing many more questions than it can solve. Why is Mr. TV's hard of security a half-man-half-rat? What exactly are those floating balloon people, other than a device to lift the heroes skyward so that can reach the aerial on a mountaintop? Why does a giant swastika show up in Mr. TV's lair? And why is Tomás strapped to a glowing Star of David when it's time to reverse the effects of the ray? As we see words stripped from people, fed into a machine and crushed, are we to assume that they all just repaired themselves when the voices came back? And what exactly are the omnipresent spiral cookies that appear to have been made from a dough of smashed language? Also, why boxing?

It can be exciting, or at least diverting, when a film seems made up as it goes along. It can lead to a general anticipation, since we have no way of knowing what might come next. But every one of Sapir's ideas is slightly worse than the last. The film assumes that just citing Dr. Mabuse or making a hypnotic logo our of Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema, we will be too flattered to notice just how lacking everything is. Inasmuch as The Aerial trades in themes, they are maddeningly simple. Were these tedious 90 minutes all just leading to a standard-issue criticism of the power of mass media? And as for our heroic trio -- young Ana (Sol Moreno) and her divorced parents (Julieta Cardinali and Rafael Ferro) -- was everything just a pretext so the couple could be reunited, as per Ana's wishes?

(Just a sidenote: I think the "child of divorce gets their parents back together through scheming" trope is one of the most harmful in all of media, and we seldom acknowledge it as a source for self-destructive fantasy.)

In principle, building a film to show off your Méliès-like sets and objects, and letting the visual logic drive the film instead of a narrative arc, is a smart thing to do. It can be liberating for filmmaker and viewer alike. But the trouble is, when you are just shuffling tropes and gimmicks, there's very little to hold onto on an emotional level. The Aerial just gets more and more bogged down in trying to be whimsical. And although its tone is rather sincere, the film is so preoccupied with its own construction that it starts to feel like having people actually watch the thing is almost beside the point.