In a futuristic Argentinian city, the entire population has, through the agency of a surreal technological kajigger, lost the ability to speak. The villain, an evil capitalist fat cat named Mr. TV, completes their enslavement with hypnotic television broadcasts and a range of branded products. The people, a fantastic grotesquery featuring an eyeless child, human blimps and scientific wonks with CRT mouths, speak only in wildly inventive comic book bubbles. The Voice, a faceless though strangely beautiful chanteuse, is believed to be the only exception. When Mr. TV kidnaps her as part of a sinister plan to deprive the populace of words as well as speech, a small group set out for the eponymous aerial with the intention of disrupting the tyrant’s stranglehold. A Nazi army headed up by a cross between John Merrick and a rat, are soon on their heels.
If you love cinema – not in a dumb Star Wars Forever way – but really, truly love it as if it were a viable sexual preference, La Antena is guaranteed to sweep you off your feet. Outlandish, discombobulating, mesmerising, it belongs to the same noble class of experimental silent film homage as Eraserhead or anything bearing the Guy Maddin stamp. A series of pointed curtseys before Maya Deren, Dziga Vertov and, in particular Fritz Lang’s Metropolis make for a film that’s simultaneously old school and dazzlingly original.
Sr. Sapir, a documentarian and commercials director, puts his keyhole lens in the service of unforgettable images; an origami ballerina, snow falling as feathers, swirling mesmeriser devices. And then just when you think you’ve seen it all, La Antena gives you the moon, not just any old moon, but Melies’ moon with a cigar in his mouth.
If you see only one steampunk, political allegory, cine-pastiche adventure this summer...