You may have noticed over the last few years of TIFF coverage that one particular section holds a special place in my heart. It’s the Wavelengths program, curated by Andréa Picard and committed to celebrating some of the most audacious works of cinema today. They are films that push boundaries and challenge, not just, or even primarily, through dramatic provocation, but by offering new ways of understanding the filmic form. Think of Gomes’ Grand Tour and Santos Arias’ Pepe and Koberidze’s Dry Leaf. Think of Nicolás Pereda’s Lázaro at Night and Copper. Indeed, the Mexican-Canadian auteur has become a section mainstay, something of a Wavelengths king that asserts his rule through seemingly simple, almost simplistic, exercises, where storytelling is depurated and elasticized, stretched betwixt off-screen and on-screen realities, apparent convention and quiet eccentricities.
The director’s latest, Everything Else Is Noise, fittingly starts with a sleight of hand that could only work as it does in this beloved seventh art of ours. Its modesty is quite disproportionate to how much it ended up fascinating me…
A camera looks down on a traffic jam in Mexico City, a common occurrence made extraordinary by its cinematic presentation. Rather than listen to the vehicles or perceive the people in and around them, a cello’s moaning song imposes a new reading. The mundane becomes extraordinary, just as the chaos of the road becomes a dance on asphalt. As beautiful as this moment is, asking us to consider a part of urban life, one that rarely pleases anyone, in aestheticized terms, it’s also a bit of an arthouse cliché. But this isn’t a crash of sight and sound produced by non-diegetic music imposed over images it seemingly transforms.
It turns out, we’re looking at it from the perspective of Tere, a cellist practicing in the morning to the consternation of her neighbor, whose baby started tiring after another sleepless night, only to be woken by the instrument. Funnily enough, the sound of the road will manifest in all its cacophony from this point onward, often drowning the domestic theater of a musician intermittently plunged into darkness by constant power cuts. One would suppose the music might soothe the child, lull them away from the flashing lights, the cars, the horns, the voices, the nearby dog who can’t keep quiet to save its life. Alas, the babe is a harsh critic of the cello.
Oh well, such are the things of everyday life in this apartment building. Today isn’t like any other day, though. The practice is routine, but Rosa isn’t. She’s a composer friend of the musician, who’s going to be interviewed for the first time in ages and wants to keep it secret from her husband for some reason. However, when the TV team arrives, using Tere’s home as their scenography, the interview quickly slips out of their control. Rosa, Tere, and Tere’s daughter Luisa all take hold of the dialogue and make it a free-flowing conversation cum power play, with each woman holding the room at turn. It almost feels staged to annoy the interviewer and his director, if it didn’t also flow so smoothly. In truth, some of their stories are inspired by books and past interviews, a collage that Pereda dutifully credits at the end.
We can’t discern whether this obfuscation through paraphrasing is truly their intention or actual spontaneous reminiscence, as when the men take a break outside, we listen to their conversation rather than the private exchange between the actresses occupying the frame. And to make it all the more confusing, metatextual, but not entirely alienating, masculine voices describe the pitch for a future project that might as well be the lives of these women in this space. The essential playfulness of Pereda’s cinema keeps things light, contradicting the appearance of intellectual overcomplication for its own sake and makes the whole thing emerge as a game we’re invited to take part in and, hopefully, enjoy ourselves.
Everything Else Is Noise is a comedy, the funniest of the director’s last few films, and adept at using the widescreen mise-en-scène to contrast the reactions of various players to each other. All of them share their names with their characters and share the screen, but surely these frictions can’t be genuine. Like when Tere tries to emulate the cello’s sound and her vocalization makes the reporters fight back a laugh. Or the following scene when Luisa performs a defiant bit of dissonance that’s more like an attack on the cello than a traditional solo. The other women are entranced, eyes closed in solemn ecstasy. The men seem in danger of having blood start pouring out of their ears.
All of these people are searching for something genuine, as one always hopes to achieve in an interview, yet their idea of what that means differs drastically. This echoes through every element at play, including the artists’ described attempts to use their artificial devices to suggest the effect that hearing natural birdsong had on their ears, their humor, their spirit. The women themselves feel like echoes of each other, as if they were successive attempts to fashion the same character that, by some folly in their creator’s design, all ended up cohabiting this apartment and the miniature non-narrative that lives within it.
They also cannibalize each other in their ways, especially when it comes to the matter of prestige, who gets it, who’s denied it, who speaks out, and who acquiesces to self-effacement and silence. From a farcical experiment, character drama with real feeling comes at us out of left field. Typical Pereda, one might say. Because, as easy as it is to identify patterns in the filmmaker’s creations – the mischievousness, the meta-fictions, the blurring of the barrier between the player and their played – you never really know where they’ll be taking you. Everything Is Noise is no different. When the interview farrago becomes too complicated in its cinematic trickery, the whole thing pulls back and breaks.
Suddenly, only mother and daughter are left kvetching about Rosa’s shenanigans in the shadowy communion of another power cut. The blackout brings an older gentleman visiting with stories of old times, old joys, and perchance some old regrets. In the trio’s candlelight vigil, the raconteur’s words invoke the marvel of memories, sweet even when they sting or leave a bitter aftertaste. Something in Teresita Sánchez’s eyes is spellbound. Then, the spell is broken – of course it is – and all you can do is laugh, so they do. In that reaction, this final camaraderie shared between two of Pereda’s regular players, perhaps something truly genuine has come out of these cinematic constructions. Everything else is noise, but what glorious noise it was.
Everything Else Is Noise has traveled the world before arriving in Toronto. Before playing in TIFF’s Wavelengths section, it premiered at the Berlinale and spent the following months seesawing between fests in Europe and Asia. This was its North American premiere, and it will later be at the NYFF, part of its main slate. At 70 minutes, this is a compact little gem you won’t want to miss.