Quiet on the set, we’re rolling. In the age-old tradition of cinema, the shooting of a scene seems to start necessarily with this ritual phrase: a rule that banishes noise and establishes silence as the sole legitimate condition of cinema in the making. Silence as solemnity, as ceremony, as devotion, as respect; as the threshold to the sacred, almost to religion. In his last film, Lo demás es ruido, Nicolás Pereda challenges this dogma and, on the contrary, embraces the involuntary sound, the one that disrupts the recording, and builds around it an understated comedy about what resonates and what remains silent, about what we hear and what eludes us.
The action takes place in the home of Tere, a contemporary music composer, who is hosting a friend who has come to give an interview for a documentary. This space that we imagined silent soon turns into a vast sound box filled with various noises, while, in a series of almost farcical mishaps, the lights keep going out. As always in Pereda’s work, something is slowly unravelling: the sound interruptions imperceptibly shift reality towards that uncertain area that borders it. The repetition of the interview thus brings forth the echo of stories told a second time, but by different voices. Who experienced what? What is true, and what eludes the truth?
With the muted irony that is so typical of his work, Pereda also questions the patriarchy that lies at the very core of the artistic system. It does so through the character of a father and ex-husband, also a famous composer, who suddenly appears in the third act as an extra sound himself: unvoluntary, relentless, impossible to silence.
Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria