Forum of Independents - review - PINK NOISE (Ruido Rosa) by Roberto Flores Prieto

Tragic and hopeless romance is not just for the young and the beautiful in Pink Noise, the stunning and remarkable feature by Roberto Flores Prieto. This film had its European premiere at the 49^th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Prieto, as implied earlier, does not cast the usual hot young things to show the natural and relentless instinct of love. Here, the central lovebirds is much older and even less pretty – at least initially, as Prieto takes its time to charm us through them. The male is a sixty something electrical repairman, the female is the cleaner in a hotel that went from being a fancy and respectable one to a sleazy one attending to part-time lovers at hourly rates.

She longs to get away and dreams the American dreams, waiting on her Visa to take her away from Columbia and learning English on the side through an old radio. It is when this same radio breaks down that the two are brought together, after an initial missed opportunity of a meeting that takes place early on in the film after the man bring a prostitute back to the hotel.

Loneliness and desolation are distinctive feature of this film. An elaborate and beautiful type of photography, with a vivid colour palette and meticulous mise en scene often allows us to take in the visual beauty of the film that accentuates the passion of the story.

This is a heart stealing conveyance that takes us right back to the passion of the silent classics of the early 20^th century, when similar cinematography was employed and when similar feeling were evoked. The vivid meticulousness of the art direction is also beautiful whilst perhaps simplistically metaphorical. The man’s living quarters are especially impressive, with run down stone walls full of mould and decay.

The two leading actors share an impressive chemistry that seems to naturally mature at a slow pace as the story progresses. Unravelling at a hypnotic pace, Prieto needs little dialogue to get his impressive brand of sentimentality across and through the simplicity of silence, he achieves a lot more than most colleagues are able to achieve through incessant loquaciousness. All the while, the setting of Barranquilla adds tragedy through its tropical rain and signs of gradual abandonment.

Defying conventional cinematic language, Prieto’s Pink Noise is a film that is beautiful on the inside and the outside. Some will find the pacing a little slow and the plot developments a little too predictable, but it’s hard to reveal them as faults over knowing them as conscious stylistic choices.