Give this movie 73 minutes, and it will give you the world … somebody’s world, anyway. Argentinian film-maker Ana Katz has created an intriguing and beguiling little black-and-white drama that’s punching way above its weight.
It’s a series of scenes or vignettes, like a collection of short stories, each about the same person, a little older each time. This is Sebastián, or Sebas, a gentle, laid-back man in his 30s, played by the director’s brother Daniel Katz. Sebas is an intelligent guy, a graphic designer, trained in the use of Adobe Illustrator, but now trying to get temp jobs, made more difficult because he’s not allowed to take his dog into the office, and leaving him at home makes the poor thing howl with misery so much that the neighbours are upset.
Sebas gets work as a carer, then with a co-operative group selling vegetables from a truck, then he appears to be podcasting about inequality. He meets a woman at his widowed mum’s second-time-around wedding, and things develop romantically. His life rolls on, or rather, it proceeds in little forward hops. In some scenes he’s got short hair, in some scenes it’s long; sometimes he’s got a beard and sometimes no beard. Each scene is hardly more than a dramatised glimpse, an extended closeup, a fragment of a life – but Katz makes the part stand for the whole with masterly, understated skill.
And just when you think this is going to be an essentially parochial tale, Katz takes us into what might be sci-fi, or brilliant prophecy. The fall of a meteor creates a health emergency requiring people to wear astronaut-type respirator helmets if they want to walk upright (the air is not breathable unless you hunch down like Groucho Marx).
This film is enigmatic and yet very digestible, deadpan in its comedy and so insouciant and casual in its form, you might almost think that Katz had written it in five minutes, filmed it in a week. There is real artistry here.
• The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet is released on 21 May on Curzon Home Cinema.
