“Cheshire Puss, would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” said Alice. “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland (1865)
The “road movie” is a recurring genre, serving narratives that indicate one of two trajectories (or both): either the protagonists are in an urgent process of escape, or they respond to the impulse to set out in search of answers. Or both.
In this short plot, a couple of author-characters, whose relationship seems to be showing some strain, reflect freely on the creative process they want to apply to the film’s theme, defining a winding script of a couple who undertake a journey to recover past moments and emotions, on a journey in which they are confronted with images from their past, projections of their future, and whose catharsis is taken to a surreal dimension, ending up with no answer at the end.
It is a somewhat introspective film, in which it constructs a certain idea of reality and illusion, evokes the creative process, not only to question it, but also, in a somewhat particular way, to confuse the creator’s expectations, to mix up the game of routines, of the roles that each character is made to play.
It is also a film about the search for meaning and the belated recognition that this is the result of chance and absurdity.
The film takes place on two levels, one supposedly “real”, inside a house where two characters, Disse and Diz, write and draw a script; and another level, the result of the imagination of these first characters, where a second action unfolds that also involves two younger characters, She and Him, who do not know the script they follow together on a non-linear journey.
Diz and Disse, have different conceptions of the script, it is more conventional, somewhat cluttered with too many references, it is more libertine but also incoherent. In the search for fictional characters (She and He), this difference becomes more accentuated, reflected in the way in which those fictional characters are represented, which only appear well defined when highlighted in detail, and disappear, like archetypes and almost silhouettes in the more open planes.
The aim is to make an experimental film, in which the two dimensions interpenetrate and influence each other, to the point where it is not always possible to distinguish what is “real” or imaginary.
In a style closed to a film noir, whose tension is resolved in progressive metamorphoses that lead to a point of no return, like the anti-hero’s journey, the crossing ends in a shipwreck in the desert.
In an imprecise order, throughout the journey, hesitations and fears are revealed that consume the characters, each one captive of themselves and the way they deal with the passage of time and the search for some meaning to life, to love. .
From a plastic point of view, the aim is to give the image a realistic line, but at the same time “moving”, transforming itself, at times, into a more expressionist and abstract animation.
The transitions between universes and their interpenetrations seek formal inspiration in the tradition of pre-animation (optical toys), as well as in examples of devices from so-called illusions or optical games.
The sound environment plays an important role in the game of illusion between the universes in which this film moves, sometimes underlining and sometimes in counterpoint with the visual development of the action. The intrusion of Diz and Disse’s voices into the sphere of fiction, as well as the equally fictitious sound environments, introduces a distance and a multiple dimension necessary to unify the film as a whole.
On a musical level, an experimental, concrete and abstract, non-illustrative line will also be followed, introducing however here and there, ironically or redundantly, one or another apparently more conventional note, soon broken by the general tone of the film.
