BY: Smriti Girish
Paranoia and fear as a tenebrous and bleak landscape of a cluster of ity building switches to a lady, clutching a folder close to her heart, running for her life from a faceless red presence, through the seedy underbelly of the gloomy city. Sinister, thunderous music growing louder still, sweeping us away in the terror of the moment.
The opening sequence never waits. It never accommodates for our speed of viewing. Perhaps, it can be said to be just as uncooperative and unindulgent as the main theme that the film is based on.
The face thief or El Ladrón de Caras, is a 2013 short CGI film, initially released in Spain. At first glance, it is a supernormal-detective film seemingly set in the 1920’s (inferred only and definitely inappropriately from the jazz tunes and the montage of blinking motels signs, holstered gun, playing cards, and a flapper-esque sofa that follow the opening sequence). The film is non-verbal and relies completely on its felicitous music and brilliant animation to power its story. We follow a hard-boiled, earthy detective who is approached by a woman being chased by a thief with an unusual interest in face related larceny. But what this 11-minute film does after this initial encounter is remarkable. It explores, through the metaphor of a face thief, the trials and tribulations of living with the memory robbing and cognitive functions impairing disease of Alzheimer’s.
Almost every moment of the film is as if a silent ode to the malady that is the essence of what it examines. Alzheimer’s, the disease is intertwined with the tiniest pixels of the film. This is never clearer than in one particular scene where after decoding the possible location of the thief, the detective breaks his way into a decrepit looking building. Here a red haze draws his attention, leading him through a door. On entering, he is confronted by incomplete, crumbling buildings and streets as if parts of an absurd 3d jigsaw puzzle floating in smoky red nothingness. It feels like time is at a standstill here, perhaps it never really even existed before the detective entered. There is nothing but faceless humanoid mannequins, their bodies frozen in positions once held by living breathing human beings. Fragments of pathways and shelters, people and symbols are the only things separating life from the plunge into the red abyss of oblivion all around. The entire sequence is representative of what Alzheimer’s is like. How memories are fleeting, unanchored and tentative while the corrosive haze of the disease permeates everything else.
But a profound part of my experience of the film was how despite all the emotional attachment, I never felt like I was completely a part of the movie, I was never wholly immersed in the experience. I was always an onlooker, a part of the audience, and this speaks not to the failure of the film in captivating its viewers but to the profundity of the disease in sidelining those who haven’t experienced it from realizing the films true emotions.
The film is a must watch, if only for the tear jerking ending. It is also an opportunity to understand this life robbing disease better and to perhaps send a small prayer to everyone who is battling it. There’s no better way for me to conclude this review than with this poem I found in the comments section for the film:
Through each such tale that slowly fade,
Time’s a thief that can’t be trade.
It reeks to take the former life,
Down to last but ache and strife.
Lost from thought, a guide to light,
That shine the way to past in sight.
For inch a day such age grew short,
Closer and closer, their love was sort.
Tabeer 