Paco

Tim Carlier's low-key absurdist comedy Paco opens with a stretch of precisely orchestrated chaos that gives the film its tuning note. In a long, unbroken shot, we witness a movie crew shoot a conversation scene over and over as actor Hebe finds newer ways of muddling her lines. Unnerved by her mistakes, Hebe walks off the set without returning her lapel mic to soundman Manny, who must now undertake an epic voyage across the city to retrieve the gadget.

A lovechild of Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot and Peter Sellers' Hrundi Bakshi, the taciturn Manny gropes his way through Adelaide's cultural scene, encountering an assortment of eccentrics, including a time-traveller and a union mafioso, in nightmarishly tautological situations. As he drifts in and out of diverse landscapes and buildings, Manny is filmed with a mock hidden camera while his trusty boom mic provides the soundtrack, punctuated by sporadic transmissions from the errant device.

In its comic, confusing disjunction between sound and image, and with the reflexive simplicity of a Kiarostami film, Paco demonstrates the indispensable role that sound plays in mentally orienting us within the space represented in movies. Either a metaphysical journey into the mind of a monomaniac or a monumental shaggy dog story, Paco is anything but ordinary.

– Srikanth Srinivasan