'Hiroshima': An Uruguayan experiment that recalls the silent age of film

I don't know whether I'd rather organize a seminar or a comedy night around "Hiroshima," a cinematically ambitious yet divertingly entertaining film by Uruguay's Pablo Stoll.

Stoll's previous works have been well-received at the Sundance, Rotterdam and Cannes film festivals. "Hiroshima" further suggests he's a serious artist steeped in the very building blocks of his medium, though he certainly has a lot of fun fooling around with film elements.

"Hiroshima," a title with as little to do with the movie's dreamlike content as the name of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's "Un Chien Andalou" ("An Andalusian Dog") had to do with their 1929 surrealist classic, is an illuminating experiment in straining the very logic of films. But it does so in a meandering, laid-back and funny way.

Stoll's brother, Juan Andrés Stoll, plays Juan, a slacker living with his parents. Juan spends his days drifting from one thing to the next, wandering through streets, riding his bike, listening to music and checking in with friends but then suddenly disappearing on them.

Juan's strolling solipsism perfectly lends itself to "Hiroshima's" unorthodox gimmick: There is no audible dialogue in the film, only intertitles that write out what characters are saying, as in the pre-soundtrack days of the art form. Stoll, however, does make very pointed use of other kinds of sound: musical instruments, road vehicles, kitchen objects — basically, the noise of things making their presence felt.

The result is a wacky version of a certain kind of hybrid movie from cinema's transition era from silence to sound, films in which sound was used expressively (even perversely) by the likes of Rene Clair and Alfred Hitchcock.

Yet the complete absence of human voices also liberates "Hiroshima" from certain realist conventions we lazily, hazily take for granted in modern sound films.

We all see, a hundred times a week, examples of mainstream editing seamlessly, invisibly reinforcing the illusion of dialogue between characters, each of whom occupies his or her own close-up. By contrast, Stoll reminds us how dialogue was typically cut during the silent age, indistinguishable from visual force.

That's even more true of the director's judicious use of ambient sound, which paradoxically invites the camera to capture great swaths of space and time in long, unbroken, exploratory shots of visual storytelling.

Stoll not only accomplishes all that, he does so around a character whose ill-fitting relationship with the world stirs echoes of the likes of Keaton and Chaplin. "Hiroshima" is nothing less than trippy classicism.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com