As Hans Christian Andersen once said, “where words fail, music speaks”. So much great cinema has been guided by music, and so it makes sense that the birth of a new music act should want to express itself visually.
One-Way Ticket To The Other Side is a collection of shorts based around songs from the debut album of music duo Pornographie Exclusive (Severine Cayron and Jerome Vandewattyne). 13 International directors come together to film “chapters”, paired with a song from the album, shot in a guerilla style with practically no budget.
The stories include a sweeping portrait of a love affair; a surreal trip through several recognisable cities; a dance between a woman and a demonic figure; a woman confiding in an AI assistant; and more. While each have their own characteristics, most play with visuals in order to disorient and mislead the viewer, conveying mood rather than telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Like reading the diary of a stranger, some of the opaquest moments can feeling strikingly emotional.
Punctuating the shorts is a running narrative of two outlaws, a man and a woman, wearing rubber Halloween masks and speaking with digitised voices. They talk to each other about art, existence, rebellion, and numerous other philosophies set to a sinister, grungy theme. While unnerving at first, they become a welcome thread that prevents the shorts feeling disconnected.
Not all of it makes total sense, but then that is perhaps the point. Our masked narrators muse on cinema’s disappearance, remarking that the medium speaks back to us “as if everything had already been said” prior to setting a spool of film on fire. In that sense, the shorts try to seek something new to say, not through linear narrative but by offering portrayals of emotions that match the mood of the track they are matched to. As with every anthology there are highs and lows, but as disparate as these chapters may seem, each moment leaves its own mark.
One could simply dismiss it as a playlist of music videos, and to and extent that’s true. However, a more accurate description would be that it sits somewhere between music and movie, reminiscent of filmmakers like Michel Gondry or Jonas Åkerlund who created narrative sagas around the music they are tasked with promoting.
At just over an hour, One-Way Ticket To The Other Side drags you on a rollercoaster of music, philosophy and emotions. Gleefully avoiding definition at every turn, it’s an artistic stream of consciousness that at its best can be captivating.
One-Way Ticket To the Other Side just premiered at Raindance.
