Pink Noise (Ruido Rosa): Cartagena Review

The Bottom Line

Melancholy, understated and quietly humorous drama about how love dont come easy

Cartagena Film Festival (Colombian competition)

Roberto Flores Prieto

Mabel Pizarro, Roosevel Gonzalez

He was an aging, bicycle-riding electrical appliance repair man. She was a hotel cleaner with a large nose and false teeth. Pretty Woman it aint, but Roberto Flores Prietos Pink Noise is gently rewarding, a carefully-crafted study of a fleeting romance set in a Colombian back street, with plenty for alert viewers to enjoy. In setting, characterization and treatment Prietos brief seems to have been to sidestep romantic cliche where possible, and in doing so he has made a third film of emotional truth and quiet distinctiveness.

This is one of those movies which has been built on the principles of unstatement and nuance. Consequently it demands the same careful eye from its audience, so that although with some tightening and a quicker pace this has a universally appealing theme which could well be remake material, as it stands Noise is most likely to be heard on the Spanish-language festival circuit.

Pink Noise describes what we hear from our radio were stuck between stations, and that is where the twin protagonists of the film metaphorically find themselves. It is basically set in two locations at the start of the rainy season, in the repair shop where gruff Luis (Roosevel Gonzalez) -- man who mends TVs but significantly doesnt own one -- plies his trade, and in the hotel he visits for sad sex with a prostitute (Nazly Ramirez). As she waits for a visa for a move to New York, Carmen (Mabel Pizarro) cleans the hotel and lives there too, wearing headphones in bed as she struggles to drown out the pink noise of couples in other rooms making love: she is nonetheless excited by their brief nocturnal romances, and wants one of her own.

Following one of the neighborhoods regular power cuts, Carmen takes her radio cassette player to Luis to be mended: that day, Luis finds one of his regular clients dead at home and suddenly becomes aware of his own mortality. Carmen paints her nails, gets a new hairdo and visits him, and by slow, subtle steps they start to grow close.

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Pink Noise (Ruido Rosa): Cartagena Review