Maria Arnal appears in the first sequence of ‘TICTAC’ walking next to a wall with the dramatic intensity of Juliette Binoche breaking her knuckles in ‘Azul’. Then, as in a ‘Tenet’ quantum twist, he goes back in time (tick, tock), “rewinds” says the lyrics (how long does this verb have left to lose its original meaning?), until he reaches the seventies Skiro bar on Escòcia Street to “find yourself again.”
This crossover between charnego costumbrismo, temporal displacements and poetics of disappearance articulates the video clip ‘TICTAC’ (theme included in their album ‘AMA’), produced by CANADA and directed by Celia Giraldo, author of the recommendable ‘Un lugar common’ (2024) and also responsible for some of the latest Bandini clips.
The contrast between the prosaic – that coffee “with very hot milk” ordered at the counter of an old people’s bar run by Chinese – and the fantastic, configures a story with surreal touches – those Dalinian ants – and magical realism, crossed by a love story (brotherly, his cousin who died at the age of 15 with HIV?) and a promise of reincarnation.
The clip is as fertile in ideas as Arnal’s musical talent. Especially in relation to the montage, with analogies and visual rhymes as expressive as the sequence of curl-coffee-clock-ants-fan spirals that any Parisian surrealist of the 1920s could have signed in the Cyrano café.
And, at the end of the loop, Arnal’s transformation, with that costume reminiscent of Rey in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’, seems to announce another possible life, as if time could really be rewinded.
Interview Maria Arnal: «There is not one but millions of artificial intelligence»
