The shadow of Charlie Kaufman hovers like a drone over a significant part of contemporary audiovisuals. Every so often a work appears influenced by the unique (meta)narrative universe of the New York creator.
Recent examples: ‘Beau is afraid’, ‘Dream Scenario’, The shine of television, the video clip ‘We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)’… And now this ‘If I died tomorrow’.
The director Celia Giraldo, who released her debut film ‘A Common Place’ this year, soaks up Kaufman’s particular poetics in its most playful aspect to build a fantasy, with echoes of Kafka and Lewis Carroll, which we could title, paraphrasing to Ari Aster’s film, ‘Rigoberta is afraid’. Fear of loss, of illness, of an unintelligible god… Of death, in short.
The song, inspired, according to Bandini herself, in a fragment of Dostoyevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ – “Nothing was more painful to him than this thought: If only he didn’t die. If they gave me my life back. What eternity would open before me!” – is illustrated by Giraldo through a dreamlike guided tour of a museum where representations of Paula Ribó’s desires and reproaches are exhibited… “if she died tomorrow.”
The clip also includes some winks and tributes. The most explicit: Franco Battiato’s song ‘Permanent Center of Gravity’ and Kate Bush dancing in the ‘Wuthering Heights’ video clip. The most hermetic (at least for me): ‘Sad Girls’ Club’ and ‘The Flea on the Couch’. Does anyone know what this refers to?
