Occasionally you encounter a vision so singular that it knocks you back. First at the New Hampshire Film Festival, and then again months later at Cucalorus Film Festival, Las Nogas stood out among the crowd as something so wholly itself, unique, and wonderfully detached from the current short film zeitgeist that it sometimes feels like a wonder that it even exists. A film that exists entirely in a universe of its own, according to its own logic, that could only have been made by a single person.
Of any short film I saw on the festival circuit this year, I think this one spent the most time rattling around inside of my brain. It is quirky, and in the quirkiness, there's a childlike innocence, characters with simple motivations and a tale that feels like a moral fable - from the innocence, there's an uncanniness, running through the veins of the stitched-together-from-corpses Homeys to the two-faced attendants administering them IVs - and a grotesqueness, in the tactile models of many of the characters (especially when they get sick, and even near death), to the ingenious stop-motion sequences of everything from a barbershop bee quartet to an almost hard-to-watch sequence where the Homeys are hooked up to a machine and slowly drained of blood - but in this grotesqueness is character, and charm, and set against the almost storybook nature of the fable, the pitch-perfect music and musical numbers, and all the wonderfully realized details of this world (The vespa montage! The double masks on the two-faced characters! Alma's huge closet of medicinal powders! And down to the smallest details, such as the doorbell attached to a string that the characters must pull outward) - emerges an eerie, uplifting, hilarious, cute, all-encompassing feeling of beauty and happiness that is truly unique. A film to make adults feel like children again, exiting the theater with a small sense of wonder, because they just discovered a new part of the universe they didn't know existed.
