Adás (Transmission) (2009) – [rate 3]
Every festival seems to have at least one: a feature film that would have been better as a lengthy short. Transmission does need some time to get atmosphere across, but in the end I felt that too little had happened and too many scenes in the movie serve no real purpose or show something that was expressed in some other scene.
I did like the way the movie is set up: ‘something’ has happened, some change that apparently resulted in all screens (computers, TV’s, what have you) no longer working. Instead of showing how that happened or giving some elaborate explanation as to the why, it only shows us what it means to normal people and how they deal with it.
If you can take one message home from Transmission, it’s that TV is a very, very bad thing for society. Apparently, the idiot box has us enslaved and has stripped us of our ability to live together normally and without TV (or the net for that matter). At other times, the movie seems to hint that the TV’s not working may well be a metaphor for many other things not working, parts of human social life included.
Transmission is bleak and only humorous if you can dive down into the dark outlook this movie offers on today’s society. It’s worth seeing, but a bit long and talking about the movie during the movie to pass time isn’t really an option either, because it’s the silence and the oppressive feeling of waiting that lend the movie it’s eerie sense of importance.
