What’s black and white with sinister, unexplained overtones all over? The teaser for the intriguing experimental noir-like short The Letter (A Carta), written and directed by Pedro Tannus. The version I am reviewing runs 26 seconds, with images distilled from the several-minute-long short. It is silent, with no dialogue, although it does feature a pounding score.
A woman (Fabi Celli) stares dead ahead while putting the pedal to the metal. The a flash fade to a close-up of the eyes of one man (Pedro Fernandes) happens. This morphs into the eyes of another man (Pedro Tannus) as the music builds. We then see a letter being pulled out of a purse and a glass of white wine being filled. Then the music drops with a fast blackout. Then begins a hurricane of dark imagery, many revolving around reactions to the unknown content of the letter written by the first man after a mouthful of wine. Something is wrong, but we, the audience, will never know what or why. We will just feel it, like a sewing needle under your fingernail.
“…reactions to the unknown content of the letter written by the first man after a mouthful of wine.”
Anyone who caught the wacko wave of the rediscovery of the Ghetto Freaks trailer in the 1990s understands how high art can be achieved from a teaser. Through these miniature reconstructions of long-form material, a filmmaker can achieve moments in tone and sensation unique to the teaser. It’s a poetry versus fiction thing, even though the teaser form is primarily used for marketing purposes. So what Tannus has achieved with The Letter teaser is a highly potent experimental deconstruction of the noir genre. The traditional noir elements of doomed characters in a monochrome landscape are reconfigured like paper unicorns, with mystery replacing exposition.
The power of this teaser is even more pronounced when compared to a 16-second short excerpt also available. The 16 seconds is merely the opening of the short with another glass of wine, eyes overhanging a curly mustache, and a pen being picked up to write a letter. That was it, just the fragment of a narrative that doesn’t carry any intrigue at all. It all highlights why the superior 26-second teaser is able to achieve this by transcending narrative. The Letter teaser is a brisk way to calibrate your senses to what experimental cinema can offer your nervous system.
"…highly potent experimental deconstruction of the noir genre."
