This article was written and published during the Talent Press program in the Berlinale, in February 2024.
In a way, The Major Tones (Los Tonos Mayores, Argentina, 2023), runs like a semiotic study, but one that is run by a teenage girl. Ingrid Pokropek’s first feature film, part of the Generation Kplus program of the Berlinale, starts with Ana (Sofía Clausen) feeling this weird frequency coming from the metal plate she has inside her arm and repeating the tones to her friend Lepa (Lina Ziccarello), who turns it into music on her keyboard. Ana lives with her father (Pablo Seijo) in the outskirts of Buenos Aires; her mother has passed away. The film is about exploring hidden signs, being those the mysterious vibrations coming from inside the protagonist’s arm, or the more down-to-earth kind of discoveries she experiences as a fourteen-year-old girl.
While Ana’s father starts going out with an ex-girlfriend of his, Lepa soon gets entangled in her first romantic involvements with a boy, both events that seem to hit the protagonist a little hard. She is still very much involved in the ludic puzzles brought on by her metal plate, which she soon learns that is too small and will have to be taken off, almost as if she was forced to grow up.
The signs which are primarily translated as humming and music, gain a whole new interpretation when Ana meets a young soldier (Santiago Ferreira), who reads them as morse code. From sequences of dots and spaces, he can translate them into words. A whole new genre of questions emerges when interpreting the meaning of these words: do they indicate meeting points? Coordinates? Constellations? Who are they from? Spies? Aliens? Lovers? Could they be messages from the beyond? When one of the codes sequences reads “forget me not”, Ana wonders if it might be a message from her mother.
The beauty of The Major Tones is precisely in those questions, that seem to open more and more, never settling into one single answer but also, never getting too far from reality. As full of wonder as these signs are, Ana’s wanderings around the city are very mundane. These many openings are always very attached to the protagonist perspective and surroundings; she searches for meanings within her own city from words written in her own language. After all, we mustn’t forget, these messages are coming from inside her own body. This inside-outside movement is also reflected on the film’s soundtrack, composed by Gabriel Chwojnik, where eerie sci-fi sounds turn into more heartfelt notes; as a childlike adventure, they sound at once mysterious and nostalgic.
The messages themselves are invisible, and the movie is set on finding as many physical and imaginary manifestations of them as possible: from Ana’s dream where lights in her neighborhood keep flickering on and off, to the different spots in the city which she finds through the words translated by the morse code. A bull’s statue, a movie theatre, a cafe, a restaurant by the docks. These seemingly random places throughout Buenos Aires, made important by the story’s context, work also as a kind of collection of peculiar spots in the city.
It’s at this point that we perceive that Ana’s journey shares a lot of similarities to a film’s creative process; what we are seeing in the screen is also a combination of initially arbitrary sceneries and people, brought together to make sense by this quilt of fiction. Despite the amount of suggested meanings, or even because of it, the fabric of The Major Tones is very light; there are so many meanings attached to these signs that we perceive more clearly their arbitrariness. In other words, we can see the bull’s statue as a sign in Ana’s messages or merely a curious bull’s statue. It is in that manner that Pokropek’s film manages to have the same kind of adventurous spirit as her protagonist, following the signs and seeing where they take us.
Paula Mermelstein Costa
LIMITE 