The film is undoubtedly challenging. Interesting plot tangents are cut off like limbs; characters appear and disappear. Late in the running time, after a scene that appears to show her waking from a dream, the protagonist morphs, unexplained, from the optimistic Betty to a haunted-looking, failed actress named Diane.
‘There is no band’
But it’s the small self-contained moments that linger longest in the memory, and which give the film a mosaic-like texture. The greatest is the famous Club Silencio scene, a truly unforgettable stretch of film. It is both a sumptuous sensory experience and a self-reflexive exercise, lifting up the bonnet of the film so we can inspect the moving bits and pieces inside.
In the scene, the MC of a surreal nightclub takes to the stage. “No hay banda!” he exclaims: “There is no band”. That is to say, all the sounds that the audience hear have been pre-recorded; they seem real, but they are an illusion. Viewers are nevertheless swept up by a stirring Spanish rendition of a Roy Orbison song – beautiful, heartbreaking and mesmerising – before the singer suddenly drops dead and is dragged away.
