Historically speaking, emptiness was valued as a great part of art that could show less and express more. We can start from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and go straight to James Franco’s invisible art that was sold for great money. But emptiness was taken to another level in Guiliano Saade’s sort film 'Empty'. Rather than being a no man’s land kind of place, a twilight zone, Saade’s short film depicts another field of the mind that was beautifully expressed by the British indie rock band Blur in their 1997 song Look inside America: “Good morning lethargy/ Drink Pepsi it’s good for energy.” This lethargy found in Blur’s song it’s the only accurate description we could give to the mood of 'Empty'.
The story can be seen as a South American short prose anthology, where the key moments are bound together to create a super story that could rule them all. And this is exactly what happened. We will not go on and narrate the storyline because it will spoil all the fun of watching this beautiful short on one hand, and on the other hand, because it is so condensed that we are not sure if we will tell it right, and we might perish the meaning of the whole symbolic realm that is something very common in South American art.
The main character, Chico, played by Che Moais, has a great narrative dimension for the story. If the whole universe here is the bar, he is the center of the universe and everything happening here resides around him. Sometimes this world encounters some exterior alterations, but he deals with them with a calm spirit, reaching for a Zen state of mind. Even though he does a couple of things that are not cool with the divinity he is speaking to at some point, he gets punished and at the same time, is saved by chance from death. His whole night experience is a quest through a purgatory that ends with him leaving the world he dominated at one point.
'Empty' is more than a short movie, it is a quest of defining what is really important in life but seen through a Lynchian scope stained with Tarantino’s infamous bloodbaths.
Written by Vlad A. G