Dec 28, 2007 05:00 PM
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San Francisco, 7:19 PM
Fri Mar 12
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The Spanish-language short "Lo que tú Quieras Oír" — "What You Wanted to Hear" — has snuck into the No. 3 spot on YouTube's all-time most viewed list, right after "Evolution of Dance" and Avril Lavigne. Unlike most top YouTube clips, its power comes not from visual antics but from spoken words on an answering machine. The few English-language blog posts I could find babbled about the film's Creative Commons license without explaining the plot. Multilingual space princess Xeni Jardin translated it on the fly for me.
From: Xeni Jardin
A woman walks in to her apartment, chatting on her cellphone to a friend about a bunch of little mundane things, she's getting ready to prepare dinner for herself and her boyfriend. A child's drawing sits on the table, bearing the title "Sofia," a lady in a red dress. The woman, whose name, we learn, is Sofia, puts her things down, sees something that jars her — she presses "play" on her answering machine, still chatting with her friend on the cellphone. She realizes the message is from the man she loves, Miguel — her voice changes, she tells her friend she has to go, will talk later. Sofia replays Miguel's voice message in entirety. It's a breakup voicemail. "Are you there? Please pick up if you are, it's urgent... I don't know how to tell you this. I'm not coming back to the house, not tonight, not any other night... I need some time to think... I've been thinking about us... I have to get out of the house... I don't want to stay anymore... I don't love you..." Sad music floods in. Sofia is heartbroken. We observe time passing, she's more and more depressed, her friend calls again and again but she won't answer the phone, that dinner is now a dinner for one, and it appears to be a particularly sad dead fish. But then — Sofia takes action. She pops the tape (hahah how old-school) out of the machine (hahahaha ancient) and snips it up and remixes the breakup call. "I need to return..." Miguel now says. "I love you.... I have to return, I love you, I love you..."
(Pause)
"No," says Sofia, shaking her head and wearing the red dress..
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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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