Spanish Masterpiece.

 

Pa negre : Casamajor and Lopez.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Agustí Villaronga's  2017  Pa negre from Catalonia is a film which opens and closes with acts of extraordinary cruelty - the first physical with the killing of a man, a boy and (more disturbing) a horse and the final an act of psychological violence that can hold it’s own with anything on film.

Set at the end of the Spanish Civil war, the film centres on young, wide eyed Francesc Colomer (first film) whose family is struggling to get by on father Roger Casamajor’s cage bird business and mother Nora Nava's work in a “shitty” local textile mill.  They are recognisably the good guys having supported the losing Republican cause during the conflict, which leaves them at the mercy of local Falangist mayor Sergi Lopez - the film’s most familiar face instantly delineated as a nasty piece of work.

Hold on - it’s not that picture. Lopez will emerge as more justified than dad Casamajor who is constantly urging his son to act on his principles. Advice is coming from all sides here. Alcoholic, pedophile teacher Eduard Fernández (another Spanish name star in a small role) gives a history lesson where he explains that victors should be admired for their triumph and the wealthy for their ability to deploy money. Recognisably part of the film‘s complex, perverse and challenging structure is his repeating “The winners write history” even as we are in the act of watching the losing side putting forward on film their version of events.

Casamajor flees the country to avoid arrest for the murder, advising Navas to take their case to the rich land owners, the Manubens where the husband looks like Francisco Franco and the gross wife is forever gulping treats. Like everyone else, they have a guilty secret but like Fernandez’ example they have the power and viciousness to protect it. Add in Colomer’s half crazy and highly sexed teenage cousin Marina Comas (particularly good) who lost her hand in a grenade explosion and has already rejected the village society with its intrigues, blackmail and lies, planning to cover her escape by setting fires that will engulf it. Her betrayal is the element that sets up the film’s final statement.

Colomer finds that the letter which his father slipped to him on their mass visit to the prison where the shouting inmates are separated from their families by a patrolled bar corridor - like the one in Mikhail Shvejtser’s 1960 Russian Voskreseniye / Resurrection - offers a desperate escape.

The murdered boy’s last word “ Pitorliua” is the name of a bird, given to a local whose photos mother Navas treasures as a reminder of the one member of her generation who stood apart from the brutalisation of the time. His ghost is supposed to haunt the cave in the woods. This figure becomes conflated with the naked boy young Colomer sees washing in the river, turning out to be a tubercular patient who the monks (brief appearance of religion in this scheme) work and half starve in quarantine.

Like the Czech Otakar Vávra’s 1967 Romance pro kridlovku / Romance for a Bugle or Agnieszka Holland & Kasia Adamik’s 2017 Polish Potok / Spoor the young people live surrounded not only by their reality but also the fantasies of the older generations, here notably the society of women alone taking care of the rich Manubens family’s property, with superstitious granny’s tales mixed with the demented accusations of the murdered man’s widow. The hidden keys (prominent in the decor) open the attic door where a mysterious light can be seen. The fantasies become more substantial than the accepted reality of their lives.

Finally the choice for Colomer is between this decayed society which he would enter as an uneducated laborer and the world of privilege made possible by an extraordinary sacrifice by his father. He finds within himself a doubtfully admirable strength.

Putting this on screen is a big ask for any director and Agustí Villaronga, who is highly regarded in his own market, throws himself into a challenge which would inhibit better established film makers. What he produces is brilliant by any standard. The audience makes the same transition from accepting the truths offered by the sympathy generating parents into an uglier adult perception which matches the lesson being offered by the college instructor finally describing the figure who gave up humanity to become a monster.

Some shots are extraordinary - the camera weaving inside the old people’s living space or Navas working on the balcony distant, while the boy tends the cages inside the house, or the truth of the mob violence engulfing it’s original deserted setting. The imagery is startling - the killing the horse, the mob with the boor castrating loop or the bodies being cleared from the garotte in the presence of the family of the condemned man - add Eva Basteiro-Bertoli’s screen filling kiss.

While extraordinarily impressive, the exercise is not a total success. It is undesirably opaque. I’ve seen the film twice with different sets of sub-titles and studied a synopsis (which I regard as suspect) and I’m still not sure that I understand the story. The Spanish speakers I discussed it with were equally confused. The symbolism of the caged birds is labored, like the subtlety free business of the white bread which is not for the boy, even after his shock experience. That is carried on in the Manubens’ table loaded with cake, glaceé fruits and rich hot chocolate. Among so much that is startlingly unfamiliar it’s not re-assuring to find a sub plot purloined from On the Waterfront.

Colomer with white bread

Pa Negre was a big Goya winner and went forward as the Spanish Oscar candidate of it’s year but it didn’t carry off the award and it’s foreign exploitation appears to have been limited. I alerted all the movie goers I know to the Cervantes Institute screening. None of them came. The turnout was less than twenty. 

 

When the festival circuit is pushing so much that it considers to be high art - the equivalent of the major works of gallery art, literature and serious music, Pa Negre has proved indigestible to it. The film goes places where they would prefer not to and shows things that are uncomfortable for it’s suburban, middle class audiences. Pa negre seems headed into the limbo that engulfs genuinely challenging work that doesn’t hide behind the familiar face of art cinema and Marxist politics. It’s unacknowledged existence is an indictment of the whole notion of serious film criticism.