Icíar Bollaín was an actress established
in Spanish movies in the nineties and got a lead in Ken Loach’s Land & Freedom. She started directing and worked with
Loach’s regular writer Paul Laverty on the 2010 Even the Rain / También la lluvia one
of the most substantial pieces the festival circuit has delivered us. It would have
been nice to see the rest of her output but now the very different but also superior La
boda de Rosa / Rosa’s Wedding has made its way to us through the distribution labyrinth.
Effectively constructed, this one kicks off with forty five year old Candela Peña (Bollain’s 2005 Te doy mis ojos / Take My Eyes) running a marathon surrounded by the supporters we will recognise as family and associates. She doesn’t stop at the finish line and we find out that this is a nightmare thrown up by her hectic life as a Valencia TV wardrobe mistress, carrying the weight of her family’s problems and even stuck with watering the neighbor's plants and looking after their cat. Brother Sergi Lopez, totally at ease doing comedy, has plans for their shared inheritance as his marriage to Paloma Vidal becomes rocky. Sister Nathalie Poza, whose work I don’t know and who steals all her scenes, is losing her translator job. Daughter Paula Usero is not making it happen with her Manchester-based family (smart ‘phone call reveals her child dripping with pasta sauce) and dad, veteran Ramón Barea, has decided the answer to his problems is to move into the back room in her flat.
It’s all too much so Candela does a runner to sleepy coastal Benicassim where her late mother’s small dressmaker’s shop stands idle. Candela announces her wedding complete with ring forged from her mother's thimble. It’s actually a re-dedication of her life to her own needs but misunderstood by all.
From this dodgy premise Bollain creates a funny, original, involving, thoughtful piece. The great cast flounder in the misunderstandings as Sergi sets up a big (well, the orchestra is down to seventeen pieces) celebration and summoned relatives struggle to work out what’s happening. (“What, there’s no banquet?”) The beach celebration is irresistible. The needy family gets to be endearing and the film making resonates - the motif of the ginger cat and the shelves of buttons is particularly nice.
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| La boda de Rosa - Peña & mother's wedding dress. |
The film does have some rough edges (what became of mother’s re-styled wedding dress?) but among the deluge of female themed movies of the moment, this one is an agreeable stand-out.
You
couldn't get something more different to David Victori's No Mataras / Cross
the Line, a low budget exercise in the fomula of the innocent
dragged into degradation by a fatal female, set up by classic German film (Die strasse, Blue Angel) as a
model for noir (Scarlet Street, Pitfall).
The new film is a vehicle for rising star Mario Casas (Las brujas de Zugarramurdi/ Witching & Bitching), as the son fresh from burying a father he has nursed through a final illness He doesn’t even smoke or drink.
Casas makes his way home carrying the round-the-world plane ticket his legal secretary sister Elisabeth Larena has made him take. However newcomer Milena Smit gets attention away from them in the shorter role of the sex bomb low life who latches onto our hero by getting him to settle her bill in a burger joint and repaying him with a tattoo she does in the closed parlor entered with a key kept after hours in the down pipe.
Taking him back to the flat where her boy friend has a back room marijuana plantation, their raunchy scene (“Take off my panties!”) is the film’s
most vivid and eclipses anything else the makers come up with.
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| No Mataras - Casas |
Development follows Casas through the single night where he faces murder and suicide, evading the police who end up wheel clamping his car for his being
over the limit, messages on the investigation from his sister, chase and subway passage struggle with the Tattooists (“He’s mad - he tore my ear”) and the final self confrontation in the emergency ward.
The atmosphere of street lamp lit menace in nocturnal Barcelona is the film’s dominant element and the narrative, with its unmotivated gloom, pales by comparison. Performance and craft aspects are equal to all demands.
They tell us Chilean Pablo Larraín is his country’s most prestigious director. A couple of his ponderous historical films have had art house distribution here - No & Neruda. These show cased one of the most marketable movie combinations - art and politics.
Well for his
new Ema, Larrain has ditched General Pinochet and taken on a good
looking young woman named Mariana Di Girólamo who proved willing to get naked
with the rest of the cast individually or together. Really if that’s what you’re
looking for, pornography is a better proposition. 
Ema - Di Girólamo
Miss Di Girólamo is the lead dancer in husband Gael Garcia Bernal’s Valparaiso ballet company, who keep on doing regeton routines - on stage in front of NASA graphics, in the streets, on a coal barge or even in a moving cable car. Trouble is Gael Garcia can’t make babies so he and Miss Di Girólamo adopt a Colombian orphan and that goes South when Mariana, who is a part time arsonist with her own Napalm flame thrower, encourages the kid to burn things down injuring her sister.
The authorities take the kid away so Mariana seeks consolation with the support cast of both sexes while Gael Garcia stands about being stoic. He’s very good at that. You can tell that they want us to take all this really seriously, which means that when the film’s overall design becomes clear and the audience starts giggling you have to score this one as a failure.
Individual images and moments are striking and the craft aspects are good but the opening traffic light in flames immediately takes us deep into dejá vue after watching the Bertrand Bonellos.
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that Maribel Verdu and Antonio Banderas were the teen age idols of Hispanic movies. Her overbite has become a glamor signature in the intervening time and, as we only get to see her at wide intervals, it’s fascinating to watch her mature down the years. However I do think it’s a bit much to ask us to believe that she has sex still wearing her scanties as in the new El asesino de los caprichos / The Goya Murders.
In this one, Maribel is a hard case lady cop who makes life tough for young partner Aura Garrido. Maribel thinks her side kick neglects their work to look after her young family, though Garrido takes time out to get up on stage in the clubs. The film’s most telling moment is the cut between Maribel preparing for an abortion and Garrido‘s toddler.
The pair get assigned to the case of murdered art collectors, whose bodies are found posed in the positions of Goya Caprichos as the Philippina maid points out by taking them into Madrid’s Goya Metro lined with reproductions. There’s also a visit to the Goya Museum.
Things get
complicated because Maribel is doing their boss - a nice authoritative turn by
Robert Alamo (La niebla y la doncella / Mist & the Maiden 2017, La piel que habito / The Skin I Live In
2011) - who is involved in some dodgy politics. Goya murders accumulate and
Maribel takes some punishment before the diabolically complicated scheme is
revealed.
Verdu and Garrido - El asesino de los caprichos / The Goya Murders.
The crime movie and the art detail don’t go together seamlessly and the piece is a bit too long but the leads impress, the shallow depth of field camerawork is effective and we can’t help wondering whether the film’s telling juxtapositions and the effective, sudden ending were contributed by veteran editor Teresa Font (Jamón, Jamón 1992, Perdita Durango 1997)
Benito Zambrano’s Intemperie / Out in the Open is set in parched Andalusia in 1946, still devastated seven years after the end of the Spanish Civil War and flint hearted foreman Luis Callejo is prepared to call out the women and children when his work men are too slow with the harvest. He takes a dim view of their scurrying to catch a hare and shoots it. This is an event that’s big on cruelty to animals. They find a cat in the freezer compartment in Ema.
Jaime López, a young boy has taken off with a few valuables to make a bolt for the city. Callejo sets out to recapture him, threatening to wall up the squalid cave home of his mother and one eyed dad and set fire to it.
Things don’t go well for the kid (or anyone in this film) with him smashing his
compass and falling down a ravine. He tries to steal food from lone goat herd Luis Tosar ( Our Last Men in the Philippines, La flaqueza del bolchevique) called “The Moor” after his time spent with the Morrocans following war service. He’s a dog owner like aged Carlos Álvarez-Nóvoa in Zambrano’s also Andalusia set 1999 Solas.
Tosa turns out to be a man of stoic integrity, taking down the sadistic pursuers as they struggle between the isolated desert wells. The point which so many pieces fail on, the central pair bonding, is beautifully handled without words in this film.
Intemperie - Tosar with dog.
The grimness which would be excessive in another movie gains an extra conviction as a condemnation of the Franco era - the brutality of the foreman’s men, the knife with the Swastika, the dry wells, the abandoned rail line, child abuse even in López’ own family) We get a surprise interlude with amputee Manolo Caro found with the boy’s horse harnessed to his wheel cart.
This is an unfamiliar setting for cowboy action - though it at times recalls Three Ten to Yuma, Rabbit Proof fence or elements of those last violent spaghetti westerns but it is a film whose excellence comes from originality and the skill of all departments. It shares the sensibility of Zamboro’s Fury of a Patient Man and it’s always a pleasure to see Luis Tozar doing his hard man act.
Outside the preposterous Ema, all these films are likely to make the cut for a best of the year list. This is not a fair test because I picked out the most likely titles, the ones with the celebrity performers but it's still an impressive total
Barrie Pattison 2021.
