Nazis and Parallel Worlds.

I’ve wanted to see the l932 F.P.1 Doesn’t Answer  through the five decades since I caught a half reel  clip with Conrad Veidt at a back yard 35 millimeter show in North London, where they kept the inflammable nitrate film in uncomfortable proximity to an open fire. The production was obviously an early example of the esthetic of The Shape of Things to Come, a cosmopolitan, high art sensibility brought to movie science fiction - wow, yes! Well unexpectedly, the film has shown up, for a short time only we are told, on You Tube, as Secrets of F.P.1, that same English language edition. 

In the brief period between the nineteen twenties arrival of film sound and the mid thirties
development of dubbing and sub-titling, it became common practice to produce parallel versions of movies. In Hollywood, film makers like Claude Autant Lara, José López Rubio and Jacques Feyder no less, would troop onto sets vacated by American directors, after the English speaking cast had gone home, and make their own versions with casts doing dialogue in French, German or Spanish. In the era of DVD extras, a few of these re-surfaced giving substance to the legend that Feyder’s version of Anna Christie with Greta Garbo again or George Medford doing the 1931 Dracula were superior to the ones we’d always watched.

 In Europe, the same thing was happening, producing a flock of lookalike, sound-different movies for their separate markets. A few notable productions were scooped up in this process - Congress Dances or the first sound films of Fritz Lang. Hitchcock did Mary, a German Murder, with Alfred Abel in the Herbert Marshall role. These consumed the early career of the then immensely popular Jan Kiepura but their big star was Conrad Veidt - two out of three Congress Dances and the English version of  Kurt/Curtis Siodmark’s “F.P.1 Does Not Answer.” Siodmark, brother of Robert, was, like Veidt, a specialist in fantasy and terror.

F.P.1. -  Albers, Veidt and Boyer.

Some of these alternates were made-later re-workings, rather than simultaneous, using as much footage as they could where original support players players weren’t recognisable - Kiepura in My Song for You and the Korda remake of Alex Ganovski’s Taras Boulba - but the F.P.1s  were genuine siblings with a photo taken of Veidt, Hans Albers and Charles Boyer, the fly boy heroes of the three versions, standing side by side on the decor to prove it.

They each recorded a version of the film’s theme song, with Albers’ becoming a hit still performed today.

As if just finding F.P.1 was not enough, the copy Is dazzling, looking like it came off the original negative correctly shown through the early sound aperture and impeccably graded. The brief, under cranked and forced processed night time exterior of the shipping offices, with fire engines rushing to the scene, is the best clue to the otherwise polished film's age.

Secrets of F.P.1. - Esmond & Veidt.

Secrets of F.P.1 opens at a black tie gathering in Hamburg, with Veidt’s Major Ellissen, who 'phones his press photographer associate Donald Calthrop (“an odd looking gentleman”) to get coverage for the bogus fire alarm he will send from the Lennartz Ship Yard, using the confusion to break into the file room and shift, to the owner’s office, plans on Floating Platform Number One -  “an artificial island in the middle of the Atlantic - made of steel and glass.” This creates interest in the neglected scheme designed by his friend, Leslie Fenton’s Capt. Droste.  

Veidt’s call was overheard by the glamorously turned out Jill Esmond, who proves to be part  owner of the Lennartz company.  The romantic leads that played opposite Veidt in his sound films always looked like his daughters and Esmond, then married to Laurence Olivier and fresh from a successful movie debut in Hitchcock’s version of The Skin Game, manages elegant nicely. She actually was the daughter of Eva  Moore from Whale's  The Old Dark House.

Smitten, the Veidt character moves on her but his life style is a stumbling block. “A man can’t always live in hotels. There are other things than hunting elephants and beating records” (Ever wonder why most English cinema failed to connect with a popular audience?) The offer of a revolutionary new plane is too tempting and Conrad signs on to pilot a marathon flight and disappears in Australia, while like Things to Come a superimposed machinery and flight material montage covers the remarkably swift Lennartz Company construction that gets F.P.1 up to the point where sailors gather on it’s deck and do the song about “The Lighthouse Across the Bay”.

Jill and Leslie have have become an item, upsetting our world weary traveler hero when he re-appears hair appropriately greyed, to explain to her “I didn’t want to come home a failure”.  Un-named nasties, who presumably have connections in surface transport (“There are spies in industry as there are in war”), have planted a saboteur on the Platform. We can spot Calthrop and Francis L. Sullivan among the jolly tars who fish off that imposing pylon in the studio tank - one of the nice pieces of staging that makes us forgive the unconvincing, un-populated model shots which provide the distant views of the platform.

Filling the sea water ballast tanks gives the bad hats’ agent a chance to sink the platform and a shoot-out with Fenton ensues - one of the movies' least exciting action scenes. Back in the Hamburg office, Jill hears this break out before the two way radio goes silent and she wants to use her plane to investigate the fact that F.P. One doesn’t answer but (surprise!) the only pilot available is Conrad, while the crew of the sinking construction have been gassed into immobility, with ballast controls jammed open and it’s planes out of commission.

Heroic intervention includes the later familiar shot of the plane take off, dropping off the lip of the deck only to soar skywards again!

What was intended as a ripping adventure yarn, (think Korda’s Clouds Over Europe/ Q Planes or Robert Stevenson’s King Solomon’s Mines) here emerges ninety years later as an antique, more revealing of its day than the makers intended and not in a good way. Well, be careful what you wish for.

   Montage image.

The French companion piece F.P.1 ne réspond plus with Charles Boyer as Ellison appears only to survive now as an inaccessible 9.5 sound edit. However, also on You Tube with excellent sub-titles, we can find the German copy, F.P:1 antwortet nicht again directed by Karl Hartl. Versions of the multi language productions, provided foreign partners, often omitted production values offered home audiences. This one was more than a reel longer than the English language film. Montages using  prismatic and superimposed images at the opening and during the rescue flight, tracked with Walter Reisch's "Flieger, grüß mir die Sonne," have been omitted in the English copy where the  credits have been abbreviated, possibly to disguise the foreign origins. Contributing writer Reisch had a long career, becoming part of the thirties exodus to Hollywood where he settled at 20th Century Fox for many years.

 

As I watched the German version, I first noticed how closely the British  followed it, with Veidt and Esmond performing the same movements and bits of business Hans Albers and Sybylle Schmidz do - not unlike Feyder’s cast repeating Clarence Brown’s angles in his Anna Christie. However as it rolled on, I also realised how much more I was enjoying it. The tempo matched the content more effectively, even before we get to the finale where Ellison’s discovery of the immobilised crew is extended and made more a matter of shocked realisation and his change of heart is slowly unrolled, moving from a feeling of betrayal to resolution. 

F.P.1 antwortet nicht - Schmidtz & Albers.

Albers is far more at ease in the Ellison part, given complexity as a prankster whose levity he is outgrowing while we watch. Veidt is one of the most authoritative performers of all time. His dismissing the angry mob with a sweep of his arm is something Albers can’t match but all his tormented screen apparitions haunt Veidt's attempts at being dashing in this one, as they do in Walter Forde’s 1935 King of the Damned or Victor Sjöstrom's enjoyable 1937 Under the Red Robe. Albers, given one of his best outings, is more plausible and involving here. Sybille Schmitz is not a conventionally pretty girl. Her career had been given a great launch with Ernö Metzner's realist two reel Polizeibericht Überfall /Police Report! Assault and the famous Carl Dreyer Vampyr, making her a German cinema A Lister, and here she plays with more shading than the better groomed Jill Esmond. (the striking shot of Esmond in her opera cloak, framed by the two caped bobbies, is actually better in the English version) Peter Lorre, frequently Albers’ side kick in German films of the day, takes the photographer part, though surprisingly Donald Calthrop (the blackmailer in Blackmail) is notably more effective. It is with his chess game, omitted in the English version, that the character’s function in the films emerges. Only Paul Hartman (later in Kazan’s Man on a Tightrope) is eclipsed by Leslie Fenton, fresh from his appearance in The Public Enemy. Fenton would go on to direct the exceptional Tomorrow the World and Alan Ladd Whispering Smith, among his more routine product.

Secrets - Fenton & Ward.

Rather sadly, we spot Warwick Ward, imposing-lecherous villain in Variety and the Bigitte Helm Die wunderbare Lüge der Nina Petrowna / The Wonderful Lie of Nina Petrovna, here almost invisible as Fenton’s first officer, like Lang regular George John, his King of the Nibelungens and the blind man in M, in this one glimpsed as the aggro sailor leading the mutiny. Friedrich Gnaß from Razzia in St. Pauli & M is Lennartz' watchman. 

 

The Composer Alan Gray would also score the early films of Powell and Pressberger and Gunter Rittau (Metropolis, Blue Angel) is among the camera credits. Director Karl Hartl, formerly editor on films by Michael Curtiz and Alexander Korda, promoted with the arrival of sound, would also handle the Albers vehicle Gold and the excellent 1935 Zigeunerbaron. He was one of the most talented film makers of the Third Reich.

This brings us to the elephant in the room. Albers, Hartl and several more would achieve their greatest successes in the Nazi years.  Assume that is why their work is so little commented, as English language critics had little access to it, though Secrets of F.P.1 had a Marble Arch first run in London. Even if writers were familiar with 3rd Reich product it would have been an act of some daring to express admiration for it. From this distance, it would seem that Hans Albers was foremost among what have been described as “Deserter” film makers, people who neither endorsed or opposed the German government. Albers’ enormous popularity among German speaking audiences would have made him a formidable opponent and he never played a Nazi in any of the films I've seen, though he did do a Merchant Marine in Helmut Käutner’s WW2  Grosse Freiheit Nr. 7 only to see the film banned by Dr. Goebbels.

A closer examination of Albers’ films shows him receiving unexpected vindication from a British Court in Unter heißem Himmel (1936) and as agent of the American Police, Sergeant Berry, der gangster schrek aus Chicago (1938). I like to think of those as indications where his sympathies lay, though they are just as likely to be part of the German attempt to enlist sympathy for a forthcoming war with the Bolsheviks.

 

The F.P.I films can be seen as clearly a highlight in the European proto-science fiction cycle that goes back at least to William Wauer’s 1915 Der Tunnel and  Emil Jannings in the 1920 Algol, through Metropolis and Maurice Elvey’s 1929  High Treason and the Tunnel sound movies to Korda’s Things to Come - short on monsters from outer space but full of the abuse of technology. Add F.P.1. to the then-contemporary product, packed with unruly mobs roused by (presumably Bolshevik) agitators - include Metropolis, Giftgas and Michael Powell’s Red Ensign of a couple of years later, which the FP1s frequently resemble.

It is frustrating that such a classy entertainment and key piece of film history are virtually never mentioned in literature devoted to the subject. Though he had been a leading man since the early twenties, F.P.1 is the first of the major Hans Albers adventure films which appear to be the mother lode in 3rd Reich Cinema - include Gustav Ucicky’s Flüchtlinge (1933), Herbert Selpin’s Sergeant Berry (1938),  Hartl’s Gold (1939) and Selpin’s Wasser für Canitoga (1939).

Even more significant is the fact that the F.P.1s were Erich Pommer’s last pre-WW2 German productions, ending a list that includes Caligari, Metropolis, Variety and The Congress Dances. The combined pull of Hollywood and push from the Nazis emptied Berlin of possibly the greatest concentration of film making talent then in the world. Pommer’s departure alone changed the nature of German film visibly, ending the stream of master pieces he had nurtured. Selpin had been a writer, Hartl an editor and Ucicky a cameraman. They achieved films of this standard following their association with masters. It is a perverse tribute to Pommer's talent and that of his peers that their second rank could take the big step forward and emerge from largely mediocre work being done around them.

It was worth waiting fifty years. With all its flaws, F. P.1 antwortet nicht stands among the most enjoyable work of its day from any source. The film shows some of the most talented people then working pushing themselves to their limits in a tradition of great imagination. Having the parallel version is extraordinarily revealing. These are examples of the kind of film that mandate the existence of the Cinémathèques - which we do not have.

 

Conrad Veidt - heroic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022.

MORE SPANISH FF.

Mediterráneo - Castillo, Rovira & Fernandez.

The 2022 Spanish Film Festival did provide notable movies - Maxibel (covered on Film Alert) is likely to be the best thing I see this year and Competencia oficial / Official Opening is one great in-joke. I did miss the new Santiago Segura and more - cost and time. However defying past experience, the popular material has been outclassed by purposeful movies this year. The also-rans have been dispiriting. Are El lodo / Wetland, Mamá o papá / You Keep the Kids and the dire La piel en llamas / Skin in Flames really the best efforts from the Hispanic world for twelve months?

There was however one other find in the schedule.

Mediterráneo - the Law of the Sea kicks off panning along the sunny Spanish surf beach
picking up a man on a surboard and the plastic caught in the wire fence (like Cette musique ne joue pour personne) to get to a now grizzled Eduard Fernández (Hormigas en la boca 2005) with binoculars. He’s a pro life guard, arguing with boss Sergi López on the cost of jet skis to expand the business. However a picture of the child drowned in the surf at Lesbos Island gets to him. “We’re turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave.”

The law of the sea declares that no one is to be left in the water, so Eduard decides he’s off to help and asks for volunteers to join him but the only taker is the irresistible Anna Castillo (lead in Iciar Bollaín’s The Olive Tree) who turns out to be his daughter and who Fernandez doesn’t rate ready to go in the water. Never the less, Eduard drives off  with his regular side kick Dani Rovira,  in the battered red car that will become a motif.

When they get to Lesbos they find the beach, where drownings are a regular event, un-patrolled and roads choked with refugees. Taking a couple of them in the car, has the derisive local police threaten to arrest Eduard for people trafficking. The only sympathy comes from the beach-side hotel owner, who was a Turkish refugee herself years back, and cuts them a cheap deal for accommodation. They find a slashed raft on the shore and orange jackets with empty plastic water bottles in the pockets being used used as flotation.

The new comers start operating with a salvaged dinghy. The Greek locals, whose livelihoods and living conditions are suffering, are unsympathetic. After the red car is graffiti 'd, the garage owner quotes them fifteen hundred Euros for a paint job and the same sum when Eduard wants to buy spray cans and do the job himself.

Lopez and the daughter arrive with Jet Skis that the customs impound and there’s dialogue about ruining their Spanish business through neglect. The E.U., where no one turns up for meetings, gets stick for the inactivity of their own border maintenance force.

A Russian refugee woman doctor waits alone by the lighthouse tower, having promised her
daughter that she would be there, when they were separated. Using this unlicensed medico gets the team thrown in the two segregated cells of the small jail but the film’s picture of the Greeks is shifting and the local sergeant refuses the bribe Eduard offers for her release and turns them all loose.

Father and daughter Castillo re-connect. It transpires that Eduard does know about her Major in journalism.  She brings photographer Àlex Monner to diner and he proposes a TV interview of which Fernandez is scornful until they point out that it was a photo that brought him there. The actual recording is telling. “The push factor is the E.U. selling arms to Syria.”

The highlight rescues give the piece grip - drowning people pulled up by their hair “Circle them twice. Give the children to their mothers. They won’t let go.” When Fernandez reaches one packed Zodiac, a passenger slashes it. (if they are in the water, the fugitives become refugees) When the refugees on shore find a young smuggler, he has to be rescued from the ugly mob they form. Along with showing Fernandez’ aggro nature, this redeems the sentimental edge. He says that the arrivals are not his responsibility after they land or pours out the now-sympathetic cops’ liquor, when they offer him a drink, and gets beaten up for it.

Mediterraneo - Barrena, Rovira, Castillo, Fernandez, Lopez & Monner.

The climax is the ferry sinking where all resources are rushed to the the ocean full of floating people and orange jackets and there’s the buzz of seeing the hostile garage man leading the fishermen throwing out their nets to join the rescue. The girl they take for a boy, who is the one to thank them, already provides a grabber moment before her revelation - damp eyed finale.

Writer-Director Marcel Barrena specialises in issues subjects and his TV Movie Cuatro estaciones is admired. Film craft and performances are more than adequate. The photos of the real life characters shown with the end credits intrigue. That their activities led to the formation of the Open Arms Movement, with an impressive rescue record,  is an affirmation.

Add this one to the current misstep-free refugee cycle that already includes Terraferma, Soy Nero, Welcome and  La Pirogue.

Since the success of his 1993 Belle Epoque Fernando Trueba has been one of Spain’s most conspicuous movie directors. His films like La Niña De Tus Ojos (1993) and El embrujo de Shanghai (2000) have fielded name stars in ambitious productions. His new El olvido que seremos / Forgotten We'll Be / Memories of My Father ticks a lot of boxes - elaborate period recreation, a real life subject, an acount of doctor become politician Dr. Héctor Abad Gómez, played by name star Javier Cámara, whose refusal to endorse the Colombian government’s aggressive military treatment of progressives had him branded as a Communist and dismissed from his university post. Despite declaring “soy medico, non politico” he runs for office when fellow liberals are being assassinated.

  El olvido que seremos - Urrego, Cámara,

The three decade story starts monochrome for writer-son Juan Pablo Urrego’s 1971 studies in Turin with a flashback in colour to show warm Medellin extended family life. Add a digression into simulated 8 mm. for home movies of  life threatening illness. The craft aspects and performance are irreproachable.  Whit Stillman is in there as a fellow doctor.

Cámara is a great support actor (Truman 2015 and The Young Pope 2016) but he unfortunately registers as amiable rather than authoritive in his leading role. The support become indistict around him. 

This one is a companion piece to Quo Vadis Aida, showing over familiar events that we must presume were devastating to those involved but to which the makers are unable to bring conviction.

Poliamor para principiantes /Polyamory for Dummies is one of those irritating sex comedies, with (practically) no sex and few jokes, that were prominent in the swinging sixties - What’s New Pussycat, Extraconiugale, Prudence and the Pill.

Fernando Colomo (El efecto mariposa / The Butterfly Effect 1995)  fields veteran comedian Karra Elejalde (Even the Rain) in what someone must have thought was a racy, cutting edge romp, after all it features Elejalde’s son 28 year old Quim Àvila still living at home and failing to establish his masked Red Ranger character as a You Tube sensation. He gets punched out by suited up Toad Man at a Comicon and rushed to hospital where Àvila is smitten with nurse María Pedraza - who is rather fetching.

She however proves to be in a Polyamorous relationship with another young woman and we start picking up the practices and terminology (unicorns, cowboys etc.) of their community, which Àvila fails to master. Back home however, mum Toni Acosta adopts the notion of three-some with some enthusiasm. Similar lame frolics follow, attempting to show the participants as naive and fun loving.

Àvila further antagonises all when he appears as his Red Ranger character on Susi Caramelo’s TV show, denouncing Polyamory.

The optical effects commenting the disasterous relationships are mildly amusing for a while. Whatever hopes the Madrid settings and smooth handling have raised rapidly evaporate.

Dani de la Orden’s  Mamá o papá / You Keep the Kids descended from the 2015 French
movie Papa ou maman (2015), its sequel, the 2017 Italian Feature film Mamma o papà?
and a 2018 French Mini Series. It has been back to the well too often.

In attempt at a bright coloured sitcom, Dad Paco León (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) and mum Miren Ibarguren are separating when they both get the offer of dream jobs, so they want the other partner to look after their children in their absence and, in what the makers hope is a whimsical inversion, they start playing the kids with bribes like a bicycle claimed as the other partner’s gift and menacing fictions.

The makers want this one to register as edgy, with references to nipple shields and an aggressively inclusive school teacher but, outside of a nice scene of the family gathering  on stage to join in a song to protect the youngest from embarrassment, it just emerges as mean.

In the early stages of director Iñaki Sánchez' 2nd feature El lodo / Wetland, hopes are set up for a tense crime piece on the model of La isla mínima / Marshland whose star Raúl Arévalo is the lead again. However elements like the ecology material and remote canal-rutted landscape navigated by the long tiller boats, give way to familiar melodrama - Paz Vega’s pill popping wife still haunted by the death of her son and swarthy, menacing locals who stand about cursing “Fijo da puta.”  We wait for them to mutter "We don't like strangers here!"

Fresh from saving a wetland in Brazil, bearded agronomist Arévalo arrives at the Spanish La Laguna Blanco which is menaced by water levels which are dropping each year. Local matriarch Susi Sanchez tells him her farmers are good people - always ominous. We know that nice dog, that we don't see enough of, is a goner and Arévalo's distrust of the shot guns he won’t let in the house will prove justified. When things turns nasty Juan Gea, the local Police Jefe, alerts them to the fate of Arévalo’s dead predecessor.

El lodo / Wetland - Vega & Arévalo

Shaven headed Park Ranger Joaquín Climent, who is disturbingly tolerant of poachers, carries off the acting honors, though spooky home help Susana Merino, from de Iglesia’s El Bar and As Luck Would Have It, registers firmly enough to liven up the ending. The accomplished Roberto Alamo is wasted and Vega, making her transition from glamorous to serious, just comes over as grating.

 Drone shots of the terrain with driving its marshes by Satnav or glimpses of flying V formations of the endangered herons circling at dusk help but they'd be more effective if they were less murky.

    

Barrie Pattison 2022

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2022.

These events are regularly highlights of the Australian movie going year.  A lot of the heavy hitters were absent this year - Álex de la Iglesia’s Veniciafrenia or Ricardo Darin in Argentina 1985, still in post. It will be interesting to see how this lot compare.

Writer-directors’ Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s Competencia oficial comes from the prestige end of Hispanic production. Their most prominent leads, Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz are partnered with  Argentinian Oscar Martínez, star of  the maker team’s exceptional El ciudadano ilustre and in Kóblic / Captain Koblic with Darin.

Cohn and Duprat are putting together a unique body of work, busily dismembering the notion of celebrity. Following El Artista and El ciudadano ilustre, they’ve moved on from painting and literature to the art cinema.

Ageing industrialist José Luis Gómez feels that his success has not brought the fame he requires to conclude his life. He ponders financing a bridge (promising) or a highway that could be named after him - or a movie.

The screen wins out, so he pays too much for a best seller novel and hires hot art movie director of the moment Penélope Cruz. Now our Penny has made a career out of being gorgeous but that’s not going to cut it here, so they make her gorgeous and grotesque at the same time - and fashionably lesbian. To charge up the project she recruits heart throb Banderas and Serious Actor Martinez - kind of like teaming Joan Crawford and Bette Davis. Their conflict in approaches is supposed to energise the production.

The rehearsal period, which is the heart of the film, is a series of grotesque exercises in an empty apartment complex - running their lines with a giant bolder suspended over their heads, rendered sticky taped mummies while Cruz menaces their treasured awards. This throws attention on the performers and they take full advantage. Antonio makes a shattering confession while his features are spread across the video projection screen. Martinez responds in kind - nice to see him going toe to toe with the celebrities after all this time. Surounded by a barrage of microphones, Banderas kissing their juvenile, for which they’ve recruited the backer’s daughter Irene Escolar, doesn’t meet Cruz’ demands and she steps in to demonstrate.

Competencia oficial - Banderas, Cruz & Martinez, between a rock...

All this has been nudged a little bit past the stories that circulate about Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson and Luis Buñel. It’s nice to find the pretentious end of the art cinema getting a licking for once or you could see this one as a Twenty First Century All About Eve, though Margo Channing’s entourage was a lot more sympathetic than the monsters the Spanish film offers us.

While quite modest in scale, Competencia oficial gives the impression of being no expense spared and suggests the leads have absolute confidence in the makers, a daring which pays off. It will be interesting to see if there is a public for something so far from the norm.

Also on show, Martín Cuervo’s Con quién viajas / Carpoolers is less commanding and probably cost a fraction of the big film but it also offers novelty. It just about gets away with being largely filmed in a moving car - ingeniously simulated with green screen on a sound stage, as they reveal under the run out titles.

After the set up meeting on Madrid’s Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas, where scruffy driver Salva Reina collects his three passengers recruited off a Tinder car pooling app,  they set out on their lengthy drive and  the camera moves inside his battered Jeep wagon - going through a closed window a couple of times.

Passengers Ana Polvorosa, Andrea Duro and Pol Monen start to feel there’s something odd about the owner. Just to complicate things, it turns out Polvorosa and Monen have a history and they start texting one another in the car, which gives the sub-titler quite an exercise.

As the light outside fails, incriminating observations make the passengers more nervous. The outcome gets by but, as often happens, it’s less involving that the ones the audience are constructing for themselves while the film runs.

The concept is given a good work out and the unfamiliar cast all register as people we can expect to see again.

And just to break the run I saw  David Martín Porras’ La piel en llamas / Skin in Flames, the first film I’ve watched, for quite some time, that I actively disliked. This one is is pretension at the movies run amok. You can tell what you're in for when early on we get the image of the naked black female Christ-figure . 

Set in the Presidential Suite of the best hotel in an un-named 3rd world country, where recently bombed buildings can be heard collapsing in the background, we kick off with celebrity photographer Óscar Jaenada outraged at finding a set of panties in the un-made bed there. Housekeeping is is soon to be the least of his problems.

The piece then develops through parallel (or are they) dialogues between Jaenada and Ella Kweku, journalist for the country's one surviving newspaper and between Lidia Nené and U. N. pervert Doctor Fernando Tejero, which, for no particular reason, end with them all in the same space. This might have worked better in the stage original that this one never escapes, despite attempts to go visual.

The film is big on perverse detail - returning spotless the silver dress stripped off the black mistress, a school loo, the panties, close ups of scar tissue. I’m still trying to work out the significance of Jaenada’s rubber gloves but I’ve long since concluded that anything that unclear is wobbly thinking of the kind this film flourishes.

Skin in Flames’ key image is the low rise mud colour Loyola School exploding as Jaenada presses the button that takes the photo of a girl student engulfed in the blast of an air raid bomb. They show the famous image of the napalm-scarred naked Vietnamese girl in a montage projected over the performers just in case we haven’t got the idea.

The film is full of irritating changes of character, possibly not the fault of the cast - Jaenada’s goes from arrogant to grovelling to assertive and Kweku switches from owning her character to disavowing it. Production values are passably studiofied.

Journalists from wealthy countries, using their colonial subjects, got a much better innings in a number of eighties movies - Salvador (1986), Under Fire (1983), Die Fälschung / Circle of Deceit (1981), Deadline / Witness in the War Zone (1987), Cry Freedom (1987), The Killing Fields (1984) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1982). This one is a belated and unnecessary addition - nasty, exploitative and awkward.

So far so so for Spanish Film Fest.

Barrie Pattison 2022