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| Mediterráneo - Castillo, Rovira & Fernandez. |
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.
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| 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.
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| El olvido que seremos - Urrego, Cámara, |
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.
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.
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| El lodo / Wetland - Vega & Arévalo |
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
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