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