SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2023

Modelo 77 - Miguel Herrán

Another Spanish Film Event is a reminder not only of the strengths of Hispanic film culture but also the fact that so little of it reaches us. Checking the credits of  conspicuously talented people with work on show, throws up lengthy filmographies - lists of films that are totally unfamiliar and are regrettably likely to stay that way. These events, like their Italian counterparts, are frequently the highlight of the viewing year and this one did offer a couple of exceptional films.

Bucking the trend is director Alberto Rodriguez, whose La isla mínima / Marshland was an international hit. (Article 19 the Hindi version and Fieiesland, a German one, also impress) These and Rodriguesz' 2012 Grupo7/ Unit 7 and El hombre de las mil caras / Smoke & Mirrors have had limited showing here. That's already enough to convince us that he is a substantial talent.

Rodriguez' new Modelo 77 / Prisoner Seventy Seven was on view. Well on the way to be the best ever prison movie, this one manages to narrow its context so that we are not considering the excesses of the Franco period but abuses that the democracy that followed was not ready to confront. Rodriguez has staked out his territory with this film and Marshland, rather as Curt Maetzig did with post WW2 Germany.

We follow current Spanish A-Lister Miguel Herrán, as he is inducted into prison for an embezzlement, that he claims he didn’t commit. He’s given his bucket of water after a strip search and a guard makes him an offer for his suit, telling him he’ll lose it anyway to the hard case inmates.  Herrán rapidly learns about outrages by the authorities and the prisoners. An over worked court-appointed lawyer tells him it’s likely to be four years before his case comes to trial. His lady friend isn’t up for a visit but her dewy eyed, red headed sister Catalina Sopelana comes to see him.

The film is a growth or an enlightenment, as we lean the things Herrán learns - don’t step on the newly disinfected floors to avoid ulcerated feet, don’t believe in prisoner’s rights or the press, don’t look to the authorities for any protection. The judge presented as a an arbitrator is a disguised cop from another jurisdiction. They demand the prison guards supervise their post demonstration return to the cells, rather than the riot squad who will lay into them with batons. 

  Alberto Rodriguez

As the film progresses, Herrán plausibly changes from an indignant victim, to a protestor, whose hopes center in the P.R.A. association getting the Amnesty given to the political prisoners extended to all the inmates, to someone hardened by the failure of self mutilation, roof top sit-ins and hunger strikes, to a stoic who has chosen to abandon all hope.

This is played in authentic jail setting - the entry rotunda, the community of the yard, solitary, the wings dominated by prisoner bosses (one makes a decent living to support his family out of contraband beer and luxuries) - all things we’ve seen in other prison movies, though rarely with such conviction. To the indistinctly shown Guards, brute injustice is a way of life. Inmates, who we see more of, get varying sympathy. Herrán is witness to a vicious murder.

The thing that elevates Prisoner 77 is  the depiction of the fellow prisoner character played by Javier Guiterrez, unrecognisable from his lead in Marshland. He first surfaces as an aggressively territorial cell mate we take to be a minor character, gradually shifting to the center of attention, becoming the individual Herrán depends on and finally the one person who may halt his disintegration.

One of the nicest touches is the scene of the guards burning Guiterrez treasured paper back library, not realising that his stock of hashish is hidden in the spine of one volume, giving the bystanders a high.

With Marshland and Prisoner 77 on his C.V., Alberto Rodríguez rates as one of the most important film makers now working.

There’s a community in the films that I find myself seeking out - the westerns of Anthony Mann, the shockers of Dario Argento & Paul Naschy and currently the comedies of outrage of Álex de la Iglesia. They make us feel pain, heat, grubbiness, sex, danger and exhilaration. It’s not a surprise to find that de la Iglesia was a product of comic strips and film societies, with an imposing history that includes Comunidad, Balada triste de trompeta / The Last Circus, 800 Bullets, Witching and Bitching and his less involving English language work. Most movie authorities pretend these don’t exist and we are quite a few behind here, even with diligent scanning of the Spanish Film events.

Four's a Crowd.

De la Iglesia’s new (well last year’s) El Cuarto Pasagero / Four's a Crowd is our man at his most show-offish. They ought to run it in film schools to show how a film about four people in a car can be full of movement and visual interest - and it can involve you with characters you would struggle to avoid in real life. Actually they ought to run it in film schools just to give the students a break from people telling them about Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.

It’s another one about Ride Share cf.  Martín Cuervo’s Con quién viajas / Carpoolers. Fifty year old Alberto San Juan has a regular Friday night run from Bilbao to Madrid in his polished car, in order to get close to twenty year younger Blanca Suárez (the daughter from The Skin I Live in) and now he’s rehearsing the marriage proposal he’s prepared, before ripping it up and shoving the pieces in the glove compartment on his way to collect her with her familiar striped case. Before he can get started, the car fills up with extraordinarily annoying Ernesto Alterio and Suárez’ perfect match, bearded, handsome, guitar playing, Taekwondo expert Rubén Cortada, who is her age and fresh from charity work with the South American dispossessed.

It’s not long before Alterio is putting together the torn up pieces of San Juan’s proposal and filming him in the highway shop brawl, that Alterio started, to put on the cloud, and the Guardia Civil are making San Juan walk the white line. Even driving off,  leaving Alterio while he pisses in a field, doesn’t solve San Juan’s problems. He finds himself dulling his frustration with brandy, while he watches Cortada ending a naked swim, in the pool at the futuristic hotel, by rubbing down Suarez with grape seed and honey.

Just when they need to accelerate away, the group face the giant week end traffic jam. (Eat your heart out the late Jean Luc Goddard!) Not unlike Speed, the film falls away when it opens out and they leave the car to get into a shoot out, while a couple is watching Marienbad on their stalled car’s TV, and Cortada whose hands are classed as deadly weapons, has to use his fingers of death in a face off with Iglesia regular, hovering, genuinely menacing drug dealer Carlos Areces.  

It’s no small accomplishment that, without softening his dreadful characters, de la Iglasia catches our sympathy - even for Alterio, finally seen plotting a “Love Program” where homeless orphans will be recruited to smuggle bricks of hash. The cast is full of people the director has worked with before. Acares was the second clown in The Last Circus, Suarez was in El Bar and Alterio in Mi gran noche and de Iglesia’s Spanish version of Perfect Strangers. The pixieish Carolina Bang, now Mrs. de la Iglesia, figures on this one as producer. The technical work is exceptional. 

 

I wanted to see El Te$t because Four’s a Crowd’s Blanca Suárez and Alberto San Juan were back heading that one's cast and there they were but I had to stare to find them in their new make overs. Even busted back to the film’s grandfather character and with his head shaved, Antonio Resines however was instantly recognisable. I’d have bought a ticket just for another look at the star of  Acción mutante and El Embrujo de Shanghai - or any of his other 172 movies. Now there’s a great idea for a retrospective.

In an awful wig, that’s part of the plot, Miren Ibarguren is a wife who has bought the entire activist agenda, assuring her associates that she only uses sustain-ably sourced products and not lettering her child go to First Communion - to Resines, the kid’s grandad’s dismay.

The script pivots on a test proposed in pop therapist Suárez’ best selling self help book, where the subjects must chose between ten thousand pesetas now or a million in ten years time. Ridiculously successful old friend Carlos Santos was once a street musician playing with San Juan, now Ibarguren’s husband and struggling to keep his failing bar business running. The couple visits Santos’ mansion, served by voice activated robots, for a dinner, where they will be joined by his glamorous new squeeze, Suárez. 

The evening exposes all the tensions between them, not unlike what we see in the much versioned Perfect Strangers. I suspect they wanted something closer to An Indecent Proposal. Resines turns up with the couple’s pre-teen daughter, who he was baby sitting and had to bribe with the sugar treats Ibarguren has forbidden. His is the surest comic touch getting a laugh with everything he does. Things build to a great scene where all the dreadful strategies, that the Suárez’ book outlines, look like actually working. Meanwhile she is getting stuck into the booze and pills combination that killed her sister.

The outline of writer Jordi Vallejo’s stage success is always visible but director Dani de la Orden has imposed an attention holding film form. We end up with a slick movie with strong performances, that near to convinces us there’s substance behind the clever gags. The final coda is implausibly sunny but you can’t have everything.

 

I felt some sales resistance to Alfonso Albacete’s La novia de América / My Father's Mexican Wedding.  It homes in on the Mexico-Spain interface, not exactly my keenest interest, and it fields those now popular favorites - gay couples and transvestites - currently in some over supply. I’d never found them fall about funny in Almodovar's movies.

My Father's Mexican Wedding.

It took a while to warm to the film - till about the time a pair of kidnappers in luchadores masks make off with the sister in law ring-in bride trying to usurp the place of voluptuous computer-fiance Diana Bovio, in mature Ginés García Millán’s second wedding. The in-law’s escape from the jilted butcher’s meat store, wearing the purloined wedding dress, freaks out the populace, who take her for la Lorna.

Director Albacete’s background is in raunchy Spanish comedies, which don’t get to play here. Miren Ibarguren again heads up the cast, in this one as Millan’s grown daughter. She jets out for the wedding with her brother Pol Monen, who is in a bind because he knows their stern dad will give him a hard time over his gay lover, passed off as a personal assistant.  The Spanish lot are greeted at the airport by bride to be Bovio’s brother Christian Vazquez’ car, packed with uninhibited Mexican in-laws and taken to their ethno-colourful extended family home, for comical culture clash.

Miren finds the viewers of the Video seminar, she’s trying to run from another continent, craning to one side to get a view of this action behind her and her own attention is caught when she finds Vazquez soaping up in the shower. The priest has to compete with the leads for the microphone when the ceremony doesn’t go to plan. Some of the routines are uncomfortable - signing the pre-nup or the gay lover as a master chef, overcoming the elimination of the suitor-butcher but the cousin’s final drag act spectacular carries the day.

Vivid colours, personable cast and loads of folklorico detail.

 

Joaquín Mazón’s La Vida Padre / Two Many Chefs was made to order for a festival opening night crowd. The Paddington audience I saw it with gave it a standing ovation.  It’s a formula crowd-pleaser by assured craftsmen, mixing food porn with appealing characters and some more trendy gay gags, all wrapped round a soft core of sentimentality.

  Too Many Chefs - Elejalde & Mazón.

Chef Enric Auquer is already stressed by the prospect of a royal visit to the Bilbao family restaurant he now runs, after his father abandoned them three decades back, when the bum Auquer nearly runs over turns out to be veteran Karra Elejalde (Only the Rain), the missing father. The old man has blocked out the intervening years and is convinced that Auquer is trying to have his way with him, when he drives him off to the restaurant where Elejalde immediately takes over again. The staff have to be assured that the smelly hobo is in fact an ace chef whose skills may placate the visiting Michelin star food critic.

Subplots involve appealing doctor Megan Montaner, who we are likely to see again, Auquer’s dope dealing brother and the search for the secret sea urchin recipe which Elejalde is determined to keep from Catalonian agents, leading to his  camper filled with souvenirs of his meetings with master chefs in his world travels. Seeing this engulfed in flames motivates the sunny ending ... and there’s another robot vacuum gag.

Tomorrow We Fix the World

In established director Ariel Winograd's Hoy Se Arregla el Mundo, things are not good for TV producer Leonardo Sbaraglia (Una pistola en cada mano / A Gun in Each Hand). His long running TV show "Today We Fix the World" is getting shaky. It looks like we are in for another media satire but this element loses importance when he argues with his separated wife and she tells him that young Benjamín Otero, the boy they raised for nine years, is not his biological son. She immediately gets wiped off in a traffic accident - an indication of the film’s curious attempt at unexpected switches of tone. 

This leaves the kid without both a mother and a father. Otero reproaches Sbaraglia with never being a real dad. The rest of the picture is Sbaraglia trying to find the boy’s birth  father, assisted along the way by therapist Charo López - unremarkable episodes where they examine possible candidates, including an amusement park clown and a family man giving a birthday party for his daughter. Most of these could advantageously be removed, reducing the film’s long hour and fifty three minutes. Hopes do occasionally rise only to subside almost immediately. Both the the stars of the splendid Tiempo de valientes turn up. Luis Luque as the TV show’s bogus medico, whose drinking is revealed to be caused by fear he’ll be exposed, comes off best, with people urging Sbaraglia to consult him. Potential parent Diego Peretti is just wasted.  

Winograd handles a reasonable budget with some slickness but the film is not funny and not involving.

 

Daniela Fejerman and Elvira Lindo’s Alguien que cuide de mÝ / Someone Who Takes Care of Me attempts to shoe horn AIDS, good living, culture and women’s issues into a Hispanic Multiplex feature.

Aura Garrido

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It kicks off with glamorous Aura Garrido in the spotlight, accepting her Goya award. She’s the youngest of  three generations of  a family of actresses, who find themself sorting out crisises enough for a couple of Joan Crawford movies.

Garrido has gotten the lead in a stage production of Ibsen’s “The Seagull” directed by her stepfather-become lover. Her mother Emma Sußrez (the most familiar face after her Julio Medem films) puts herself forward for a bit of life imitating art, in the play’s actress mother part. While this is happening, she is in financial stress over the flat she wants to buy, needing the proceeds from the sale of Granma Magui Mira’s home in the now up-market river district, which holds the old woman’s memories. Added to which Sußrez has a secret!

Her leading man shows an interest in Garrido, who proves to have a great build, while Sußrez’ gay companion Pedro Mari Sßnchez steals performance honors from the women who are working hard for them.

Throw in some black and white flashbacks to Garrido’s youth as young Anastasia Russo, and Sßnchez long-past TV productions, along with the contrast of “serious” theatre and Sußrez’s tele novela role - and the best Latin production values. I got bored with it all.

Barrie Pattison 2023.