TWENTIETH SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL in SYDNEY - 2017.
Over the years a few events stand out - the Paris Cinematheque opening the Chaillot with its George Eastman House tribute in the sixties, the London NFT Viennese season, the 2000 Italian Film Week and the Tomu Uchida retro of which the Melbourne Film Festival played a section. Impressively the 2017 Spanish Film festival is up there with those - shading a bland French event that preceded it.
Seeing my year’s ration of Hispanic movies in one hit has it’s disadvantages. We spot the Madrid bank they knock over in
Cien años de perdón when it turns up again in
Cuerpo de elite. Do all Spanish movie characters have relatives in intensive care? One fresh faced juvenile abandoning writing his journal in
Last Men in the Philippines is enough. We don’t need it again in
El destierro or more robbers cutting holes in the floor with thermal lances - things that wouldn’t be disturbing viewed more widely apart.
I also got really tired of those repeating pre-show ads, Sebastian Artois' and his dog or Tina and Ross with their extroverted olives but I wasn't game to wait to climb over the settled customers as the movies started because that would mean missing the trailers which were one of the few sources of information on this underdocumented material.
On the other hand this way we start to recognise the talented performers. Luis Tosar remains our favourite Hispanic hard man since the late Paul Nashy. Miki Esparbé's dorky lead does duty in The One Eyed Hero, a reproachful account of police violence and the knockabout Heroes Wanted. We can notice the fetching Belén Cuesta who does the “Madrid is not a sophisticated city” line from Kiki turning up again in Tenemos que hablar/ We Need to Talk as the building cleaner persuading boss Roberto Álamo, the cop hero in Que Dios nos perdone / May God Forgive Us, with an offer to wax his car for free or Robert de la Torre (Balada triste de trompeta ) brutalising more low lifes.
On top of this there is the repeating, weary indignation in identifying austerity Spain with ruthless banks, corrupt officials and blood thirsty cops.
Particularly outstanding Iñaki Dorronsoro's Plan de fuga/Escape Plan is a crime piece with ingenious twists to go with strong performances and production. Here the mechanics of the criminal group suggest Melville but Plan is more polished and has sharper characterisations - think Claude Sautet. Pity the Spanish FF buts it up against Cien años de perdón/To Steal from a Thief which is pretty good but outclassed in the comparison.
In Plan shaven headed Alain Hernández joins the Russkie robbery team in a test run break-in on the Madrid complex Torre Norte office, where they burn the files to prevent an audit. It proves to be a dummy run for their bank vault job where they check problems like the heat generated by using a burning lance in the confined space of a container. Hard man Hernández takes a dim view of becoming part of a tax fraud when they told him they were robbing the safe but they re-assure him he’s now a member of their criminal family.
As a fringe benefit - or irritation - Hernández finds the young stripper from the heavies’ club on his stairwell. Scene of him having his apple and bottle water health food meal while she puts ketchup on a burger. They hit the bed. Hernández talks about his criminal past when they got so confident that they went for a dip after a job and left the getaway truck parked, with the cops catching up with them. He just kept on swimming while the law got his partner who he watched deteriorate in prison.
Cop Luis Tosar is on the case interviewing the crooked attorney who set up the bogus raid. They face off, with him demanding to see Luis’ shield and Luis wanting one of the lawyer’s business cards, the pair offering bogus co-operation. Tosar's part is small here but he makes his presence felt.
Turns out the now addicted partner Javier Gutiérrez (memorable in
La Isla Minima/Marshland) has been recruited by the heavies and arrives as Hernández is working in his welder’s mask on the robbery van. While they are absorbing this new development, the black wearing Interpol SWAT team appears for a no mercy shoot-out which disposes of the heavies we thought were going to carry the film’s action. Hernández is being roughed up by the Interpol commander when Tosar shows up introducing one of the film’s unexpected developments.
Hernández’ wife is on about him taking care of their hospitalised daughter (more sack action) and Gutiérrez has this dream of opening a beach bar in South America with his share of the loot. Hernández blows smoke through that scheme, saying he’d put the returns in his arm before he even got to the country, which has an extradition treaty anyway. More prison would kill Gutiérrez.
I won't spoil the welcome surprises of the ending which involves moments like the stripper's customer sent off to have a cold shower, a pair of robbers walking through the marbled banking hall in balaclavas and waving shot guns with no one taking any notice or Tosar studying the thermal image of the bandit who is pondering giving up as conditions deteriorate. Throw in an either way happy end.
Also notable was Gastón Duprat & Mariano Cohn's
El Ciudadano Ilustre/ The Distinguished Citizen which kicks off with Oscar Martínez waiting in the Stockholm ante room till he’s called to receive his Nobel Prize for literature and he gives a speech where he says that he is driven by pride to accept an award that means his work is acceptable to famous men and kings rather than his intended audience - long pause before the hearty round of applause.
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El Ciudadano Ilustre/ The Distinguished Citizen Oscar Martínez' award
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We pick up Martínez again in his Spanish home, after a three years writer’s block. He perversely rejects all the prestigious occasions he's been invited to in favour of a "distinguished citizen" award in his small Argentinean native town, commenting that the
characters he drew on for his books' plots were unable to leave while he was unable to go back.
Arriving late he is driven through the town on the one fire truck, accompanied by the local beauty queen, waving to uninterested pedestrians. He speaks to a thin attendance after a video describing his life made by the local small station TV personality who does a one question interview before introducing the sponsor’s fruit drink in shot.
At his Q&A a young woman contradicts Martinez when he says that he never claimed suffering was essential to creation. She gets to be naked on his bed eating pizza. His old mate Dady Brieva has married Martinez' former flame. The writer goes to dinner where the Brieva serves up whole roast sheep heads. The situation gets to be more complicated. The men adjourn to the local club where Brieva has had all the girls thirty times each and he does the crazy-move dance to the juke box.
Martinez has been roped into the local art exhibition and they are confronted with crudely drawn likenesses of pets, a portrait of the Pope and a badly executed rural scene which the judges decide to give the award because it’s painted on the back on an advt. hoarding - hang it so both sides are visible. The creator of a dim still life, who proves to be biggest nutter in the town, denounces them for denigrating the progressive work of local artists - like him. He turns aggro.
After a violent confrontation, Martinez finds himself trying to escape from the town where there are no hire cars.
There's a coda which puts in question what we have seen.
The key element is Martinez' description of vanity as a essential to the writing process. Our estimate of the central character changes constantly as we see him in contradictory situations - with his old flame, meeting a bolas swinging gaucho, relating to the young hotel clerk short story writer or dismissing the local who is sure his dad was one of the Martinez' characters. His contempt of the small town doesn't stop him pressing a dandelion from his parents' neglected grave in his note book.
The continuing comparison to Australia, another colony separated from it’s cultural heritage by an ocean (they do the little plane across the map shot) in Argentine cinema is here again. Watching this, thinking of
Wake In Fright is inescapable. However there is a lot more than hick comedy, brute hoons and desperate sex going on here.
The film form is basic, though there are a few effective attempts at style - the montage of people met in the streets - but it’s strengths are a great set of performances and it's ability to keep on changing our take on the creative process - not going home again, arrogance as a source of inspiration. This one is a complex, unfamiliar and superior piece of work when it's not being viciously funny.
Rodrigo Sorogoyen's Madrid ultra-violence thriller
Que Dios nos perdone/May God Save Us also proves one of the all-time best things of its kind.
The cops have to deal with the 15M anti-austerity movement demonstrators and a visit by Pope Benedict XIII, so some of their less than finest put a granny killing down to low priority robbery until stuttering Inspector Antonio de la Torre lies down in the position of the body on her apartment stairs and deduces rape. Shaven headed partner Roberto Álamo (who carried off a Goya for his macho family man role) gets into a punch up with one of the blundering officers.
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| Roberto Álamo, Antonio de La Torre Que Dios nos perdone |
We get the first of scenes in the morgue with naked old woman cadavers where de la Torre’s guess is verified. A second killing and digging through the files to find an earlier case, which was never investigated, ups the pressure. Their supervisor takes the boys to lunch and explains that with Pope’s visit, granny raping can’t be seen to be going on but the young profiler who enjoys his work comes up with the notion of a well-groomed thirtyish serial killer with mummy issues who is kind to animals. Álamo is dismissive till de La Torre (also
Volver, Night Manager) points out that they know the killer left milk for a stray cat in the victim’s flat.
Set piece scene follows with de la Torre spotting profile fitting Javier Pereira distant feeding a kitten and following him to the flat where he’s got another old woman to bring him a glass of water.
There's a tense chase mixing in the festival crowd which is trapped in a Metro station when the pair, using their police authority and a shot in the air, lock it down. The chief ends facing hundreds of complaints from the embassies of roughed up visitors and fires Álamo because he’s got a wife and two kids to keep him stable, putting de la Torre on audio tape surveillance work, not wanting him offing himself.
Actually de la Torre and his cleaning lady are getting it on after she comes to his flat with a jug of gazpacho, while Álamo brings his daughter back to the family home to finds his wife making a meal for a shirtless man. He ends bloodied and drunk burying his dog in the apartment block lawn.
Another old woman killing introduces their antagonist in shock close up and the net closes with our heroes blackmailing an old churchman, who isn't sure of the immigration status of his Philippina maid, into fingering the nutter.
Shot in unsteady hand held, with a superior, suspense building score, the film has vivid characters, convincing settings, a deep vein of ugly perversity and a succession of grabbing set pieces - the festival crowd and subway escape, rounding up the suspect’s brother by the flickering cellar minuterie light, the fight in the crime scene and escape and the final scene.
For something that is the currently most ambitious undertaking of a beginner director, this startlingly effective. Lead Antonio de la Torre seems to be a specialist in these, turning up in Raúl Arévalo's also impressive
Tarde para la ira/The Fury of a Patient Man. I wouldn't take your granny to either one.
Also on show, that one is a remarkable, a grubby, super tough ‘scope crime and punishment piece set in the Madrid barrios. It kicks off with a
Gun Crazy reminiscent one take jewellery store robbery, camera behind the getaway driver, which ends with a jolting crash.
Not showing the connection, we get to de la Torre in the hospital with a comatose patient and in Raúl Jiménez small bar, a long way distant from de la Torre's comfortable home. This is a world of the men playing cards, first communion parties and the proprietor's waitress sister Ruth Diaz, with a son out of her conjugal jail visits with Luis Callejo (
Mi gran noche, Cien años de perdón). When the hard man comes out it doesn’t look good for her and de la Torre who are getting it on and exchanging intimate text messages.
The power relationship between the two men reverses as we discover that de la Torre, with a shot gun in his car boot, is not what he seems. Callejo who feels he was let down by the escaped robbers starts seeking out his fellow heist men, cheery Manolo Solo and his reformed associate now scraping a living from a small farm and about to become a father. The man’s happy wife invites them to lunch.
We get screw driver stabbings, the menacing barrio gym, a victim on his knees begging for his life and Callejo, who has snuck a hotel steak knife into his shoe, locked in the car boot while Diaz, waiting in de la Torre’s flat, runs his family videos. We expect she will find the brutal black and white robbery footage where a girl is pounded to death but her discovery is another twist in the film's unpredictable plot line.
This is attention grabbing stuff negotiating a path between reality and crime movie in a way we haven't seen before. Ugly grainy and desaturated filming works for the project. We can’t see who the getaway driver is and the violent material is more plausible. It’s director Raúl Arévalo’s first film as writer-director coming off interesting actor credits (
Cien años de perdón, Balada triste de trompeta, Marshland).
Álex de la Iglesia has for years now been the most conspicuous contributor to Hispanic film, though critics cling to Pedro Almodovar like a life raft. I noticed the outrage when de la Iglesia's splendid
Balada triste de trompeta/The Last Circus carried off a major 2010 festival prize and the approval of Quentin Tarantino. Any of his films is an event and the new
El bar/The Bar is instantly recognisably his.
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| Filming El Bar - Casa |
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The single take opening follows the cell ‘phone conversation of Blanca Suárez (the daughter in Almodovar’s
La piel que habito/The Skin I Live In) discussing her blind dates where they send ring-in ‘photos. She criss-crosses de la Iglesia regulars on the footpath,
Hill Street Blues style, until they all converge on Terele Pávez’ small cafe bar. Gormless Secun de la Rosa is the handy man and Carmen Machi (also great in
Vilaviciosi de la lado) is playing the slot machine. Bearded Mario Casa (
Witching and Bitching) is working on his lap top making him the only one who doesn’t pay attention to trim Señorita Suárez.
A junkie stumbles in to use the loo and grubby religious nutter Jaime Ordóñez generates confusion till Pavez calms him down. De la Iglesia grotesques are accumulating.
At this point one of the businessmen customers leaves and a shot is heard. Through the window the cafe group see his body on the street. Confusion and terror inside. Yes they are in the middle of one of those sinister government cover-ups.
Trying to figure it out, the retired cop produces his pistol and demands to see the contents of one man’s attaché case, which proves to be his lingerie salesman samples. The junkie stumbles out looking like the exploding man from
Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. The barflies' attempts to survive prove counterproductive - and generate an unpredictable plot line.
The characters each get their revealing scene, self-sacrifice and self-interest on display,
until the one traumatized survivor makes it out of the street grating behind all the policia
activity.
The de la Iglesia grotesque comedy and striking imagery are back - the dead man's blood picking out a square pattern in the tiled street, disgusting, gaunt Ordóñez is skinny enough to be pushed through the escape hole greased with cooking oil, a corpse bleeds out of its ears. Carmen Machi's jackpot winnings get used as coins on the dead man's eyes and her burned hands are dressed with toilet paper from the cellar where they survive on Cola and crisps
However the director is trying to work variations on his usual product - confined location and time span here, with a finale under the streets rather than in the usual perilous high place. The appealing Suarez stays immaculate, like Tony Curtis in
The Great Race pie fight, only to get the full grime and grease treatment. She plays straight faced, unlike the self-satirising Carolina Bang who has been fronting her husband's movies.
Craftsmanship, pacing and performances are spot on but the mix of yuck elements and gags is losing contact with our concerns, despite references to Ebola and financial meltdown but what the heck? It's a new Alex de la Iglesia. It's still going to be better than ninety percent of the material in the film festivals that ignore him.
Daniel Calparsoro’s
Cien Anos De Perdon /To Steal from a Thief is a another precision tooled bank job movie in gleaming, cool colour.
At the down town Valencia Banco Mediterranea with its massive metal doors, it’s the last day of the alarm system outage under maintenance. Sleek manager Patricia Vico learns that she’s on “the list.” Redundancy looms as the rain pours down.
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| Cien Anos De Perdon /To Steal from a Thief Tosar |
Our Luis Tosar leads his squad of no-hoper heist men wearing see-through plastic masks
in a raid, psyching down the out-gunned armed guard (what happens to him?) and roughing up the teller who presses the alarm.
The crew are soon emptying out the safe keeping boxes but we learn that more is at stake.
A hard drive has details of a Minister’s evil deeds. Cops and officials are pouring Guardia
Civil manpower into the area, aided by cell ‘phone conferencing. The leads stride about
the parlays, under their weapons, undeterred. Inside alliances with Vico, an undercover informer and Tosar are being shaped.
“This day has to end and I want it to end without violence.”
Co-conspirator Rodrigo De la Serna (
Motorcycle Diaries) manages to hold his own with Tosar in our attention - no mean feat. The development is ingenious and absolutely immoral as we root for the robbers rather than the cowering hostages made to wear the mercury triggered explosive vests.
After that telling ray of sunshine, warm in the green colour scheme, getting back into the outside city-scape is a striking release of tension. Technical work and performance are superior though the piece could stand some trimming in the later stages.
By normal standards David Cánovas first feature
La punta del iceberg/The Tip of the Iceberg would be a welcome outing but in this company anything less than brilliant disappointments.
This gleaming Spanish corporate drama starts with a body dropping onto a car in a busy street to the consternation of passers-by, soon evoking parallels with the high suicide rate scandals at Orange France. Executive Maribel Verdú in business suit and six inch heels is flown in for a day to explore this third fatality in one of her communications company's regional facilities, though she says her area is balance sheets not human relations.
Security cameras scan all the public areas and a reporter keeps on trying to contact her. The branch has cut staff and increased output, putting out a record number of new prototypes, making its manager Fernando Cayo a valuable commodity and he puts the deaths down to personal faults in the late employees.
She talks to the latest victim's secretary, union organiser and old flame Carmello Gómez, the dead man’s replacement and the company coffee bar manager and puts together details of fifty two year old executives with children at university who would never find another job or one who had two women pregnant simultaneously. Rather confusingly she has visions of the victims dropping out of windows or one slicing his throat with a box cutter, along with seeing her sister in law whom she had had fired to win the approval of the board.
Finally Maribel's passed a computer stick by the neurotic secretary who takes her breaks on the roof, looking down the mesmerising drop to the court yard.
This all plays quite well but we might have hoped for a more inventive ending. The final falling scarf image we saw in a Mrinal Sen drama.
Nice to find Verdu and Gómez still plausible star material sixteen years after their winning appearance in Gonzalo Suarez’
El Portero/The Goalkeeper. The pair joke about his expanding girth and, with her features having a hint of gaunt, Maribel has become a striking, mature beauty.
Secuestro/ Boy Missing the second film to be directed by the producer of
The Orphanage and
Julia’s Eyes comes across as a kind of more realist De Palma thriller.
Defence lawyer Blanca Portillo is winding up a corrupted case successfully, getting her shady client absolved of blame when her young son is found wandering a forest road and cops Antonio Dechen and Vicente Romero can’t get a statement out of the boy until Portillo shows up explaining that he was born deaf and uses sign language.
The kid fingers an identikit of villainous looking ex-con Andrés Herrera, who is stretched to the point where he looks like losing his flat while his wife Macarena Gómez (
Musarañas) is eight months pregnant. Herrera has his own secrets, hiding his bank roll in the wall and he tries to contact the family - shadowy figure flitting by in the dark outside their window.
When the cops fail to remove them from danger, Portillo contacts the boy’s unknowing docks boss father José Coronado who has begun a new family. Herrera’s secret turns out to be his connection with the shady world of dog fights in an abandoned swimming pool. Coronado’s two heavies move on him but he takes one down with a mirror shard in the leg before the man’s side kick sends a bullet his way.
Meanwhile the cops have broken the kid’s story. A surprise ending means that ironic justice is dispensed.
It holds attention well and the development is inventive and unfamiliar. Vague messages about school bullying and cruel sports but there’s no one to root for among the characters. The atmosphere of corruption at all levels is particularly strong in this one.
Set in Barcelona, Eduard Cortés
Cerca de tu casa / At Your Doorstep is another view of the Spanish financial crisis with unexpected musical interludes. The comparison with
La La Land doesn’t get past a shared debt to the Jacques Demy Musicals.
Unemployment is wiping out Ivan Massagué reduced to selling smoke alarms door to door after the cops break in and evict his family. The In Law guarantors look like they will go too. The film even manages to spare a bit of sympathy for the old friend banker Oriol Vila who foreclosed, though not much. His dad Lluís Homar goes into the office and slaps the guy when he finds out.
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| Austerity in action - Sílvia Pérez Cruz evicted in Cerca de tu casa |
Strong performances, notably singer lead Sílvia Pérez Cruz and her mum Adrania Ozores, and a disturbing account of the newly poor go with the film's striking images - the passengers synchronised diving in front of a metro train.
David Serrano's
Tenemos que hablar / We Need to Talk also deals with the newly dispossed but this one is a lively rom com.
Michelle Jenner wants to marry her hunky Argentinian boy friend but she’s still tied to separated husband Hugo Silva, the marriage having disintegrated when they followed the advice of his banker friend wiping out her family with shaky investments and leaving them to live in the remote investment flat while dad has commutes to his new job as an office janitor working with so nice Belén Cuesta.
Jenner thinks that Silva, who now shares a meager flat with his out of work financial advisor, is suicidal when he falls out of his window. She sets up a diner coercing her own now separated parents to present a picture of prosperity though her dad hates Silva. She uses a store account to buy luxury food with the intention of returning it for the refund. This doesn't work out when they want to eat the five hundred Euro ham.
The plan is to jolly Silva up to jolly with the prospect of a reconciliation and a job. Cuesta bribes her boss, Roberto Álamo again, into giving her the board room keys. In her power suit, she poses as the company’s human resources officer planning to turn down Silva's application gently but he does his pitch so effectively that she tells him he’s hired for the non existent vacancy. Verónica Forqué is in there too. It takes a maximum of charm, bright colours and beautiful people in attractive settings to make this all unravel into feel good movie.
A big hit on its home turf I had concerns that
Villaviciosa De Al Lado /A Stroke of Luck may not travel - a bawdy comedy where the people talk sex but there’s no nudity. I usually hate those. However the energy, nice score, bright colours and expert farceurs headed by mayor Arturo Valls and brothel madam Carmen Machi (from a couple of Almodovars and more significantly Álex de la Iglesia’s
MiGran Noche and
El Bar) all are on target.
Plot developments start formula predictable. In the small rural Spanish town Villaviciosa the one industry is a run-down spa, failing until a syndicate lottery win offers salvation. Trouble is the local husbands bought the ticket in the Club Mementos whorehouse and their wives will get to know if they claim. Farcical plots to get the cash cummulate in the Good Friday procession of the Holy Virgin.
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| Villaviciosa De Al Lado /A Stroke of Luck - Machi |
Throw in a lesson in faking orgasms and a chase on tractors which only go 40 m.p.h. A
few of the characters get to be quite involving like young Macarena García who offers an appealing alternative to the locksmith’s zumba class organiser fiancée or the gay of the village and his mum, delighted to find she is part of the new morality.
The film’s mean spirit proves to have an unexpected tilt. The African priest manoeuvred into breaking successive commandments gets more sympathy than the Madrid leftist who dragged his wife out of the big city to the dim backwater. The Guardia Civil officer proves to be the only one who has a genuine moral compass, which is certainly a shift in Spanish popular entertainment.
Director Nacho G. Velilla has a backlog of these and I’d like to see some more.
Contratiempo/The Invisible Guest written and directed by Oriol Paulo is not a likeable film but it's one that juggles its precision-fit elements expertly. Close-ups of a stop watch count off an hour, surveillance cameras cover outdoors pay ‘phones and computer screens carry incriminating messages. The polish of the film-making matches the subject and the deserted roads and woods achieve a suitable menace that contrasts with the leads' luxurious life.
Mario Casas (
Witching and Bitching and
The Bar) is arrested for the locked hotel room murder of Bárbara Lennie, her body found scattered with bank notes. Top lawyer Ana Wagener has been summoned to stop justice catching up with Casas. Turns out the pair of the beautiful people who have everything and want more were a guilty couple on a Barcelona getaway their spouses don’t know about when they became involved in a multiple car accident with a deer in the Bierce woods.
Our perception of the events and their presentation to the police keeps on shifting as his mouthpiece pressures Casas into further revelations. As in
Boy Missing (also with Jose Coronado) the Spanish legal system is again shown as totally corrupt.
Everyone is saying Hitchcock, particularly with the sub-Bernard Herrmann score, but the
model is really Agatha Christie, as becomes evident in the ultimate twist.
Salvador Calvo's
1898. Los últimos de Filipinas/1898 Our Last Men in the Philippines is one of the event’s most ambitious productions, a big costume melo-actioner, with handle bar moustached Luis Tosar here heading up the fifty man reprisal force sent to recover the Philippines Baler mission over-run by the Tagalog locals in the last days of the Spanish Empire. They are received by agro survivor-sergeant, the admirable Javier Gutiérrez
(La Isla Minima, Plan de Fuga) with a machete cut across his brow. After forting up the church, which is strong enough to stand artillery, and digging their well and trench barrier, they come under attack from the guerrilla force. The locals take a lot more
hits than the troops but one of the recruits sent out to recover bodies under truce just keeps going to the other side. As a deserter he can never return to Spain.
While all this is happening there’s lots of pondering - dialogue about the honour of Spain, “two kinds of soldiers - those who want to get home and those who want medals”. Young recruit Álvaro Cervantes keeps on sketching. His certificate of military service is what he needs to get the recommendation for his art studies. He also starts puffing on Padre Elejalde‘s opium pipe. Their limited diet means that the Spaniard soldiers are getting beriberi, diagnosed from their swollen feet by Dr. Carlos Hipólito.
To complicate the issue, the Tagalogs arrive with buckets of oranges and the offer of letting them dig a garden if they cease hostilities, saying Manila is now in the hands of the Americans, who have bought the country from Spain. It’s recorded in the newspapers they have brought. Luis, who has nothing to go back to, doesn’t believe it but Captain Eduard Fernández (
Truman, El Portero) wants to send Cervantes off through the jungle to check. When the commander dies, Luis puts a stop to that and they make a stew out of the officer's pet dog. Some of all this is too loaded, most notably Tosar with his death wish opposed by the fetching singing whore Alexandra Masangkay as the life force.
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| 1898. Los últimos de Filipinas/1898 Our Last Men in the Philippines - Tosar |
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Skilled technicians and a substantial budget generate great images - Cervantes on the deck of the troop ship, Tosar leading his uniformed force chest deep in the river while Father Elejalde paddles along side them, fire arrows reigning down on the church, topless Masangkay’ song, a giant spider eating a praying mantis.
Determined movie goers will have seen a lot of it before. This page of Spanish military glory is a disillusioned match for Augusto Genina's 1940
Sin Novedad en el Alcazar/The Siege of Alcazar’s defenders holding off the enemy against overpowering odds and makes an interesting comparison with Gary Cooper's Philippino exploits in the 1939
The Real Glory or with Eddie Romero's insurgent films like
Moro Witch Doctor or
Aguilar. Argentinean Hugo Fregonese would have been familiar with the original incident when he made his remarkable
Apache Drums centering on its own church fortress. While
Los últimos de Filipinas' attempts at thoughtful stray closer to grim accounts of Imperial expansion like
Burke and Wills and
Scott of the Antarctic, it is one of the most handsome entries in the cycle.
Any film from Alberto Rodríguez the director of
La Isla Minima/Marshland and
Grupo 7 is going to attract attention and
El hombre de las mil caras / The Man with a Thousand Faces /Smoke and Mirrors with its ingenious scams and multiple striking locations looks promising. However, for those not familiar with the real life scandal centring Luis Roldán, the first civilian controller of the Guardia Civil, this one often plays like an
Ocean’s Eleven rip off.
We start with pilot, the busy José Coronado (also in
Boy Missing, To Steal from a Thief and The Invisible Guest) telling the viewer about his disgruntled master spy chum Francisco Paesa (Eduard Fernández) who never got paid by the government high ups for his major strikes against ETA. Confusingly Coronado receives the key to a Paris Gare du Nord locker the significance of which we will only discover in the finale.
Fernández is recruited by Carlos Santos, as the bald & bearded ex-Guardia Civil commander, to get him away with his billions of pesetas in graft, now complicated by the fact that his elegant squeeze is pregnant. “In three years you’ll be playing with your child in the park” and close up hand shake.
There follows a complex world-wide pursuit by the authorities determined to bring back Santos. It involves Fernández shifting the fortune round the globe while the fugitive is hidden in a Paris garret. Fernández’s associates include an alcoholic who has a vision of a live deer in an airport lounge and Paris merchants rung in as a menacing underworld network.
The coup involves having Fernández' law school trained niece physically moving the loot one floor in a Singapore banking complex, briefcase by brief case full, which makes it untraceable. The film’s major innovation is showing the strain on the fraudsters.
Though he’s beaten the game and moved his bag and Modigliani painting back into his wife’s home, Fernández can’t stop and has to take the government down and go deep undercover till the statute of limitations expires. Convincing staging, personable cast but conviction in short supply.
Even the least likely entry in the Spanish Film Festival, Marc Crehuet's
El rei borni/The One Eyed King, minimally adapted from his stage play, proves to have interest - strong performances and probing interrogation of issues.
Alain Hernández (better in
Plan de fuga/Escape Plan) is again the Spanish shave headed macho man, here occasionally putting rounds into the apartment wall when he inventories his stock of weapons and playing the “Red Orchestra” gunfire video game on the home TV.
As a police riot officer, he shot out a demonstrator’s eye with a rubber bullet. He tries to defend his act to his epicure cooking (shot of the two portions of her pea soup going down the sink) wife Ruth Llopis. To open up her world, he encourages her to contact Betsy Túrnez, the friend she lost contact with when Túrnez became a student. This means Miki Esparbé, her husband and the shooting victim, unexpectedly turns up as their dinner guest.
Llopis offering her husband oral and anal sex doesn’t restore marriage relations after the confrontation between the two men. She leaves him and, trying to win her back, Hernández calls Esparbé and attempts to create an understanding. This takes a while to gel but gradually Hernández absorbs his opponent’s activist rhetoric and attempts to put it to his superior. (Compare George Clooney in
Hail Caesar)
This gets Hernández transferred to a desk.
The marriage still shattered, desperate and disturbed Hernández acts with the bloody violence that comes naturally to him. His wife and the other couple are appalled, though Túrnez warms to his idea of direct action, suggesting cutting off a finger to send with their demand.
Hernández finally realises the enormity of his actions (“Nobody told me it was wrong”).
Striking touches - locating the piece by the mirror Hernández smashed, his removing his full riot gear - still evoke a theater production. Curiously and unlike common wisdom, scripting which would play on a stage seems artificial here. OK craft aspects attempt to compensate for the time spent in the apartment setting - camera, editing, music, distinctive titles and sound mix to go with the expert performances.
There were a lot of films in this event that represent a better return on festival prices but this is still worth watching.
Then
Cuerpo de élite / Heroes Wanted by TV director Joaquín Mazón proved to be the ideal movie to rile up all those traditional film festival adherents who are snotty about these events.
On the streets of Madrid, moped riding traffic cop Miki Esparbé from
The One Eyed King even tickets the attractive girl who comes on for him. The car of Minister for the Interior Carlos Areces (the lead in
Balada triste de trompeta) is parked illegally but Esparbé wants one law for all so they drive over him and it makes the papers.
Esparbé is told that his devotion to duty has made him a candidate for the new elite squad being fast recruited to replace the lot wiped out in a Gibraltar shoot-out. He finds himself in the company of a team drawn from different Spanish regions, including winning Andalusian Signorita Maria Léon whose choices there were being a whore or joining the Gardia Civil .
Think
Police Academy with better production values.
There are gay jokes, gross outs and James Bond burlesques in the search for the A bomb Franco stole from the crashed US plane at Palomares. It's even quite rousing when Esparbé rallies the dispirited team, followed by the unknowing New Year's crowd wowed by the fireworks display that nearly got to be Madrid going up in a flash.
You don't often see these sub-titled. TV Director Mazón and Léon did a series together. The cast are winning and the film making spot on so we can forgive
Heroes Wanted for all those jokes that misfire.
In absolute contrast Arturo Ruiz Serrano Serrano’s debut as feature director
El destierro/The Exile (which he also wrote and scored) is a movie of high seriousness from the first shot where bespectacled young Joan Carles Suau walks into focus against the monochrome winter mountain snowscape.
In the Spanish Civil War he’s been allocated, to replace a dead soldier, one of a series of remote Nationalist mountain stone watch-huts. Fresh from the Seminary, Suau doesn’t have much in common with coarse fellow sentry Eric Francés who abuses him for oversleeping and letting their fire go out and is derisive about Suau’s "priest books". Unmotivated Francés could just as easily have found himself on the Republican side, like his brothers in Madrid.
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| El destierro/The Exile - Francés |
However out getting water Francés discovers wounded girl Monika Kowalska, who he brings back to the hut, not unlike the animals in his snares, to add to their comfort, tying her up behind the hut to keep her out of sight of donkey sergeant Chani Martín bringing supplies.
Her papers reveal her to be a “roja” foreign fighter. We get their back stories, Suau sexually abused, Monika, educated and aware (but not able to cook), and Francés, desperate for news of his family on the other side of the war.
All their values of are challenged. The bleak monochrome winter terrain changes to
spring in step with their own personal thaw - get it! The ending is brutal.
Established editor Teresa Font, with
Jamon Jamon and couple of de la Iglesias on her
resumé is the most familiar name on the credits. This one is more Film Festival material
than the kind of popular cinema that made up the body of the current event. It could have
come from a different planet, let alone a different country. It is worth seeking out.
Because the Spanish Film Festival new releases take all the time (and money) I can pour into the project, I've been neglecting its small retrospective on the work of the gorgeous Ana Belén. That's a pity because it's hard to see any vintage Spanish material here. I did however catch their run of Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón's 1982
Demonios en el jardín/ Demons in the Garden again.
Admired in it's day as a star turn by the New Spanish Cinema, a festival prize winner and prestige production, this one is not really equal to its ambitions. Torrid Latino melodrama wins out over that festival film cliché, sensitive study of growing up in troubled times.
In the Franco era, the rural family store derives much of it’s profits from the black market. They are preparing for Ana Belén’s wedding. Much sibling rivalry between balding Eusebio Lázaro the groom and his brother Imanol Ariaz the local Don Juan, who it turns out has got cousin, the always imposing Angela Molina, pregnant. The giant bull, that Ariaz regards as a pet and Lázaro threatens to turn into steaks, breaks into the church during the wedding. “He only wants to play.”
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| Molina, Prieto & Belén - Demons |
Molina reproaches Arias for deserting her when he decides to use his Falangist connections to get a place in Madrid and she moves to an isolated hill property to raise her child. Years later grandma Encarna Paso is overcome with guilt and acknowledges Álvaro Sánchez Prieto and, when the doctor orders the boy's indulgence as a cure for rheumatic fever, takes him into bed rest at the main house and bankrolls the purchase of
scarce streptomycin, with Molina visiting.
They discover that the kid’s father, whom he has never seen, has gotten a spot in the service of Franco. The newsreel playing in the neighbourhood movie house has a shot of him glimpsed in the retinue and the projectionist chops out the piece of film for Prieto. The kid dictates a letter to the generalissimo asking for his dad to be allowed to visit and an official motorcade arrives for a trip where Franco can fish for the local trout.
They swirl through the dusty road and one of the cars has Arias, who pulls up showing the leader's dessert container, greeting the boy and inviting him to visit. When Molina takes him - one adult and a child, granny is left behind - he can see that Arias is just a waiter ("it is an honor to serve the general") and runs off disillusioned.
The boy has been stuffing his bed with groceries to slip to mum Molina and money goes missing from the business’ vintage four tumbler safe. Suspicion falls on Molina. However Arias (“he’s always been a demon”) is the culprit and gets a blast from the pistol which they cover for the family photo that the end credits play over.
The film presents elements that aren’t properly worked out - the “merchant” business with Lázaro lovingly running his hands through the sacks of superior produce or Paso telling the kid about the sins of the scarf wearing women customers out of their hearing. Arias with his silver tray is continuing the family tradition.
Without understanding the original language, the persistent humour registers as strange (the brothers' drunken reconciliation, the relatives devouring Paso's Spanish omelette that the kid rejects) and political detail is lost - Molina as a "rojita", the fascist symbol on the cigarette lighter that we expect to set the hay on fire.
The scene of sending the lecherous policeman to intimidate Molina seems to be missing in the current copy, apparently an original 35mm film print with the contrasty colour and poor shadow detail of its day. Film form is basic. Pretty much the only close shots are of Molina, who is of course in her element - another onion cutting scene. The cast are expert. Minimal music with none under the titles and the locals breaking out in the theme from Silvana Mangano's
Anna, which the Pope has forbidden, making watching it young Prieto’s first mortal sin.
There are Spanish films I'd prefer seeing dusted off. I am sorry to miss
Incerta Gloria / Uncertain Glory the new film by the director of the exceptional
Pa Negra but
Queen of Spain and
Kiki look like getting runs at popular prices (we'll see) and the musical documentaries are for someone else.
The 2017 Spanish Film Festival was an impressive suggestion that Hispanic popular cinema is full of work that could fill our time better than a lot of what we are offered. Customers kept on telling the staff that. Can’t help wondering if anyone noticed.
