I Saw the TVs Glowing.

My generation was stiffed for fantasy horror. Lon Chaney and Conrad Veidt didn't mean much to my olds but they did have Hollywood European masters like James Whale and Karl Freund batting out long-life monster classic movies, with Val Lewton as a chaser. We on the other hand were protected by career civil servants proudly boasting on media that they had purged our screens of the corrupting horror films destroying overseas youth - like The Catman of Paris! The salaried custodians hung on into the era of those tacky British Hammer films, which topped up the Gainsborough costume melo formula with dabs of Technicolor gore. 

Eddie Cahn & J. Lee Wilder snuck into the outlets that encouraged us to believe this stuff was transgressive. It was only thanks to furtive industry pressures and a bit of not wanting to look too ridiculous that the Seigle Invasion of the Body Snatchers got two bookings in greater Sydney. The generation who came along after us did better. They were the Fantasy Film Festivals lot, getting Paul Naschy and Dario Argento on their way to the drive-ins. 

Action moved from cobweb castles through a line of visions of contemporary U.S. weird - cloaked Bela Lugosi looming in the mist next to the family refrigerator, The Fly escaping its B movie world into Cronenberg land. A dancing dwarf dominated  Twin Peaks or Bodysnatchers went big  close up on Dana Wynter's eyes.

Well, we have since gone through a period of respectability for monster movies and lackluster it was. Think Coppola's Dracula, Ken Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Tom Cruise as The Mummy. However, there's a new player. U.S. indie producer A24 has been batting out a string of budget shockers which have been filling the void that is engulfing theatrical distribution.  In the wake of their airing Ari Aster films Midsommar onwards, we could see Jane Schoenbrun's I Saw the TV Glow coming - festival bookings follow Sundance and sympathetic notices from writers who normally consider these beneath them.

This one echoes the phosphorescent make-ups and spooky nighttime settings of  Schoenbrun's admired 2021 debut We're All Going to the World's Fair. Black teenager Ian Foreman is found wandering Void High's already surreal school celebration - a billowing rainbow parachute silk dome, a light-up Fruitopia machine in the gloom. Who should Foreman find there but equally alienated Brigitte Lundy Paine, who relates, though she's two years his senior. The thing that makes her conspicuous is that she's engrossed in an episode guide for "The Pink Opaque" TV program which he's never been able to watch because it comes on after his bedtime, in the young adult zone that precedes late-night black and white movies for old people. The Pink Opaque becomes central to the film, more intense than the drabness that is the kids' small town reality. 

Commentators home in on the pair's rule-setting dialogue. Complete with a hint of mustache, she prompts "I like girls. What do you like?" That out of the way, they hit on having him do a secret sleep-over at her home to watch the forbidden program, which is a low fidelity old-format piece. She takes to leaving pirate VHS copies in the school Dark Room (where else?) for him.  He has to scrub off the reproduction of the show's spook symbol that she's drawn in pink marker on his back. Observers seem to recognise their own viewing - Buffy The Vampire Slayer is the most common nomination. Stranger Things gets a nod. Curiously no one mentions Meliés and the Tarot Deck whose Man in the Moon and Mr. Punch duo are strikingly rendered in the on-screen series. 

... and we're only starting.  With diversions like a downed wire setting fire to the Pink Opaque guide or glowing coloured chalk graffiti on the roads, Lundy Paine vanishes and the kid, grown to be Justice Smith, becomes gopher in the local mall Fun Center, where the manager is lewdly abusive. Ten years later, she makes an abrupt reappearance - in the after-hours frozen goods division of course. She claims to have left this joyless life and really entered The Pink Opaque, through being buried alive, and has prepared a plot near the sports oval, for him.

 Such is the film's hallucinatory strength that we are drawn to her morbid vision rather than his oppressive reality. This goes with Smith's shaking off the alternative worldview as a useful member of society. The Pink Opaque comes back on streaming - the episode he saw in her lounge room. "The whole thing had become cheezy and cheap." We've got to the film's most disturbing concept. Nostalgia and fandom are on the operating table.

Ian Foreman,  Brigitte Lundy Paine

Using real locations, the set-up is done with basic characterisation, muttered straight-faced dialogue and voice-over and staged with a minimal supply of support players. Isolation is the film's key element.  It also cuts costs. Fear doesn't rise from the tomb anymore.  Now it comes out of the TV - Poltergeist, Harlequin, Videodrome, The Ring. 

What I Saw the TV Glow is saying is up for debate. The film's solemnity makes it ridicule proof. I can only wonder how the passage of years will leave it. It seems crass to believe that Jane Schoenbrun is just jerking our chain. All we are lacking for the full experience is the protection of professional moralists to tell us how dangerous it is. I now understand they were part of the show. 

Barrie Pattison 2024

Vienna, Forst & Wessely.

Austrian star and director Willi Forst is one of the cinema greats but often the most ardent movie enthusiast hasn’t heard of him, let alone viewed their way through his substantial body of work. As an actor, he co-starred with Lillian Harvey in Ein blonder Traum and a pre-Blue Angel Marlene Dietrich in Café elektric and Gefaren de brausit and his work as director extended over three decades. 

 I encountered Forst when new (West) German material was first shown in Australia post-WW2. East Germany was a blessing to “serious” film criticism which only had the draggy Slatan Dudow-Brecht Khule wampe to offer as German Marxist film. That didn’t work out too well when The Wall went up and the East Germans banned an entire season of DEFA’s output as being compromised by foreign ideology. We are beginning to see the problem. Forst’s career spanned Germany’s Third Reich, leaving him tainted by association. There is no suggestion in his output that he sympathised with Nazi values or even their aesthetics. Being an element of the Viennese scene had given him a measure of separation.

The belated arrival of (black and white) TV in fifties Australia revived awareness of thirties Busby Berkley and co. What we didn’t know about then was the parallel blossoming of the  German  musical with Erik (White Horse Inn) Charell’s 1931 three-language Der Kongreß tanzt/ Old Vienna/The Congres Dances/Le congrés s’amuse followed in 1933 by Forst's Maskerade. Rivalry between the Ameican and  Viennese traditions will be dramatised in Forst's fabulous 1949 Wiener Mädeln. His productions would become the only example of the quality end of previously mighty German-language film to survive the arrival of the National Socialists and the departure of Erich Pommer. Sorry Hans Albers, you gave it a good try but all we ever saw was Leni Reifenstahl’s boring Nazis

I didn’t find my enthusiasm mirrored in Europe where the few people who recognised Willi Forst’s name said I should be putting the time in on Max Ophuls, the first filmmaker to feature at the London NFT incidentally. Turned out that I’d already seen Ophuls’ best work and long nights in the Paris Cinémathèque further undermined his status – though I did quite enjoy their three-tints copy of his Tendre enemie. I would come to the conclusion that Ophuls was Willi Forst light, though for many years the only indication had been that one, decades-old library 16mm. of  Maskerade. Now after all this time, sub-titles are appearing on Youtube copies.

Theft of the Mona Lisa - Forst

Maskerade/Masquerade in Vienna proves not to be the start of the cycle. In the first years of sound, Forst had appeared for director Géza von Bolváry in a series of Walter Reisch’s scripts including Zwei Herzen im Dreiviertel-Takt/Two hearts in Waltz Time, Das Lied ist aus Der Herr auf Bestellung and the exceptional 1931 Der Raub der Mona Lisa /Theft of the Mona Lisa. However, with Maskerade Forst took over direction, von Bolváry’s status never recovering.

Maskerade asserts as the archetype off which subsequent efforts were struck, pretty much the key work of the Alt Wien cycle, launching Anton Walbrook/Adolf Wohlbrük as the ultimate European movie sophisticate, opposite theatre-trained actress Paula Wessely. The Wessely-Walter Reisch Episode is modled on it. Reisch’s actress wife Lisl Handl borrowed the Poldi Dur character name for appearances. MGM’s Escapade is a re-make. That studio was particularly determined to manufacture their own Viennese tradition, putting out three versions of "The Merry Widow" and importing doe eyed Luise Rainer to front productions. They had had Jacques Feyder directing Ramon Novarro and Helen Chandler in the excellent if compromised 1931 Daybreak from an Arthur Schnitzler piece with the Duvivier life of Johan Strauss, The Great Waltz to come. Little wonder Joe Pasternak rolled up there.

Wohlbrück/Walbrook & Tschechowa

Maskerade has a great opening with the Masked Ball in progress – streamers, dancing masked couples and Olga Tschechowa (Hitchcock’s Mary and conspicuous in the Dupont Moulin Rouge) sweeps up in the feathery shoulderless number to accept the Tombola prize chinchilla muff. At this point, sketch artist Anton makes his great entrance down the white stairs into the festive activity, still munching his paper horn of Sascha sweets, and Olga moves on him, producing a pistol/cigarette case to threaten him into reviving their liaison but Anton (cheeky possum) demands an introduction to her sister in law to-be Hilde von Stolz. Blonde women in curls are bound to be trouble in these films.

Olga warning him off doesn’t stop Anton moving on Hilde, proposing she poses nude for him. Turns out she doesn’t need any urging, immediately hiring a fiaker to take her to his studio. Her fiancé, court music director Walter Janssen and his brother, Olga’s husband, bearded Royal Chief of Surgery Peter Petersen won’t notice. They are going to be arguing about Bach all night, while the orchestra plays “You Should See Me Do the Polka” in the background.

Anton’s housekeeper Grete Natzler, whose Fandango-pose painting dominates the hallway, has admitted Hilde and soon the visitor is Anton's subject in only the borrowed muff. However sketch completed, he loses interest and sends her off. Next morning he’s up late after all this exertion and the housekeeper lets his publisher’s runner have the drawing, which we never get to see. It appears on the magazine cover of the next day’s Carnival issue - montage of sniggering groups, barber shop dandies, ballet girls, hospital staff. Petersen assumes the worst and orders his inoffensive brother to demand satisfaction.

Janssen presents himself to Anton, who assures him the model was another girl. Told “If you don’t give me a name, I’ll have to challenge you”, the artist invents one, which happens to be unique in the Vienna ‘phone book, that of ladies companion Paula Wessely. She, it turns out, has won over not only elderly Princess employer Julia Serda but also gardener Hans Moser by her daily readings from the news papers. Janssen turns up at the Princess’ coffee and chocolate cake afternoon gathering to verify and a ball invitation he offers the Aristocrat is declined and passed to her companion, who is thrilled at the prospect of going to a society event. They have a gown which is just her size and, despite her round shoulders and boyish haircut, Paula turns out plausibly glamorous. She’s a bit puzzled by all this conversation about the brother everyone except her knows.

At the ball, Anton who of course has never met her, is smitten and carries Paula off, away from the snobby society guests to a cheery beer garden (we keep on seeing this juxtaposition – The Congress Dances, Michael Curtiz’ The Mad Genius) It’s a big ask to believe worldly Anton is enraptured by the simple servant but that’s where the picture lives. You have to give them a bit of suspension of disbelief.

Needless to say, Olga is outraged and scandal looms, not to mention the demise of the amorous artist. Now desperate, Paula has to find a solution as the formally dressed crowd, that had been listening to Janssen conduct Enrico Caruso, surges out of their opera loges to engulf her and Peterson.

His character is even more remarkable than the  leads – austere, forbidding and entitled, to the point where there is no question of involving himself in a common duel (like Louis Salou in Les enfants du paradis) he faces the hysterical Wessely and it will be Peterson who will get to make the iconic hand kissing gesture that resolves the film. His extended story becomes more involving than the leads’.  Revealingly the comparable John Barrymore character in MGM's Maytime is obliterated in a comparison.

It would be difficult to find a 1934 film made anywhere in the world with such accomplished technique, though we are told equipment was basic. Cast, costumes and setting are matched by sure editing (nice use of hard-edged wipes) and camerawork by the great Franz Planer, later to film Hollywood's most effective Viennese outing, Ophuls' A Letter to an Unknown Woman, along with The Big Country and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Maskerade has the ability to draw in an audience who have no knowledge of its imaginary on-screen world and make it as compelling as their own. The Waltz (and polka and the rest) cycle appears to have been established with this film. It became the prototype of more than a decade of a European music drama rival to Busby Berkley World, as the gold standard in popular entertainment of the day. Forst’s 1949 Wiener Mädeln dramatises that US-European musical competition – even if that contest is now all but forgotten. Too many critics and fans are unaware when they are foot soldiers in culture wars.

Forst and Wessely now a hot ticket, re-surface as co-stars of the 1934 So endete eine Liebe/So Ended a Great Love directed by Karl Hartl from another Walter Reisch script, which places the leads in The Congress Dances’ Napoleonic setting. The French Emperor’s calamitous campaigns still loomed large in European awareness, not unlike the conquest of the American West in the U.S. The lack of this dominant frame of reference diminishes contemporary Hollywood Napoleon films like Frank Borzage’s Hearts Divided or the Garbo Marie Walewska once again from MGM.

Paula Wesswely and Willi Forst

Here Erna Morena’s Josephine proves barren and an heir is required to establish a dynasty. This time we get Gustaf Gründgens (Mephisto in person) as the scheming Austrian Count Metternich conspiring with Edwin Jürgensen’s Talleyrand to put young Austrian Grand Duchess Marie Louise, Wessely of course, opposite the Emperor.

To smooth the path, they recruit her cousin Forst, as Franz defeated Duke of Modena, who no longer has his troops to command and compensates by spending his time choreographing ballerinas. The prospect of  getting his crippling debts paid off sends Willi galloping across the straight line (compare Miklos Jansco's The Hopeless Ones) Hungarian horizon to ensure she accepts the dubious proposal, which will save Austria from being reduced to just another French Duchy, after the countries’ five failed wars.

The playboy Duke discovers that the nineteen year old (!) girl has nursed a crush on him, after his promise to return years before, only to now find he's there to tell her that she's to marry the Emperor who needs a childbearing spouse.

Particularly after seeing Ridley Scott’s giggly depiction of the Imperial match, Forst and Wessely seem an unlikely mature aged rendition of the historic characters but the pair, at the top of their game, prove irresistible. Wessely realising that her beloved is the agent of her destruction and Forst desperate to assert himself with the powerful, who rather than dismiss his pleas, share his anguish - the whole Viennese doomed costume romance.

More charm pours out of the screen. Mounting is elaborate and imposing, complete with much striding about designer Werner Schlichting’s palace decors in white tights, carrying swords that are never drawn. Spot the set-height white double doors used in Maskerade. It all comes backed by Franz Grothe’s score and is again expertly filmed by Planer. Classy! Forget Joachim Phoenix. We are seeing a plausible first run of the Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux in Mayerling cycle.

The YouTube version is uneven – gummed together from several copies where French sub-titles come and go behind the new computer translation.

By the time we get to 1935’s Vienna-filmed Episode, the impetus of thirties German-speaking sound film is already winding down. Now directed by Reisch, this is a toothless attempt at RomCom with everyone doing their best to be winning, as the middle-aged leads struggle to involve us in their comedy of confusions.

The opening raises expectations. It's 1922 Vienna but it’s not waltz time. Among more streamers, the black girl cafe vocalist is doing "Yes, We Have No Bananas." In a sustained take, Harry Stradling's camera circles the orchestra and dancing couples, while a floozy picks the pocket of her drunken escort and goes off to dance with the gigolo seen adjusting his make up in his pocket compact mirror. At the bar, a stressed drinker is told that two men are waiting for him outside, unable to enter the formal event without diner suits. He shoots himself.

 Wessely

Turns out he was a city banker who had lost twenty-eight million crowns in speculations, wiping out the savings of depositors, including elderly Rosa Albach-Retty, now in a panic making her first-ever long distance call to daughter, senior class art student Wessely. Paula has to desert Professor Ferdinand Mayerhofer's clay sculptures to storm into the office of Dr. Walter Janssen. He can only confirm the disaster. The meager savings of the mother's lifetime will no longer be there to pay her a pension.

Paula lies to Albach-Retty and abandons her studies to provide for the old woman. Hunting employment, she considers stuffing envelopes and other such menial tasks but none are to be found. Her bouncy blonde chum Friedl Czepa has a Hungarian to meet her needs and proposes his Romanian friend for Paula, who is politely outraged. Though desperation sets in, she tells fatherly Otto Treßler that she's not that sort of girl and he proposes regular cheques for merely accompanying him to theatres and cafes with the occasional peck on the cheek. The attempt to sanitise this one has already done in its credibility.                                                       

Now one of these Treßler rendez vous coincides with a wedding anniversary that he had forgotten and he has to send his sons' tutor in dual piano, former Uberleutenant Karl Ludwig Diehl (The Devil's General) to tell Paula he can't make it. Well one thing leads to another and Paula and Karl dance the night away, despite her shaky stiletto heel on the shoe that Czepa borrowed. The sons misunderstand the situation and accuse one another of associating with Paula. Diehl slaps them and resigns but their mother, Erika von Wagner (the Curtiz Austrian Sodom & Gomorrah) knows that an officer who commanded the respect of his troops for four years of the late war would not act irresponsibly.

Meanwhile, Karl is taking Paula to watch a dupey copy of one of Gunnar Tolnæ’s fake Maharaja silent movies and romance has bloomed. The boys discover the truth and there is an obviously telegraphed further misunderstanding when Czepa, rather than face destitution, her provider now revealed as a defaulting cashier, cashes Treßler's last cheque, which Paula wanted returned. I did warn you about girls with blonde curls.

It of course all ends happily due to the saintly understanding of mother knowing best von Wagner. The handling is studiofied. It trades heavily in Viennese atmosphere - balls, cafes, private boxes, art montages and street performers. There's a nice superimposition where silhouette dancers appear on lines of "Pizzicato Polka" sheet music. "When day is Done" plays on the track. All this might have introduced an artificiality needed to boost cred. The scene where Wessely and Diehl unite at the street brazier in the snow, observed by the passing musicians, edges towards the ambience they want to believe they are offering but, despite all the effort, this one is hopelessly over shadowed by Maskerade. They need Anton Walbrook and another duel to get by.

Reisch, writing collaborator with Bracket and Wilder, joined the pair in Hollywood, notably for Ninotchka. He never managed to navigate his directing career past Universal’s Song of Scheherezade. Appealing actress wife Elisabeth (Liesl) Handl appears peripherally here. Stradling, whose imaginative lighting manages the odd striking shadow, did better, continuing his distinguished globe trotting with La kermesse heroique, Streetcar Named Desire and My Fair Lady.

These three Wessely films can only provide a shadowy representation of the cycle they represent. Forst, Walbrook, Lillian Harvey, Karl Hartl, Ludwig Berger and the rest would – maybe will – provide material for more detailed studies than this. Meanwhile I remain glued to the TV, busily making up for lost time.

French poster puts the portrait on screen and inserts Wohlbrük in costume for another film.

Barrie Pattison 2024

WELL THERE IS CHINA AND INDIA.

Not so long ago, we had unprecedented access to the films of China and India - and not a few more - in dedicated cinemas and video stores. Where did all that go? Well not really all that far. The multiplexes now run their product in late sessions, sometimes to empty houses and occasionally in sold out auditoria.

Wuershan’s grim new Block Buster Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms is getting a down town first run. This one offers big budget myth as a special effects piece and is being touted as the second biggest earner in the history of the Chinese film. Actually it logs in about number twenty eight but its owners are talking it up big with an eye to the overseas market -  European musical scoring and script participation by James Schamus, long time collaborator with Ang Lee, including Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

The film opens with the usual captions on graphics explaining the descent of the Shang Dynasty from the Gods, to rule a China divided into four territories, the governor of each having to send a non-heir son to the Shang court to participate in the hostage Legion of the Disinherited. It is this that the Shang ruler sends against a rebel province (where have I heard that description before?) under the command of his own son Fei Xiang who is scornful when the commanders are repulsed by a fire barrier, which their horses will not cross and sends them back with the animals blindfolded.

The now defeated governor is pursued by two of the Legion Commander sons, who overtake him and his alluring daughter Narana, that they feel it would be wasteful to slaughter with her father. They bring her back to Fei Xiang for his victory celebration. Bad move guys! Her pupils narrow to those of a cat. Yes she’s a Fairy Fox in human form, who sets about bewitching the macho leader. His solution to the disturbances is to have a massive funeral pyre which - promises, promises - he will ascend to assuage the wrath of the Gods.

It’s not long before people are assassinating their children or parents as part of the royal struggle and the concerned gods dispatch ancient sage, comedian Huang Bo in loads of make up, with the enchanted message stick, to impose control. The convoluted plot is spaced by mass action footage and, rather better, a bit of erotic by-play like the scene of the power couple bathing together naked in the milky pool with  Narana’s floor length hair trailing in a circle round them.

Fei Ziang & Narana

It's about time we had some monsters and the effects guys and a Taoist sorcerer oblige with suitably spectacular examples.

Seems like things get sorted but a couple of epilogues tell us that the fox demon will have it all going again for part two.

We recognise a mash-up of Shakespeare, Eisenstein, John Woo and Kurosawa (the fake head in the bag is instantly Ran). Westerners would be battling to follow events or to find a focal point for their sympathies in three hours of all this violence within power families. 

Origins in the Chinese classic “Investiture of the Gods” from sixteen hundred AD would be known to its home audience, if not from the original, then from adaptations like the Xu An’s 2016 Feng Shen Bang / League of Gods  3D, which similarly buried Bingbing Fan and Jet Li in CG effects work.

It all left me yearning for the great days of Chu Yuan and the Shaw Brothers, whose fantastic costume melodramas packaged this kind of material with welcome self deprecating comedy -  at considerably shorter length.

Bring back Lo Lieh and Lia Chia-hui!

The great days of (mainly) Hong Kong Chinese movies were succeeded by the great leap forward in Twenty first Century Hindi Cinema, which followed the arrival of MTV in India. Front runners were the Yash Rash productions with their imposing stars Shah Rukh Kahn and Amitah Bachan, who now make joke promotion videos about giving roles offered them to one another.

Despite the diffusion of interest through Bengali, Tamil and Sanskrit regional cinemas (not however their English language productions), Yash Rash is still a thing and director Atlee’s new Jawan is a big hit for them. It proffers the old Yash Raj over-production even before SRK shows up again.

Our superhero first surfaces looking spectral as he arrives to take down the hoard of red star soldiers conducting a village massacre. It’s not long before that looks like him again running the hijack, terrorising the commuter train with ransom demands by ‘phone to the minister and providing his own casualties, like the bank bandits in Un Flic, before blending in with the crowd like the team in the 1981 John Huston Victory - all backed by his personal Charley’s Angels. While we are processing that, our hero, rendered youthful, shows as the governor of the model women’s prison sheltering lines of green uniform inmates (OK digitally populated aerial shot intro) which provides a haven for arrestees who never re-offend. Confused - that’s the idea.

Throw in intrusive production numbers, like the one where our high stepping hero does his routine in the red shirt, the “Fly Away Little Birds” song all becoming progressively more imposing till we get to the finale, where a couple of him dance together while the motion capture camera weaves around them.

As a follow up to the red star soldiers, we get Bhopal style industrialists, backed with goon squad heavies and money from the Mafia (who are making a comeback as movie villains - Equalizer 3) Our heroes out smart them by holding the country's voting machines ransom, when it looks like the election will be bought, complete with the spectacular highway stunt action piece where the veteran biker retainers fan out to make a moving wall and truck loads of bribe money blow in the wind. It takes a super cop to battle our super heroes, so Sanjav Dutt (Munna Bhai himself) makes a late appearance - ripple of audience recognition.

Jawan - SRK in the slammer.

Despite virtuoso touches, this one is too nasty, too loud and too simple minded to recommend to the outside audience that once lapped up their industry’s Lagan, Mohabateen and Robot - when they had the chance.

The current sample is (far) too small to make any real generalisation about the state of non endorsed foreign language film but it isn't all that encouraging.

Barrie Pattison  2024

SPANISH FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Above -  Beatrice Béjo/The Movie Teller

In the local 2024 Spanish Film Festival, La contadora de películas/ The Movie Teller, directed by Lone (An Education) Scherfig, looked the most promising entry. It had name stars and an interesting premise but I can’t say I was taken with this odd and not altogether satisfying Chilean account of growing up in a Saltpetre mining town - where school is mainly about the industrial uses of rock salt. Sunday movies make a welcome break in the grim life of the miner’s family headed by Beatrice Béjo (The Artist) and Antonio de la Torre (Marshland).

Dad de la Torre steps up when the explosive charge doesn’t go off and (like the Gilles Carle Red) is caught in the unplanned blast, becoming an invalid. The owners move on their Company-Owned house and it’s only manager Daniel Brühl who holds them off, because he has eyes for Béjo. All this in the bleak environment where daughter Alondra Valenzuela glimpses the bar stripper’s act through an open door. It has been too much for Béjo who takes the motor coach to the city.

Only able to afford one movie admission, when the other children can’t deliver, Valenzuela takes over the task of relating the film stories first to the family and then adding neighbors, who gather on chairs in the street, their contributions boosting the family income stream. Doing the dubbed The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Some Like It Hot, Tarnished Heroes, “Yo soy Spartaco,” Les Patrapluis de Cherbourg. becomes intertwined with their life - Paths of Glory’s poilus cut to the miners in their lookalike helmets and the rape scene in Johnny Belinda standing in for the storekeeper demanding sex with the girl. Her brother’s revenge doesn’t much concern the locals who had debts at his shop cf. Cabin in the Cotton.

Grown to be Sara Becker, the movie teller daughter takes over servicing Brühl. Her would-be poet beau quits the dying salt-mining community. The girl goes to the town, sea wall prominent, and locates the vaudeville theatre where her mother is performing her fire dance act.

By now there is TV to show the military government taking power. Years later, when Becker brings her own child back to visit her old home, become desolate, they sit in the ruined cinema before taking the same bus. This is a handsome film with vivid characters but no involving narrative line. Notice that in films like this or The Last Picture Show, Cinema Paradiso and Babylon, their early days as movie freaks always lead to glum outcomes in the lives of the characters. Not encouraging. 

Isabel Coixet worked on the script of that one and you can’t help looking for a connection to the event’s retrospective of her work as director, which I only knew from her stunningly boring 2008 Philip Roth adaptation Elegy, with Ben Kingsley as a randy academic. They included that one and her Ayer no termina nunca / Yesterday Never Ends, what used to be called “a two hander” with the only significant parts being Javier Cámara and Candela Peña as a pair of twelve year separated lovers facing off in what turns out to be a decaying former mortuary. Developers are talking about turning it into a casino.

The talented lead duo are outmatched by ponderous dialogue exchanges, spaced by black and white “thinks” interludes where they monologue in unidentified desolate areas. Two hours - and I thought Elegy was tedious! When Stanley Kramer put Lilli Palmer and Rex Harrrson in one of these he had the sense to space their scenes with UPA animated sequences. I can’t help feeling Isabel Coixet’s output would benefit from adding a few nice toons.

Rather better is actress Itsaso Arana’s 2023 Las chicas están bien / The Girls Are Alright, an account of an all-women group preparing a play in sunny rural isolation.

The women arrive at the locked gate of the country home they’ve booked where pre-teen Julia Leon has the key and takes them up to the house for their welcome. There follows all the settling-in routine, moving the four poster to the barn to rehearse, getting used to the costumes they will wear, finding the village they want to cycle to and stock the kitchen. Which pair gets to share the double bed? There is a sequence where they each in turn get to stage an entrance – one of the places where rising juvenile Irene Escolar registers – along with her trooping round the river bank in skirt hoops.

The Girls Are Alright - Barbar Lennie, Irene Escobar, Itziar Monero.

The body of the film is the women learning to know one another, exchanging experiences. A teen age looking girl comments that she keeps on getting movie parts in flashbacks where she plays the star’s youth. One is pregnant. One is lesbian. One prompts that Marx said “Shame is Revolutionary” They bond and develop the performance. Add cell ‘phone conversation with the world they have left. Like using an electric toothbrush, such touches of modernity disrupt the timelessness established.

It’s not till the film is half gone that we hear a male voice, when impressing her group one girl manages to pick up Gonzalo Herrero the bar help at the village dance. He’s the only one to go topless despite all the David Bailey touchy-feely stuff with the girls in their petticoats. Herrero stays with the group and shows them to the river for a dip and the discovery of a toad which promotes jokes about kissing it.

Laying on a pile of mattresses Leon tells the story of the princess and the pea, getting the group’s applause and, when they pack up, Herrero follows as they go like Anthony Perkins in This Angry Age. The toad has the last word.

Scenes come punctuated with tapestry pictures. We get Bach and Keith Jarrett on the track. There is no real narrative development, just the cast being winning. It’s all very female. The girl, who was only other person in the theater at my session, was delighted with the film. I felt excluded, like the women I used to know who complained about watching Randolph Scott movies.

Casa en flames/ House in Flames proved to be a surprising Spanish-Catalan-Italian mix of comedy and drama among a misfit family. Writer-director Dani de la Orden hasn’t come my way previously, underlining the point about our poor access to Hispanic material. He emerges from this one as a kind of Spanish John Cassavetes - only better. There’s a bit of Adam Sandler in there too.

An unsettling start has grandmother, Catalan celebrity actress Emma Vilarasau, finding the several days dead body of her aged mother with the TV still playing too loud, while Vilarasau’s lightweight son Enric Auquer (also in The Teacher who promised the Sea) is downstairs in the car, too busy flirting with fiancée Macarena García to come up and visit his granny. After a brief panic attack Vilarasau is not going to let this turn of events disrupt the long planned family reunion gathering in their about-to-be-sold Cadaqués house on the Costa Brava.

There we meet family members and their partners, daughter Maria Rodríguez Soto (who makes the most impression) has brought her easygoing husband José Pérez Ocaña and their two children, which doesn’t get in the way of a bit of hanky panky with the beach cafe guy - close up of Vilarasau spotting his fingers resting on Soto’s bare shoulder. Divorced father Alberto San Juan, given to attacks of sciatica, is with his lover and former Gestalt therapist Clara Segura. This is convenient because she is there to give thumbnail summaries of these studies in disfunction.

Packing away family memorabilia, like the buried tin of obsolete standard video cartridges, triggers the weekend’s revelations. Infidelities, complete with a used condom, shady business dealings and rejection phobia, all sketch these people as self-centered inadequates but we come to like them.

When we’ve had enough talk, De la Orden spaces events with some dangerous looking action set pieces – a break up where the participants are harnessed together in a first parachute jump, a distraught mother being carried against the shoreline rocks by high tide, convinced her children are in the water, and an impressive house fire. The forward motion of all this is Vilarasau’s scheming, which she claims is in the interest of her family but, in a corrective to all those British sitcoms where star actresses manipulate their near ones and it’s meant to be charming, we come to doubt her motivation.

De la Orden’s characters are more vivid than we are used to seeing and his staging is impressive. Everyone involved is so good I feel I should know more about them. They didn’t get that way without a substantial run-up.

Simón Casal expanded his Justicia artificial / Artificial Justice from an hour TV special, where the idea might have played better. We learn that a Multi-National company is selling the Spanish Government their idea of computerising the courts, the way has been done with medicine – or self diving cars. The judge in charge of the commission of enquiry is murdered and lawyer Verónica Echegui (Tony Servillo’s personal trainer in the 2020 Italian Lasciati andare / Let Yourself Go) now has the Algorithmic Justice files on her desk with the hint of political and corporate manipulation. Her persistence is not being well received.

The filmmakers know that their best idea is the nighttime ocean radar scan which reveals a floating human body, so they put that on the front of the film and bring it back for the climax. In between the office manager who wants to be Verónica’s chum won’t depart from procedure to get her crucial files and her gynacgologist is giving her bad news. “Your body has expelled the embryo.” There are a lot of earnest meetings in corridors or parked cars, motorway tunnel driving and tracking devices. Information is exchanged on iPhones, because Self-Driving cars don’t get into accidents. The hacker released despite the computer’s recommendation, is accused of being a pedophile. It’s going to be a face-off on the TV talk show. What we end up with is an overlong, cut-price, doctrinaire imitation The Parallax View. La Syndicaliste blows this one away.

Echegui is the film’s most familiar face, though Alberto Ammann turned up last week in SBS's ’ ham-fisted El año de la furia / Year of Fury. 

Heavy sledding.

The payoff in a largely unremarkable event proved to be El maestro que prometió el mar / The Teacher Who Promised the Sea a from one-time script clerk Patricia Font, which pulls off the remarkable feat of planting predictable plot developments and then making them compelling when they arrive. From the first few images, it communicates that this is going to be better than the other films included and indeed most of what we see as new releases – something closer to Anatomy of a Fall or La part d'une autre. The word doesn’t seem to have spread on this one yet but it impressed someone enough to put it into an extended run here.

From the first images, we sense that something substantial is involved. Laia Costa (with Ricardo Darin in Nieve negra) who is already under stress, has to deal with the fading awareness of her grandfather Felipe García Vélez in his so nice beachfront retirement centre. Following hints in the old man’s papers, she sets out for his childhood village, where she finds crews excavating a trench mass grave – cataloging and collecting skeletal remains.

Speaking to now-aged survivors takes us into the story of teacher Enric Auquer - who I’ve seen in La vida padre & the event’s Casa en flames without him registering. Here he impresses up as a teacher in 1930s Republican Spain, appointed to the abandoned community school. This would be picturesque if the shadow of history wasn’t already hanging over it.

Living conditions are Spartan and only a few children turn out, Alcalde Antonio Mora’s daughter Alba Hermoso prominent. A dairyman father confronts Auquer saying he’s the one who knows what’s best for his absentee son. Used to being beaten for any infraction, a boy cringes as Auquer approaches his desk. They start to relax but it’s back to rigid posture when village priest Milo Taboada enters the classroom to demand why the crucifix has been taken down. Auquer confronts him saying that now that Spain has elected a Republican government, it is officially a secular country and religion doesn’t belong in the classroom. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t go down too well.

Off hand, I can’t recall another film where they spell out atheist sympathies quite so explicitly - Larry David's Regulious maybe or the Elmore Leonard The Big Bounce, with Owen Wilson explaining “God is an imaginary friend for grown-ups”.

This one is existing in two time zones but a shadowy third is added by Costa investigating records, and mementos and memories of the grandfather’s aged surviving classmates. In particular, the one-time Alcalde’s daughter, now Elisa Crehuet, is hostile

It seems to have been concocted to get all knees jerking, the old “Lost Horizon” justification - “I believe it because I want to believe it.” I sense formula - warm hearted Spanish teacher opens the world to his young charges despite Falangist heavies.

However, The Teacher Who Promised the Sea develops unexpected conviction and involvement. Auquer discovers that the ocean has a fascination for his class who have never seen it. He organises a school vacation trip there.

The Priest and the Alcalde are determined to bring Auquer down and organise an unannounced visit by Schools Inspector Xavi Francés, convinced that his use of the "Frienet Method" where the chidlren move freely about the classroom and produce booklets on the teacher’s portable press, will be exposed as leftist stupidity. Auquer is explaining the Golden Mean, when the group arrive and demand to test his charges, including the son of an imprisoned communist, who we know was illiterate when he joined the class. At this point what we see becomes exceptionally compelling. It is the departure for a succession of remarkable scenes.

Without spelling things out, The Spanish Civil War, already a charged subject, becomes a reference for even more complex and substantial ideas. This one deserves all the support it can get. I rather like that it washes up here before dissection in more influential circles.

Barrie Pattison 2024.