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.