San Sebastian Dispatch. 7.

There is no easing up on the depression here. Almost every single film seen in Donosti's Official Section has been a more or less accurate portrayal of this state of mind, and body and soul. Reasons may vary, but the endings are similar, a series of images of people crying their hearts out. Slovenian director Jan Cvitkovic's sophomore effort Odgrobadogroba (Gravehopping) seemed at first to be a different affair.

It begins like a Kaurismäkian black comedy with a great lead character in Pero, a guy in his mid-30s who earns a living by writing funeral speeches that spark more laughter than anything else. He lives in his family house with his sisters Vilma and Ida, his nephew Dzoni and a father who now and then tries to commit suicide with the same lack of expertise Bud Cort displayed in Harold and Maude. The human landscape of the film is fantastic and great jokes abound. But then comes the discontent - in a rather forceful turn of the wheel, the bittersweet comedy evolves much too quickly into a grim drama of gory proportions. There is no evolution in tone. One minute we were laughing at deadpan sight gags, and the next we're suffering through a reprise of I Spit On Your Grave. Why? It seems everyone's obsessed now with the idea of making definitive films about life as a whole, and the presence of death is an essential requisite. Simple stories woven around a few people who don't die onscreen are now a rare thing.

Another example of this trend of pseudo-transcendental dramas is the second entry in yesterday's competition, Manuel Martín Cuenca's Malas Temporadas. Set in the heart of Madrid, this is an ambitious yet failed drama about the intertwined lives of a group of upright people - a woman working hard for a NGO that helps refugees, an exiled Cuban who earns his life dealing in illegal cigars, a man seeking his former cellmate and lover, and everyone they know. This is an overwrought, overwritten, overacted piece of work which falls flat in its attempt to capture the zeitgeist of today's Spanish society. There's talent in Javier Camara's performance, and there are some hints of truth, but the film is too conscious of its own supposed importance to be really important - the montage of the characters going through their lonely lives to the sound of Leonor Watling singing a cover of "Los Chichos" is so wrong it hurts.

Received with a tepid applause and some noise, Malas Temporadas had an additional problem in its press screening of yesterday - it was projected just after the Zabaltegi selection, Broken Flowers, a story about a few people who don't die onscreen, and a master class in subtlety. Almost any title has to pale in comparison with this miracle.

Posted by dwhudson at September 22, 2005 1:58 AM