Spanish Cinema Now. 1.

According to the Film Society of Lincoln Center, annual film production in Spain has increased from around 40 in 1992, the year of the first Spanish Cinema Now series, to the triple digits this year. What's more, the connection between Spanish film and that of Latin America has never been stronger, with actors, filmmakers and crews working in both areas and co-productions at an all-time high.

This year's series is comprised of a total of 28 programs, including 17 new features, a collection of Spanish shorts, the first exposure outside Spain of an eight-part (shown in four programs) television series on the Spanish Civil War titled The War on Film, and the seven-movie retrospective featuring the work of the late Pilar Miró.

This weekend alone, six new features will unspool: Under the Stars (Bajo las estrellas), 53 Winter Days (53 dias de invierno), Contestant (Concursante), Yo (site), Theresa, the Body of Christ (Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo) and Solitary Fragments (La Soledad), along with the first in the Pilar Miró retrospective, The Cuenca Crime (El Crimen de Cuenca) and the first section of the four-program series The War on Film (La Guerra filmada), a review of which will appear tomorrow. The first four films mentioned above are covered below; the latter three will be reviewed on Monday.

A pretty fair choice for the opening night festivities is Félix Viscarret's Under the Stars, which he's adapted from Fernando Aramburu's novel. This feel-good melodrama (about the return home from Madrid to a small Spanish town of a hasn't-grown-up-yet trumpet player who gets word of his father's impending death) is chock-a-block with good performances, smart cinematography and editing, and a nice feel for life in the provinces. It is also utterly predictable. Once you know the set-up (unless you're a relative newcomer to cinema), not only can you guess the outcome, you can also figure out some of the dialogue prior to the characters' mouthing it. That the leads - Alberto San Juan as the trumpeter, Julián Villagrán as his alcoholic artist brother, and Emma Suárez as the brother's girlfriend who once promised the trumpeter a blow-job - give this dialogue life and truth is a big help. But the film still possesses a manufactured quality in its too-obvious plotting and execution. Under the Stars won several awards at the Festival de Málaga; I find this surprising, but then, I have no idea of the competition it faced. Showing Friday, Dec 7, at 2:15 pm and 6:45 pm; and Sunday, Dec 9, at 12:45 pm.

Winner of the FIPRESCI prize at this year's Rotterdam International Festival (plus a Málaga fest award and other nominations) Yo, the first film from Rafa Cortés (director and co-writer), plays around to little effect with themes of identity, community and the immigrant life. None of these are particularly new, god knows, though immigrants have come in for more than a little filmic interest of late. By the finale, what Cortés hoped to achieve with this story seemed to me to be so obvious - and so tired - that I had to mull over the whole movie before setting thoughts to print. The mulling did not help. Part mystery, part psychological tract, part study of a doofus German immigrant and the Mallorcan community - nasty, needy and uncaring of others - into which he plops, the movie finally holds nary a surprise for any inveterate film fan. Your ability to stick with Yo may depend on the appeal held by leading man (who doubles as co-writer) Alex Brendemühl (Ausentes, Inconscientes). Onscreen nearly the entire time, his gorgeous green eyes and buoyant body may suffice, unless, like me, you're growing too old and impatient for silly games such as this. My gut feeling tells me that, had Cortés stuck more directly with his immigrant theme, or his thriller, or his identity search, he'd have come up with a more cogent, interesting movie. Instead, he whips them all into a so-so soufflé. Showing Saturday, Dec 8, at 6:30 pm; Sunday, Dec 9, at 9:30 pm; and Tuesday, Dec 11, at 1:30 pm.

Another Cortés - Rodrigo - fares much better in this festival with his surprising, bullet-speed Concursante (Contestant). Every so often Spanish Cinema Now offers a new film that seems to be on top of the headlines as it covers a particular political/social/economic issue. (The Method, from SCN 2005, and The Archimedes Principle, from 2004, are two that immediately come to mind.) This new film wraps economics, banking, taxation and TV game show prize-winning into a fast-paced story of one man's windfall that ends up a downfall. I'm not giving away anything, since the film begins with the dead man's musings about the universe, its stars and how many of these one's eye can actually perceive. We're then taken swiftly through a tour of the life of this smart, attractive economics professor at a Spanish university. That he is played by perhaps the smartest, most attractive leading man in current Hispanic cinema, Argentina's Leonardo Sbaraglia, should only add to your pleasure.

Writer/director Cortés paces his film so speedily that you'll barely keep up with events - which is good, because certain of them (the leftist economist's explanation of banks and their loans) don't quite hold up to prolonged scrutiny. (Cortés simply leaves out those people who profit from their loans by making them work for them and then paying them back.) Still, most of his points are well-taken and applicable to far too much of the populace of western democracies. In less than 90 minutes, the movie manages to hold a gun to the head of our consumer society and gleefully pull the trigger. After a quiet, thoughtful beginning, the next 70-odd minutes are so fast-paced that, when suddenly, the finale slows down to a mournful dirge, it should leave you stunned. Yet few filmmakers of recent times have managed to create an ending so simultaneously dark and bleak that opens up into something so somber and beautiful. I was impressed, highly amused and oddly moved, and if this film receives the theatrical/DVD release it deserves, I think you will be, too. Showing Saturday, Dec 8, at 3:45 pm; Friday, Dec 14, at 3:10 pm; and Sunday, Dec 16, at 1:30 pm.

Alex Brendemühl (Yo) is back in another, better role in the ensemble drama 53 Winter Days. Led by the great Mercedes Sampietro (Common Ground, Queens), the cast does a wonderful job of giving life to characters barely linked but who, taken together, bring us a most interesting group of people who might well stand-in for urban Spain today. We, not they, know that three of them share a pivotal moment, and from here the movie spreads out to encompass their lives and problems: love, money and coping with a return from a traumatic incident of violence.

As a security guard with a wife, child and twins in the oven (and now a dog), Brendemühl is on screen perhaps a quarter of the time he commands in Yo, yet he creates a devastating portrait of a quiet, decent, caring man driven to a breakdown over finances and fear of losing the love of his wife. The luminous Sampietro (my lord, she grows more beautiful with each passing year!) brings such clarity and honesty to every moment that she rivets us, first scene to last. Aina Clotet completes the threesome as a talented cellist (or does she play the double base?) with man problems - absentee father, sleazy lover - and a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

No mention is made, but these three (and the characters who surround each) appear to represent the working, middle and upper classes, and the filmmakers, director Judith Colell and writer Gemma Ventura, are able to identify with and care equally about all three groups. They do a marvelous job of connecting their dots with subtlety and an unusually honest appreciation of the difficult lives of their protagonists - and of their subsidiary characters, too. They never push events or emotions - increasingly rare in films these days - and so the audience is free to ruminate, question and appreciate. Which we do, in spades. Showing Friday, Dec 7, at 4:30 pm; Saturday, Dec 8, at 9 pm; and Thursday, Dec 13, at 1 pm.

- James van Maanen

"First shown in Spain last year to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, The War on Film is a vast compilation of wartime documentaries from both sides of the battle line - Loyalists, Communists, and anarchists on the left, and Spanish and German Fascists on the right," writes Saul Austerlitz in the Voice. "The result is less mural than palimpsest, with each voice-of-God narrator asserting a version of the truth.... The only thing the two sides can agree on is the significance of propaganda."

Dan Sallit readies himself for the series with a few notes.

Posted by dwhudson at December 6, 2007 3:36 PM