Spanish Cinema Now. 3.

For all those who - frequently and with abandon - toss out the dismissive phrase, "It's only a movie!", and for others who claim that no movie can approach the breadth and depth of "real life," here comes Solitary Fragments (La Soledad) as one of - perhaps the - best corrective you'll encounter. This is not a documentary, although it possesses the feel and sound of one, if not the look. Most of us by now know that, while the documentary may be truthful, it can also be biased and judgmental, coming, as it does, from a single viewpoint and often taking in a single character, subject or event. But La Soledad is a narrative feature.

How has writer/director/co-producer Jaime Rosales (The Hours of the Day) managed this feat? Let's start with the "look" of the movie. The cinematography, by Oscar Durán, from the first moment is a knockout - beautifully composed and rendered (it's a scene of cows, yet!), and the film continues in this fashion for its two-hours-plus, not-boring-for-a-moment running time.

Generally, the camera is placed back a distance at the point of maximum inclusion and beauty of design and composition. It is then left stationary, so that characters enter and leave the frame as needed. This technique, while rarely used, is not without precedent, of course. What makes the difference here, I suspect, is that the director and crew appear to have set everything up perfectly, let the camera roll and then taken a powder. Is this possible? Without anyone there, watching them, the actors can more easily imagine the camera to be invisible, unseen. I suggest this because the entire cast - including not only the adults, but also some very young children, one of whom is pivotal to the movie - acts as though nobody is there. Very young children almost always look toward the camera and modify their behavior. Not here. (Adult actors have the smarts to try to fight this impulse.)

Speaking of adult actors, the cast chosen for the film looks remarkably "non-actory." Though new to me, their resumes show that most have worked often over the years. I think Rosales has cast them not only for their talent, which is front and center, but for their "everyday" look. While the camera loves certain actors (when it caresses them, they glow, looking larger, more beautiful than life), the cast here simply looks like life at its most ordinary. (Casting director Sara Bilbatúa surely deserves a good chunk of the credit.) Each performance not only looks right, it sounds right, and there will be times when the audience may imagine that the dialog has been improvised. I doubt it has. Rosales has written his screenplay far too well and too specifically. Improvisation - real conversation, too - is often boring. Rosales's is never that. Sounding random yet precise and structured, it weaves reality into art.

Structured, too, are the many scenes that comprise the screenplay.  Rosales has chosen carefully what he wants to show us, lengthy or short, meaningful or seemingly off-the-cuff, alternating humor with annoyance, the mundane with the profound. Two scenes especially are stunning, shocking; I've never witnessed anything quite like them. And yet they are quiet. I have not gone into content here, but there is certainly plenty of it, involving health, relationships, real estate and - oh, my - so much more. By the end, I felt I'd experienced fictional life on-screen in a manner than seemed... new. Offering none of the affect-free, non-behavior of Bresson, perhaps some of the serenity of Ozu, not much irony (which I usually love), but a directness and an honesty that are restorative, Solitary Fragments will be shown again Friday, December 14, at 9:15 pm.

Normally, a movie about a 17th Century Italian nun who makes sainthood would not ring my bell. That Ray Loriga's new movie Theresa, the Body of Christ (Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo) comes close surprises even an agnostic reprobate like me. Anybody remember the 1973 camp classic Story of a Cloistered Nun with Suzy Kendall, Eleonora Giorgi and Catherine Spaak? Well, this new film does star Paz Vega, whom I happen to think can act (Sólo Mía, Spanglish, 10 Items or Less) in addition to being awfully beautiful; ditto Leonor Watling and Geraldine Chaplin, even if Ms Chaplin is part of the gorgeous grandmother set (but, ah, that bone structure!).

What writer/director Loriga has done is give us a relatively straightforward, researched (not up to snuff, according to my knowledgeable seat-mate, though it seemed pretty good to me), and beautifully set/photographed/costumed drama of a wealthy young woman's call from God, or in this case, from the literal body of a very sexy and appealing Christ. Loriga manages to make this a religious movie (Theresa does indeed struggle mightily with and for her calling) but he cleverly hedges his bet by giving us a perfectly believable psychological/sexual basis for this calling. He also introduces - with only a bit more exposition than necessary - politics, power, class and economics.

This is quite a dazzling film to view, colorful and visually smart, even though Loriga keeps his camera relatively close-up in his exteriors, interiors, and even in crowd scenes and one small orgy. What was probably a costly film would only have been more so had the camera panned outwards for very long. But it all works rather nicely, as this is in actuality an intimate movie, more character study than spectacle (the character of Chaplin's Prioress is especially interesting). Not particularly exploitative, the film impressed me as genuine and appreciative of Theresa, just as (according to Loriga's post-screening Q&A) Teresa's character seems to have genuinely impressed the writer/director. Given its cast, colorfulness and occasional skin, it would not surprise me to find Thersea, the Body of Christ in US theaters at some point. For now, it screens once more only, Tuesday, December 11, at 3:30 pm.

Spanish Cinema Now's Pilar Miró retrospective got off to a difficult and rewarding start last Saturday with a rare screening of El Crimen de Cuenca (The Cuenca Crime), one of Miró's first motion picture ventures after a number pieces for Spanish television. Just prior to the screening, noted Spanish film critic, former director of the San Sebastian International Film Festival and Miró biographer Diego Galán gave us a fine intro to this writer/director and her work, more than ably translated by the FSLC's Richard Peña. I hope Mr Galán will appear at all the Miró screenings and share even more of his knowledge with the audience.

Miró, who died of a heart attack ten years ago at the age of 57, grew up in a military family that included her grandfather, father and brother. She appears to have despised men in uniform for rather good reason, if two of the three films of hers that I've seen so far are any indication: Cuenca Crime and Your Name Poisons My Dreams (Tu nombre envenena mis sueños). Señor Galán calls her a seminal woman and hugely important figure in Spanish cinema who was in part responsible for its growth and international acclaim following the Franco decades.

The Cuenca Crime details an event that took place in Spain in 1910, in which, after the disappearance of a somewhat slow young man in an outlying town, two other men are arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Civil Guard until they finally confess to his murder. This story of power, politics and class involves everything from the three figures at the center of the "crime" to landowners, officials, judges, the Civil Guard, parents, wives, children and townspeople. Nobody comes out of it with his or her halo intact, and this film, about one of the most horrible miscarriages of justice in modern Spanish history, forces us to endure watching some truly horrible scenes of torture. (Galán mentioned that, during the film's premier run in Spain back in 1980, ambulances were stationed at theaters because patrons were fainting and worse from watching these scenes. Trust me, this is no William Castle gimmick: As someone who has sat through Hostel 1 and 2, Wolf Creek and more, I found these scenes about as difficult to endure as anything I've witnessed on screen - probably because they appear not only real but all too human and therefore even worse than the can-you-top-this gore and slaughter some of our current filmmakers seem to cherish.

If detailing torture were the main point of Cuenca Crime, it might still warrant an asterisk in movie history, but there's much more to this film. It culminates in an embrace that is passionate, meaningful and - infused as it is with everything we have just witnessed - easily one of the most powerful in screen history. Based on the two Miró films I've now seen, I'd say that she was no great stylist, at least not at this point in her career. Cuenca has a certain made-for-television look, and the dialogue is serviceable but not especially literate. Yet the director's sense of decency, justice and her strong need to document, coupled with her ability to move the story along quickly and with few melodramatic flourishes, have enabled her to create not only the biggest box-office success in Spain of that era but a movie that holds up beautifully today and will, I suspect, do so for a long time to come. Among the supporting cast are a much-younger-than-I-am-used-to-seeing Hector Alterio and Mercedes Sampietro. The Cuenca Crime will screen again Wednesday, December 12, at 1 and 5pm.

When I heard that the FSLC was doing this retrospective, I immediately sought out any Miró titles I could find from various movie internet services but came up with only one: Tu nombre envenena mis sueños (Your Name Poisons My Dreams or, as it was called in its DVD release, Amor y Venganza). Her penultimate theatrically-released film, this one shows an enormous leap over Cuenca Crime in certain areas such as budget and style, and its crack cast includes Emma Suárez, Carmelo Gómes and Toni Cantó. Supposedly a return to the thriller format for this director/co-writer (with Ricardo Franco from a novel by Joaquín Leguina), the film is hardly "thrilling." It waddles along rather lethargically for over two hours, as it flips back and forth among at least three different time periods - all of which take place during or in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War.

At stake here is why a certain fellow, and then another, have been killed and by whom. In his investigation, a policeman (Gómez) attends a funeral at which, upon seeing the daughter (Suárez) of the deceased, he is whisked back down Memory Lane to their meeting years before. We're whisked along with him, and then taken back even farther as the Suárez character begins explaining to Gómez her own family history. All this involves the war and who was on which side (families were often as divided internally over this subject as were the classes), along with love, assassination and revenge. Not just dreams, it turns out, are poisoned here. Whole lives are misspent in the quest for vengeance.

Miró's hatred of uniformed men is apparent once again, especially via the character of the Falangist. Her police, though they wear street clothes, still run the gamut between anti- and pro-Franco stances. The increasingly convoluted plot offers us some fairly interesting characters and incidents; the photography is gorgeous in terms of color, and sometimes composition; and performances are as good as they are allowed to be. Both Suárez and Gómez have been better elsewhere (there's not much chemistry between these two or any of the actors in the film), and the writing (perhaps taken directly from the novel) too often comes across as a kind of affected, tending-toward-the-purple prose. I suspect that this is not one of Miró's better movies. We shall see, as her retrospective continues... Your Name Poisons My Dreams will screen on Wednesday December 26, at 4:15 and 9pm.

- James Van Maanen

Posted by dwhudson at December 11, 2007 5:13 AM