Spanish Cinema Now. 4.

Next up in Spanish Cinema Now's Pilar Miró retrospective are La Petición (The Engagement Party or The Request) and El Pajaro de la felicidad (The Bird of Happiness). The former film, from 1976, was initially banned in Spain. Even though, upon the demise of Franco, sexual matters appeared to be immediate fair game while political themes took longer to surface, La Petición stirred up some kind of hornets' nest with its depiction of a femme fatale teenager who - surprise! - becomes a full-fledged femme fatale woman, ruthlessly dispensing with a couple of would-be lovers.

Updated.

My, how 30 years can change things. Although American film noir had handily outdone any shocks Miró's movie has to offer - with infinitely more style and subtlety, too - with this film, the writer/director comes on as though she's telling us something new. Hardly. And Ana Belén's one-note performance in the lead role is little help. Miró perhaps imagined that her movie dealt with "class" because her anti-heroine's victims are from society's lower rungs, while Belen's character's family has money. So what, if the film is not going to bother to go any deeper? This particular "case study" might enter the chronicles of Kraft-Ebbing, but I challenge you to find much more meaning - power? female empowerment? - than that.

We do get a good notion of life in 19th century Spain, via the sets, costumes, and a capable supporting cast (Carmen Maura is listed among the players, though I couldn't pick her out). But the movie, short as it is, stills drags. Further, we're treated to a murder that, with just a tiny push from supporters, might enter the annals of wonderfully camp killings (it goes on and on until you find yourself suppressing a guffaw). In the end, the movie seems little more than a cautionary tale about the results of rough sex in an era prior to air conditioning. La Petición was shown this past Wednesday only, and, to my knowledge, is not available on DVD in the USA.

A moderately stronger movie, The Bird of Happiness (1993) reunites Miró with one of her favorite actresses, Mercedes Sampietro (The Cuenca Crime, Gary Cooper Who Art in Heaven) and offers a lead character possessing a good deal more humanity than the single-characteristic lady of La Petición. With this, my fourth Miró movie, I am beginning to suspect that the writer/director did not have any particular knack for storytelling. She was willing to try different genres - period pieces, thrillers, woman's melodramas - united perhaps by an underlying sense of class struggle and injustice.  She certainly had a keen interest in film but shows not much of those innate filmmaking skills - pacing, editing, dialog, composition and the like - that might set her apart.

Change usually provides a more interesting situation than stasis, and The Bird of Happiness offers as much of the former as La Petición does of the latter. Not only does the lead character, played by Sampietro, undergo a change of partner, locale and mindset, Spain itself is waking from its long restless sleep under Franco's rule.  Neither country nor character seems to know quite what to do or how to handle itself. (One of the more interesting scenes plays out between the lead character and her father, whose speech about the old and new Spain strikes a dissonant chord of unpleasant reality.)

Assailed by family problems, housing problems, even a nasty and violent sexual encounter (interestingly, some 30 years later in this edition's 53 Winter Days, Sampietro plays a character also recovering from traumatic violence), this fascinating and beautiful woman travels south to the sea and sun, trying to make peace with herself and others. Oddly, for a film so packed with incident, there is not all that much dialogue, and what's there often includes lengthy quotations from other sources. This, together with Miró's somewhat generic abilities, leaves us with a movie in which a lot happens but little of it is moving or thoughtful or even particularly believable. We'll accept it, I suppose, but can be forgiven for not quite knowing what to make if it. The Bird of Happiness screens Wednesday, December 26, at 2 pm and 6:40 pm.

Ventura Pons is very nearly a regular at Spanish Cinema Now (Amic/Amat, Morir (o no), Anita no perd el tren, Amor Idiota, among others) and this year it's Barcelona (A Map) (Barcelona (un mapa)). As usual, Pons enjoys creating ensemble pieces, but this time his ensemble is made up less of the intellectual upper-class (there are a couple in this bunch) and more from the working class and immigrants.

The location is a rather large apartment run by a husband and wife team, the former of whom is dying (this is a favorite theme with Pons). The relationships between owners and tenant, different and deeper than we initially suspect, are laid bare via dialogue and very short trips into either the past or what a character might have preferred to have happened (here the photography turns grainy and bleached). As odd - bizarre, really - as some of these relationships may be, Pons makes them believable via his direction and characters' interaction (he adapted his screenplay from a play by Lluïsa Cunillé), and his actors do him proud.

With Barcelona (a Map), Pons may have given us his most mature work, even though, like so many of his films, the dots are not all connected - which his fine with me. (One scene even channels Stephen's King's Firestarter, but you'll probably go along with it.) The Spanish Civil War hangs over the movie like the memory of a stillborn child: it colors everything and everyone, even if the characters are not aware of it. The saving grace is that Pons understands and deeply loves his people, no matter how outside the realm of "normalcy" they may be. And so, finally, do we. Barcelona (a Map) screens again Sunday, December 16, at 8:45 pm and Tuesday, December 18, at 1 pm.

Anyone looking for a good, old-fashioned show biz biography will find one in Lola, la película (site). One of Spain's most famous actress/singer/flamenco artists, Lola Flores was evidently something else, and this movie, written with some intelligence and flair in better-than-average biopic style by Antonio Onetti and directed with a nice combination of panache and tact by Miguel Hermoso, does the lady a good deal of justice. Rather pleasantly old-fashioned in its handling of sex and sin (of course, the period here is Spain of the 30s and 40s, so why not?), there is very little skin, and since Lola had a number of affairs in her life, this is a bit surprising. In fact, the romantic scenes are generally sealed with a kiss, rather than the usual bump-and-grind, and each kiss with each new man seems interestingly nuanced and carries its own hallmark: economic need, passion, exploration, sheer sexual attraction - and love.

All this is handled crisply yet with genuine feeling, and so it generally works. Gala Évora is terrific in the title role. She looks enough like the real Lola to pass muster, and she has a fine sense of "period" in her appearance and manner. The supporting cast is excellent as well. Hermoso and Onetti tell Lola's somewhat clichéd story with brevity and a good sense of pacing. They know when to leave out the excess we can easily ascertain on our own, thus sparing us further clichés. Lola, as seen here, was a woman who acted out of necessity first and passion second, at least until her career revved up to full throttle, at which point she began to want more.

I do wish we got some sense of the politics of the day, however. Considering the era during which the film takes place, you might imagine there'd be at least a hint of the Civil War. Nope; it's left out completely. There are certain scenes when people appear to be hungry. Why, we never learn. Did Lola side with the rebels or the Republicans? Or did she, like so many others, out of necessity, become a Franco-phile once victory belonged to the little dictator? Or was she the only person in Spain upon whom the war had no impact? We get no clue.

Perhaps it would not have met with much popular approval had the moviemakers weighted down the love and music with war and politics. Maybe they felt this might make the film too long; it comes in at just under two hours, as is. Whatever: Lola, la pelicula makes for a very odd entry in a festival which is devoting an entire 8-hour series to the Civil War. But you might as well simply lean back in your seat, drink in those gorgeous colors and compositions, listen to the music, watch the dance - and put that other part of your brain to sleep.

At the Spanish Cinema Now luncheon, I queried some of the younger crowd about both this film and the TV series La Guerra Filmada. Turns out none of them had seen either. (One director told me that he recalled Lola being criticized when in opened in Spain because of its completely apolitical "take.") Spain's younger generation seems to have little interest in a history that predates it, and in fact, is noticeably tired of having to see and hear about it. This is not unusual, I suppose. I remember my daughter coming home from Hebrew School one day and telling me that she no longer wanted to attend because she was so tired of constantly hearing about the Holocaust. Spanish filmmakers closer in age to the Franco era have been making movie after movie about the war and its aftermath. It's a national obsession and pastime, and for good reason. Yet the farther away our younger generation gets from this event and others like it, the harder it will be to remember and learn from, until - in whatever country - it happens again.

Lola, la película will screen Saturday, December 15, at 9:15 pm and Monday, December 17, at 5 pm.

- James Van Maanen

Updates: Acquarello reviews Contestant and Solitary Fragments.

Posted by dwhudson at December 15, 2007 9:27 AM