Spanish Cinema Now. 5.

Spanish Cinema Now continues its mixed bag of attractions with Shortmetraje, a program of seven short subjects of unusually diverse style, subject and length. I am not a particular fan of shorts, but this combination, gathered by film curator Marta Sanchez strikes me as about as interesting a blend as you're likely to see in any 90-minute sitting. 

Libra (yes, the astrological sign) begins the program on a brief, quizzical note, as a young woman faces her questioner and explains the problem she has with taking her final law exams. In only four minutes, writer/director Carlota Coronado and her two-person cast Helena Casteñeda and José Angel Egido manage to hold us rapt and then surprise us.

Updated through 12/19.

At the screening I attended, an audience favorite, garnering spontaneous applause, appeared to be Lucina Gil's fourteen-minute The Happy Man. Concerning three foreign anthropologists studying the phenomenon of happiness in Spain, this would get my vote as the clinker in the bunch due to its utterly simple-minded approach and conclusion. Our learned educators discover an elderly married man who is happy, yet - shock, shock - does not own the latest hot sports car or vacation property and is not even famous. Can Spaniards - or Americans or any Europeans - really be so dense as to imagine that some people might find happiness elsewhere? Guess so. There's no mention, either, of the basics of life - food, shelter and so forth - being necessary to achieve this much-vaunted state of being. Produced and acted pleasantly enough, this is, I presume, the work of a very young filmmaker.

Weird and oddly memorable, Avant pétalos grillados harks back to those low-budget, black-and-white sci-fi films of the 50s - and appears to have been pieced together from found footage having to do with slaughter, space aliens and laundry. Beginning in the middle of things (ending there, too), Velasco Broca's ten-minute compilation is utterly bizarre and occasionally hilarious (intentionally? who knows?). But it's short and, in its freaky manner, quite fun.

Claymation gets a 12-minute Spanish slant in Said's Journey, a lovely fable of imagined immigration from North Africa to Spain by Coke Riobóo. Full of bright color, music and charm, this little gem is at once a "Welcome to Spain/You Have No Idea What You're In For" warning and a short subject interesting enough to mull over, post-viewing. Is it an anti-immigrant statement posing as advice? A slap-on-face to the Spanish immigration system? Maybe a sweeter version of the old Monkey's Paw saw about being careful what you wish for. All three, I think, and all the stronger for this special combination.

The longest piece in the program is also one of the most accomplished: Traumalogia, from writer/director Daniel Sánchez Arévalo. If the usual eight minutes of commercial breaks were added to this 22-minute narrative, it would qualify as a clever, classy, half-hour sit-com, and I would not be surprised to learn that the filmmaker is already working on a full-length feature based on what's here. Why not? He already possesses a keen understanding of character, storytelling, dialogue, cinematography, composition, editing and more, as he spins a funny, witty, quick-paced tale of family, wedding and hospitalization. We'll be hearing more from Señor Arévalo soon, I suspect.

That old misogynistic chestnut comparing a woman to a dog walking on its hind legs gets a kind of comeuppance in the penultimate short on the program. Cristina Lucas's ten-minute You Can Walk, Too begins with a young woman (perhaps the director herself) musing on this ineffably stupid quote, and then provides a visual compilation of dogs, all kinds, walking on their hind legs. It's funny as hell and, after a while, you ask yourself, Why is this quote so famous? This is, I would guess, Ms Lucas's point. The "comparison" is clever, nasty and stupid. Replace women with blacks, gays, Irish - your pick - and the result is the same. Still, the idiotic aperçu continues to haunt us. Which may also be Ms Lucas's point.

The final segment, Fuego de angel (Angel's Fire), a documentary about the child labor in the Peruvian brick industry, is brief (13 minutes), quiet and compelling, as it uses visuals of the children at work and play, along with bits of their own explanation, to create a portrait of lives mostly harsh and unfair. The film's most evocative moment comes as one child, with a tact that seems extraordinary, given the circumstances, tells the filmmaker that he would prefer not to speak about the beatings he gets from his father. By simply allowing us to watch and listen, writer/director Marcelo Bukin contributes more than do certain famous documentarians who prefer to sermonize and scream. The program of Spanish shorts was screened last Saturday and will be screened twice today, Monday.

One of the most annoying, forcefully random movies I've had to endure in awhile, Bolboreta, Mariposa, Papallona (site) could drive one bonkers (or asleep, if you're already a tad tired). After its 87-minute running time, you still don't know who half the characters are or what the point of it all might be. (Here's one reason we don't know who's who: In the scene in which several of the school kids introduce themselves by name and interest, the director keeps the camera focused on the actor playing him and his assistant, rather than on the children he is "interviewing.")

The film's description in the FSLC program notes that it "moves back and forth between fiction and documentary" but I challenge anyone to figure out which is which. Which may be the point. Or one of them.  Gosh, I enjoy watching differing forms and formats, too, but I guess I need more discipline and rigor than writer/director Pablo García Pérez de Laura chooses to use.

There is certainly beauty in the land/seascapes and in the faces of all the townsfolk - what a good-looking bunch is here assembled! Among the "actors" are Fele Martínez (Bad Education, Darkness) who plays (behind a scruffy little beard) the visiting film director. The three-word title, explains one helpful villager, aided by the assistant director, means the same thing ("butterfly") in Galician, Spanish, Catalan and maybe Portuguese (there was a bit of disagreement on this point). Bolboreta, Mariposa , Papallona will be screened Monday, December 24, at 4 and 7:45 pm.

Juan José Ballesta, the 20-year-old actor who made his motion picture debut in the terrific (and multi-award-winning) El Bola back in 2000, has already appeared in ten films, including Carol's Journey, The Shanghai Spell and (from last year's SCN) Seven Virgins. One can easily understand why he chose to appear in Doghead (Cabeza de perro): the chance to flex his acting chops in a story about a neurologically damaged young man who must suddenly pull his life together, on his own, and in a new city.

Ballesta grows more gorgeous with each new role, possessing the kind of face over which the camera creams ("Muy guapo!" croons an older woman in the film, as she sits on his lap and begins to grind.) The actor's approach to this role is understated and questioning - his usual style - and he allows us to enter the character via a tabula rasa tactic. This works fine, to an extent. Or perhaps writer/director Santi Amodeo insisted on it, using camera tricks to take over whenever Ballesta's Samuel has one of his "attacks." (The most inventive camera work occurs as Samuel begins his first day on a new job, and this is a lovely, energized moment indeed.)

Subsidiary characters are given not much more than cursory attention; they keep the incident-laden "plot" moving along. The roles are acted with aplomb by Adriana Urgarte, as the would-be girlfriend; Manuel Alexandre as the old man for whom Samuel becomes caretaker; and (I believe) Alex O'Dogherty as the old man's reprobate son. Amodeo did a superior job with his earlier Astronautas, which also featured a lead character with problems who becomes a care-giver. But that film featured a 40-year-old character (played by Nancho Novo, who had both maturity and stronger acting ability) and, odd as it was - more inventive, too - it also managed to be more believable. In this movie, Samuel's parents appear to have simply given up finding him, and he them, which I find pretty hard to swallow. I've been around families with children who have physical/behavioral problems; there are many ways to deal with this, none of which these rather well-off characters seem to have encountered or applied.

Doghead diddles around, piling incident upon incident without allowing us to understand its lead character any better than we did at the beginning. Finally, rather than coming to an end, it simply stops, and not in a particularly satisfying manner. While one might say that this prevents undue sentimentality, I might counter that it's difficult to feel sentimental about a near-cipher. Doghead will be screened Saturday, December 22 at 7:20 and Monday, December 24, at 2 and 6pm.

Aside from Pedro Almodóvar and, to a much lesser extent, Alejandro Amenábar (Open Your Eyes, The Others, The Sea Inside), I suspect Julio Medem (Lovers of the Arctic Circle, Sex & Lucia) may be the Spanish filmmaker most recognized by American cineastes. This year Medem comes to SCN with his new film, Chaotic Ana (Caótica Ana), touted as a kind of homage to his late sister. While I've enjoyed this filmmaker's works, I've also found his visuals to finally be more interesting than his content.

Chaotic Ana is yet another such movie, although this time Medem's subject is the life/lives - over centuries - of an unusually creative young woman, as unearthed via hypnotism. I place reincarnation theory at approximately the same gimme-a-break level as I do the nativity story and other religious myths, but for art/entertainment's sake, I'll willingly watch a film with these subjects and treat them as acceptable fantasies that may have other meanings and uses. In his new film, I think Medem is putting forward an argument for the empowerment of women and the downtrodden - which is certainly an idea whose time has come (and gone and come again) a number of times.

To get his point(s) across, however, this writer/director uses an awful lot of incident and shortcut, buoyed by intermittent exposition. How much of what we see is real or fantasy, I'm not too sure, nor do I think it probably matters much. The art used here - the originals were evidently done by Medem's late sister, with recreations by another Medem (maybe his daughter?) - is colorful and sumptuous in its somewhat primitive manner. The performances from his young, attractive and talented cast, most of whom play art/video students (and one hypnotist), are very game. These kids seem to give themselves over fully to the reincarnation/hypnotism/spirituality thing. Adults might find it a bit more difficult, as can be sensed in Charlotte Rampling's performance. For an actress this intelligent and accustomed to tacking some heavy-duty roles and coming through splendidly, this turn as an "arts patron" must have bored her to tears and is reflected in a perfomance that she could have phoned in (and from the looks of thing, did).

Medem does have one ace up his sleeve, however, and he saves it for near the finale. It is still relatively early in the worldwide filmmaking game of discovering new and creative ways to bash the highly deserving Bush administration. But if anyone tops the moment of glory delivered by Medem (via Ana), I'll be very surprised. A special note of commendation must be given to Gerrit Graham (remember him: Phantom of the Paradise, Tunnel Vision, Used Cars and so many more) for his selfless turn as a ruthless pig. Chaotic Ana, which might just get a theatrical or video release (sexual envelope-pushing often does) was shown last Saturday and will be screened twice today, Monday.

- James Van Maanen

"Based on playwright Lluïsa Cunillé's Barcelona, Map of Shadows, Ventura Pons's richly textured nocturne, Barcelona (A Map) [Barcelona (un mapa] is an intimate and atmospheric rumination on urban architectures and shared spaces as integral projections of anonymous, emotional landscapes," writes acquarello.

Also: In Lola, la película, "[Miguel] Hermoso's demythologized approach to [Lola] Flores's biography is perhaps best illustrated in rumba guitarist El Pescaílla's (Alfonso Begara) repeatedly derailed courtship of Flores (played as an adult by Gala Évora), insightfully framing her artistic accomplishments as everyday milestones in an all too human search for unconditional love and acceptance."

Update, 12/19: Acquarello reviews the program of shorts.

Posted by dwhudson at December 18, 2007 9:31 AM