Spanish Cinema Now. 7.

Icíar Bollaín's Take My Eyes (Te doy mis ojos) won some 39 international awards, including a bundle of Goyas in 2004/05. Her earlier film Flowers from Another World (Flores de otro mundo) managed a half-dozen awards back in 2000. A triple threat, Bollaín boasts an even longer career as an actress, with leading roles in films as diverse as They're Watching Us (Nos miran) and Ken Loach's Land and Freedom. In this year's SCN series, she is represented as writer/director by the new movie Mataharis (site; and yes, it's the plural of that famous femme fatale spy). I caught up with Flores de otro mundo only a couple of years ago and found it quite special: as real as it was charming and honest about loves present and past, foreign and domestic. If I was not as bowled over as were most Spaniards by Take My Eyes, that is probably due to being earlier inundated here in the US by far too many movies and too much television nonsense on the subject of wife abuse. Granted, Bollaín's version placed some of the responsibility on the wife - not for the abuse itself but for returning to it time after time - and its mountain city setting and art museum ambience added immense beauty to her film.

Mataharis, interestingly enough, deals in an off-kilter manner with a subject even more timely: surveillance. The setting is a small Madrid detective agency run by a fellow (a very believable Fernando Cayo) as stupidly macho as he is sure of himself and staffed by three very different women. We learn about the three - their lives and their cases - as the film progresses, slipping deftly and quickly in and out of their stories. Bollaín forces us to look at surveillance a bit differently because we don't, at first, see what is going on here in the same manner as we might look at, say, the Bush Administration's unwarranted trampling of our civil rights. Instead, we perceive it, as does the oldest of the three women, as a private company simply doing what it has been paid to do. But then one of the cases turn out not to be what it initially appeared to be, and we - like the characters - are caught up short.

Bollaín and her casting director Eva Leira have assembled a very good group led by Najwa Nimri (Asfalto, Lovers of the Artic Circle, Sex & Lucia, The Method) and Tristán Ulloa, as the young marrieds-with-children, Nuria Gonzáles and Manuel Morón as the oldest couple, and María Vázquez and Diego Martín as a problematic detective and her prey. The entire cast is fine, and Bollaín keeps her story moving well. She tamps down the emotions and melodrama so that events that could go over the top stay grounded. In the end, you may feel, as I did, that being any kind of spy goes so thoroughly against the social contract as to leave one bereft of humanity. This was shown most clearly by Robert De Niro's fine film The Good Shepherd. Ms Bollaín, in her own simpler, quiet way, brings the point home just as well - while stirring up a meaty stew of economics, corporate policies, family lives and sexual attraction.

On the other hand, sitting through two movies in the current Pilar Miró retrospective, back-to-back, as some of us Spanish Cinema Now fans did last Wednesday (the only day these two were shown), proved pretty heavy-going. In the first of these, Mercedes Sampietro stars as what I'd guess might be a Miró surrogate (she plays a TV director given her first chance to make a theatrical motion picture) in the delightfully titled Gary Cooper, Who Art in Heaven (Gary Cooper, que estás en los cielos). Unfortunately, the title is the only delightful thing about this 1980 film. You might expect something light, a bit of charm, perhaps a laugh or two. Forget it. On the basis of the Miró films included in this retrospective, I would suggest that the woman, as a writer/director, had no sense of humor. This, as much as anything else, accounts for my opinion that her movies simply can't reflect much more than the - understandably - stunted perspective she must have had on what life offers.

Added to this are her generally woeful filmic vocabulary and storytelling skills: lots of close-ups but no more than a cursory sense of composition, color, editing, music or much else. After an unusually off-the-cuff beginning in which the lead character greets friends and co-workers in the TV studio, everything else comes across as "hard work." The dialogue especially seems forced and expository; people talk about ideas and feelings as if they were from some book or other (often, they are). The plot, as such, has the Sampietro character discovering that her body has become a medical emergency, to which she responds by bringing in, one way or another, just about everyone important from her past. I find it odd that a movie dealing with love, death, career and more should fail so thoroughly to engage us on any visceral level. Instead, we - and the film - just plod along toward a finale that is, well, let's call it very "expected."

In 1992, with Beltenebros, Miró tried her hand at film noir, which apparently she understood to mean, "Don't turn on the lights." This is one of the danker movies I can recall. Faces, thank goodness, are lit up enough to register and, as they belong to the likes of Terence Stamp, Patsy Kensit and Geraldine James, we enjoy watching them.

The film was shot in English - no surprise, given the lead actors - and this adds yet another layer of distance to Miro's usual, somewhat inert dialogue. Toward the end, there is a silly and unbelievable showdown/shootout in a boarded-up movie theater in which the antagonists shout at each other in language that borders on camp and sounds more like the libretto to an opera than anything "real" people might utter. In this scene, an actual movie is screening behind the man on stage. Why - since there is no audience in the theater? For art's sake, I would guess, and if so, the movie misses by a mile. The FSLC program notes that Beltenebros is based upon a "taut thriller." If Miró ever knew the meaning of "taut," the seven films in this retrospective certainly do not prove it. Moments that should last a single beat go on for several and this builds and builds until the viewer is nearly nodding off.

The Spanish Civil War and its aftermath hovers here, as in so many movies by Miró and other filmmakers of this period. The question of who is a traitor is raised, along with the consequences of acting on this knowledge without the assurance of its veracity. This is a perfectly valid premise, and it makes an interesting bookend to Miró's penultimate feature, Your Name Poisons My Dreams, in which vengeance is seen to destroy a life almost as thoroughly as does the initial crime around which the story is based. Miró certainly knew how to zero in on interesting themes for her movies. I only wish she'd had the skill to do better by them. Her final theatrical film, The Dog in the Manger, rated by some as her masterpiece, will be shown beginning this Sunday. I maintain high - well, mid-level, at least - hopes.

Posted by dwhudson at December 21, 2007 9:03 AM