Shortmetraje, 2006-2007
Libra, 2006. A beleaguered woman's plea for a two week adjustment elicits both poignancy and unexpected humor in Carlota Coronado's articulate slice-of-life portrait, Libra. As the woman provides an array of reasons from work-related commitments, to personal sacrifices that have already put a strain on her relationships with family and friends, to conflicting schedules with final examinations that, if missed, would not prevent her from graduating as planned, but also create a financial drain on her already limited resources that would likely cause her to abandon her studies altogether, the film's title serves as a wry, double entendre for the heroine's own quest to find balance in her life.
The Happy Man, 2007. The sound of a 24 hour news station broadcast reporting its usual program of international crises and economic downturns provides an insightful foil to Lucina Gil's The Happy Man, a tongue in cheek biography on a self-described "happy man" whose credentials are put to a test by a team of skeptical international researchers. As in Libra, the slice-of-life approach suits the film's structure well, reflecting the film's ideals of enduring love and uncomplicated living.
Avant pétalos grillados, 2007. Idiosyncratically primitive in its surrealism and impenetrable in its fragmented logic, Velasco Broca's equally humorous and baffling Avant pétalos grillados invariably suffers from its decontextualization from its source, a trilogy entitled Echos der Buchrucken. Visually, the film loosely resembles a parodic, rough hewn, desexualized version of Frans Zwartjes's Pentimento in its clinical images of everyday life at a sanatorium (albeit this time, the clinic apparently doubles as a laundry service) crossed with the metamorphic insect people of Tsitsi Dangrembga's Mother's Day.
Said's Journey, 2007. Coke Riobóo cleverly incorporates the lyrical structure and vibrant palette of traditional animation to create a sobering and incisive gothic fairytale in Said's Journey. Chronicling a young Moroccan boy, Said's unexpected adventure across the Strait of Gibraltar to a Spanish fairground, where Said is soon confronted by the reality of his marginalized status as an immigrant and racial minority, Riobóo tersely, but lucidly exposes the myth of assimilation and cultural integration.
Traumatology, 2007. When the family patriarch suffers a heart attack in the midst of his eldest son's wedding, the entire wedding party invariably follows him to the hospital, where the bride and groom soon express their second thoughts over their impending marriage, two brothers alternately vie for the affections of the maid of honor, and two younger brothers, lamenting their inability to find girlfriends, begin to question their sexuality. Daniel Sánchez Arevalo's Traumatology is a well rendered, character ensemble film that, despite its relatively short duration (22 minutes), manages to capture the complex texture, intimacy, and irrationality of human relationships.
You Can Walk Too. A writer's disposable comment that a worthwhile female composer is about as common as a dog walking on its hind legs serves as a rallying cry for Cristina Lucas's, You Can Walk Too. Assembling shots of hind leg-walking dogs as they make their way through town before proud owners and bemused onlookers, the film is idiosyncratic and pointedly humorous, but at ten minutes, seems belabored and overextended as a droll, protest piece.
Angel's Fire. A worthy companion piece to the first chapter of Javier Corcuera's The Back of the World on a young boy who makes a living by breaking rocks at a quarry in Peru, Marcelo Bukin's Angel's Fire chronicles a day in the life of eight year old Angel who works at a brick factory in Titicaca, Peru to help support his family. Broaching such fundamental human rights issues as child labor, abuse, and exploitation, the film is an articulate and impassioned portrait on the corrosive effects of poverty and marginalization.
Posted by on Dec 18, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2007, Spanish Cinema Now
Julio Medem's Chaotic Ana is an unclassifiable concoction, at once deeply personal and untenably ambitious, alternating between creating a strong statement and indulging in fanciful whimsy. Presented in eleven chapters that count down towards zero in the referential pattern of hypnotic regression, the bohemian artist, Ana (Manuela Vellés), not surprisingly, is first shown in a state of trance on the dance floor of an Ibiza nightclub. Ana's seeming perpetual state of waking dream is subsequently reflected in the images of her sheltered life with her father, Klaus (Matthias Habich), having lived an idyllic existence in a cave overlooking the coast throughout her youth until Justine (Charlotte Rampling), a patron of the arts from Paris, invites her to stay at an artist workshop where, for a few years, she can work in complete creative freedom. Finding immediate community with the workshop's eclectic residents, in particular, a video artist named Linda (Bebe), Ana immediately falls for the subject of Linda's latest installation, an enigmatic, resident artist named Saïd (Nicolas Cazalé). Drawing inspiration from his life in exile, Saïd's primitivist composition creates a violent reaction within Ana's subconscious. Suspecting that Ans's blackout is a psychological fugue that is connected to the resurfacing of traumas suffered during her past lives, Justine and Linda enlist the aid of an American hypnotist, Michael (Asier Newman) who gradually unravels the centuries of cross-cultural testimonies buried within Ana's subconscious, told by young women whose lives were all tragically cut short by the age of 22, that would bear witness to the hidden histories of inhumanity, violence, and oppression. Part loving tribute to his sister, Ana Medem, whose artwork is featured in the film (and who, as the postscript reveals, "left" at the age of 22), and part contemporary indictment of masculine aggression (and in particular, American aggression) that has led to a legacy of warfare, occupation, terrorism, and subjugation, Medem's fractured tale proves to be an unstable alchemy where moments of sobering reflection on the repercussions of a chronically shortsighted US policy are supplanted by two-dimensional caricatures that constantly shift the tone of the film from unflinching realism to bawdy farce (an awkward juxtaposition that proves especially flawed during a pivotal encounter at a Navajo bar, where Medem's trenchant parallel illustration of dispossession and institutional segregation between the Native American reservations in the US and the refugee camps of displaced Saharans in the Middle East - and by extension, the Iraqi occupation that has also resulted in geographic factionalism along ethnic and tribal lines - is undermined by the facile sight gag of a patron's inebriated uncoordination).
Based on playwright Lluïsa Cunillé's Barcelona, Map of Shadows, Ventura Pons's richly textured nocturne, Barcelona (A Map) is an intimate and atmospheric rumination on urban architectures and shared spaces as integral projections of anonymous, emotional landscapes. Ostensibly capturing an evening in the life of an elderly couple, Rosa (Núria Espert) and her dying husband, a former opera house stagehand named Ramon (José María Pou) who have decided to evict their tenants in order to have the privacy of the entire house to face the final days of his terminal cancer, the film is an understated and insightful exposition into the nature of alienation, transformation, and passage. Composed of a series of encounters as Ramon and Rosa alternately pay a visit to each of the tenants in order to confirm the eviction during the coming week, the conversations serve as an illuminating reflection of the couple's own sense of irrelevance and isolation. A conversation between Ramon and a French language instructor, Lola (Rosa Maria Sardà) questions the practicality of cultivating proficiency for a culturally exclusive (if not outmoded) foreign language in a society that is increasingly homogenized, indistinct, and assimilated - a separateness that also reflects on the place of Catalan culture within the context of a Spanish national identity (and in particular, within Barcelona's multicultural landscape). The theme of obscurity and frailty is also suggested in the paradoxical image of the couple's only male tenant, a handsome, young security guard named David (Pablo Derqui) who is first seen applying liniment to his leg after a track and field injury as Rosa knocks on his door. Abandoned by his wife and relegated to working graveyard shifts after the shopping malls have closed for the evening, David is also a figurative ghost resident of Barcelona, patrolling in the shadows of deserted public spaces with an unloaded gun. Paradoxically, even the couple's pregnant tenant, a cook named Violeta (María Botto) reflects this anxiety, as the viability of her unborn child becomes clouded by the uncertainty of the father's less-than-ideal genetic legacy (a compromised heritage that is also alluded in Rosa's complicated relationship with her younger brother, Santi (Jordi Bosch)). Within this pervasive sentiment of impotence and obsolescence, the couple's idiosyncratic act of role reversal in the final chapter may be seen as an act of empowerment - a symbolic transfiguration into their own self-created afterlives - where spiritual liberation exists in the anonymity of costumes and interchangeable identities.
In the opening sequence of Lola, La Película, young Lola Flores, the daughter of a tavern owner from Jerez, convinces a gypsy flamenco teacher to take her in as a student by performing a lively interpretation of the dance, incorporating an assortment of freestyle twists and turns that causes him to ask her at the conclusion of her routine where she had learned such unorthodox movements, to which she responds that they were made up as she went along, doing as she pleased. In a sense, her willful determination and willingness to flout conventions for the sake of personal expression encapsulates Flores's outlook towards life as well in Miguel Hermoso's reverent, yet unsentimental and well-rendered portrait of the legendary screen and stage artist. Chronicling Flores's career evolution from her public debut at the age of thirteen as an intermission act for a variety show headlined by popular flamenco singer, Manolo Caracol (José Luis García Pérez), to her early vocation as a struggling bailaora for a traveling variety show in the north of Spain during the early days of the Franco regime (an austerity similarly captured in Carlos Saura's 
By the time the final, pillow shot of Solitary Fragments unfolds - a congested panorama of dour, monolithic structures, interchangeable, tiled rooftops, and mobile cranes hovering over the cityscape in a perpetual state of construction and demolition - I was convinced that the film would conclude with some sort of postscript dedication to Edward Yang. And while filmmaker Jaime Rosales may have only subconsciously channeled Yang's distanciated images of liminal "city stories" that quietly unfold in the distractive chaos of an anonymous, ever transforming urban landscape (alas, the expected commemoration did not materialize), the film, nevertheless, remains a remarkable and poignant testament to Yang's indelible legacy. Opening to the bucolic image of cattle grazing at a pasture in the rural province in Leon that has been visually bisected by a foregrounding pole, the resulting split-screen becomes a recurring aesthetic that also reflects the film's parallel stories of separation, isolation, loss, and the randomness of fate. Composed of bifurcated, often long shots (usually complementary point of views of adjoining spaces or conversations that are idiosyncratically presented as a series of alternating frontal and perpendicular dialogues) and compartmentalized images (often occluded through in situ obstructions or the secondary framing of doorways and windows), Rosales reinforces the dual imagery through the interweaving stories of recent divorcée Adela (Sonia Almarcha) who, seeking a change from her uneventful life in the country, decides to make a fresh start by moving to Madrid with her infant son, and a widowed grocer, Antonia (Petra Martínez), the mother of Adela's new roommate, Inés (Miriam Correa), who struggles to find a place in her now grown daughters' lives as they work through the distractions in their own lives (including her younger daughter, Nieves's (Nuria Mencía) recent cancer diagnosis and her eldest daughter, Helena's (María Bazán) not too subtle overtures for financial assistance in buying a vacation home). Rosales demonstrates a keen eye for observation and for capturing the quotidian beauty of these seemingly cursory, often inelegant, momentary interruptions of life - the petty arguments, procrastinated plans, quiet sacrifices, acts of compassion, and conciliatory gestures - the insightful "solitary fragments" that capture life at its most intimate and honest expression of struggle, loneliness, and validation.
Rodrigo Cortes's first feature, Contestant is something like effervescent, visual prestidigitation, a self-consciously frenetic, hyperactive, insubstantial, flauntingly inconstant, and naïve satire on the perils of modern-day instant wealth, consumerism, applied economics, and state taxation. The film follows the plight of an attractive economics history professor, Martin Circo (Leonardo Sbaraglia) who wins the largest cache of prizes ever awarded at a trivia game show on television, only to realize that he cannot afford to pay the windfall taxes that have been attached to his winnings. Initially seeking a short-term financial remedy by taking out a line of credit from a bank using his winnings as collateral with the idea of paying off the taxes in order to unfreeze his newly acquired assets from the government's lien and enable him to sell them and repay the bank, Martin soon realizes the inescapable financial quagmire that he has been ensnared, when he bank then subsequently seizes his assets as insurance against defaulting on the debt. Cortes deploys a dizzying arsenal of gratuitous, MTV-generation, short attention span, film school 101 clichés (including simulated, Brakhage-styled scratch film sequences, arbitrarily interwoven color and black and white sequences, fluid, birds eye view crane shots, knowing, fourth wall addresses, and repeating slow-motion rain and bath shower scenes that highlight the pixellated texturality of water drops) to distracting, and ultimately uninspired (and even off-putting) effect that distracts from the film's more relevant, critical assessment of indenturing, collusive financial institutions that reinforce social immobility and economic polarization, integral questions on the systemization of poverty and dependency and that was better articulated in Abderrahmane Sissako's spare, yet potent and incisive 
Part Alfred Hitchcock styled mysterious intrigue and part 1930s inspired romantic comedy, Edgar Neville's Carnival Sunday is a taut, irresistibly refined, and well crafted whodunit thriller. Set in the surreal atmosphere of the advent of Carnival Sunday, the beginning of the three day celebration that culminates with the Mardi Gras festivities (and ushers the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday), the film opens with an obtrusive tenant and night watchman's discovery of the body of a murdered pawn broker that had been haphazardly concealed in her unlocked apartment. Reporting the murder to the local police constable who seems resistant to conducting a prompt examination of the crime scene to search for clues for fear of curtailing his holiday plans (and rationalizing that the social insignificance of the crime lends itself to a soon forgotten resolution, irrespective of the perpetrator's capture), the constable cedes the investigation to his inexperienced, but highly motivated junior officer, Matías (Fernando Fernán Gómez) who believes that the answer to the identity of the murderer may be found within the sheaf of promissory notes discovered within the secret compartment of the victim's bureau. But when Matías makes a quick arrest after a local tonic peddler is discovered attempting to retrieve a lost item in the pawn broker's apartment, the peddler's devoted daughter, a clock seller named Nieves (Conchita Montes) decides to launch her own independent investigation, aided by her affable and well-intentioned friend, a costume merchant and town gossip named Julia (and aided in part by Julia's access to an assortment of disguises) to root out the real killer. Creating an environment that is both ominous and carnivalesque, and sustaining the film's tension and suspense through the efficiency of narrative, Neville not only demonstrates a precision for storytelling, but also provides an incisive glimpse of the endemic social and economic disparity and instability that defined contemporary life during the transitional, early days of postwar Spain and the entrenchment of fascism.
In a well-appointed villa in seventeenth century Spain, a wealthy, widowed noblewoman, Otavia (Verónica Forqué) vows to marry off her two beautiful, but problematic daughters: Nise (Macarena Gómez), whose dark, smoldering beauty is equally matched by the ferocity of her intellect and penchant for uncompromising, philosophical debates with the finest intellectuals of the day, and Finea (Silvia Abascal), the sweet and fair, but (seemingly) dimwitted sibling whose marital prospects, despite having been made all the more attractive by the endowment of a generous dowry, have been tempered by her exasperating bubble-headedness and naïve gullibility. With Nise amorously pursued by a roguish and penniless, but well-respected poet and cavalier named Laurencio (José Coronado) and Finea courted by the vain and self-absorbed Liseo (Roberto Sanmartín) at the instigation of his parents, Otavia's hopes to find appropriate suitors for her difficult daughters seems to be within her grasp, until the fickle Laurencio disrupts the fated course of arranged love by turning his attentions instead on Finea in the hopes of acquiring a small fortune through her dowry. Adapted from the titular comedy by Spanish playwright Lope de Vega, Manuel Iborra's La Dama Boba evokes the lightness, burlesque humor, and effervescent tone of William Shakespeare's comedies (most notably, The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night) to create a sincere and incisive exposition on the nature of identity and the transformative power of love. However, inevitably, like Shakespeare's escapist comedies, La Dama Boba similarly suffers from a certain degree of archaicness, blunt absurdity, and caricature that, like Finea's lapses of common sense, renders the memory of the film equally fleeting and transposable.
Albert Serra's understated first feature, Honor de Cavallería loosely channels the melancholic wanderlust of such contemporary, dedramatized road films as Marc Recha's 
Based on the popular, baroque, fifteenth century chevalier story Tirante el Blanco, the seminal Catalan novel that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra cites as a profound influence on the realization of Don Quixote de La Mancha, Vicente Aranda's The Maidens' Conspiracy is a lavish, risqué, and skillfully composed, but superficial and unsatisfying medieval adventure that combines the ambitious scope of epic, battlefield encounters with the intimacy and situational satire of sexual politics. Centering on the often comical (mis)adventures of a handsome, brave, and dutiful knight from humble origins named Tirante el Blanco (Caspar Zafer) who seeks to curry increasing favor from the benevolent, ailing Byzantine king (Giancarlo Gianini), initially through his assumed role as military strategist to defend the kingdom and stave off the inevitable incursion into Constantinople by the Turks, then subsequently, through his brazen seduction of the royal family's only surviving child, the young, fanciful, and impressionable princess, Carmesina (Esther Nubiola), the film quickly devolves from grand, heroic tale to lowbrow, bedroom farce. As Carmesina is alternately counseled, manipulated, ordered, and bedeviled by a seemingly endless assortment of intrusive and interfering court handmaidens and servants - a stern and repressed widow (Victoria Abril), the Viuda Reposada (The Rested Widow), a hopeless romantic (Leonor Watling) named Placer De Mi Vida (Pleasure of My Life), a trusted confidante named Estefanía (Ingrid Rubio) who has fallen for Tirante's roguish lieutenant Diafebus (Charlie Cox), a dutiful servant named Eliseo (Rebecca Cobos), and a royal page named Hipólito (Sid Mitchell) whose youth and sensitivity has attracted the attention of the neglected queen (Jane Asher) - and the dynamics of the Imperial Court is further complicated by her parents' attempts to ensure peace and sovereignty in the kingdom from the Grand Turk's (Rafael Amargo) insatiable lust for conquest, what unfolds is an effervescent, but confused, vacuous, and ultimately forgettable (and idiosyncratically cobbled) pastiche that is equal parts romantic ode, bawdy comedy of errors, and graphic illustration of the brutality (and inhumanity) of religious war.