Cria cuervos (1976)

I was totally enthralled by Victor Erice’s Spirit of the beehive. For reasons that are plentiful, while watching Cria cuervos, I imagined that it must be directed by Erice, too. But it is Carlos Saura who made it. Both films share a mysteriousness with which they approach the world of a child – a mysteriousness never even coming close to the cliché about children’s fairy-tale-like perception. Instead, the sense of mystery has to do with a world that, for the child, is barely comprehensible and is, in its lack of intelligibility, traumatic. These films delve in murky waters, attending to insecurity, eeriness and dissonance. And artistically, they have much in common as well, working with an almost painterly sense of composition of the image, where much of what is going on is half-hidden, half-obscured. A third link is the actress who plays the young main character of both movies, a puzzled outsider kid – the great Ana Torrent.

Ana grows up with her two sisters. After both her mom and dad have died, their aunt takes care of them in a gloomy house they also share with a housekeeper and a silent grandmother. The aunt treats the kids with a cold rigidity; she is stern, but somehow well-meaning, and strangely fragile. The sisters tend to each other, listening to music, just being. In several memorable scenes, we see Ana and her sisters listen to a proto-disco tune, a tune that is both catchy and strangely insistent. In another scene, we see them play dead, then coming back to life again, Ana being the person who commands and re-enacts traumatic scenes.

The death of the father is seen in the dramatic beginning of the film, when we see him having sex with some woman (that is not his wife) – and dying. Ana, an enigmatic child, feels guilt about the death of her mother. The film plays out as a dreamy tension between scenes that depict the mother, the sisters’ mundane life and Ana as a grown-up whose past is still present in her life as a menacing shadow (this is emphasized also by the fact that the adult Ana is played by the same actress who plays her mother). The perspective could be called ‘subjective’ – it is Ana’s experiences, her fantasies, her feelings we share. But at the same time the film treats the other characters as persons in their own right. The dynamic between the people in the film is never clarified – it is only shown in suggestive scenes, in which we can only guess at what is going on, and what it means. The same could be said about the sense of fear and guilt. The film is like a question: what was it all about? This question has a glimmer of hope in it, as a bewildered, staggering process of healing and recovery.

The film has often been read as a comment upon the last days on the Franco regime. These hints are obvious, especially with regard to the fact that Ana’s father is a general. There are plenty of ghosts that haunt this movie, and Franco is definitively one of ‘em. The film's paradoxical hopeful sense of foreboding is remarkable.

A Perfect Day (2014)

The war in Yugoslavia is ending and a group of aid workers find themselves stuck in bureaucratic structures that renders them unable to help. Their mission is to drag a dead person out from a well, so that the corpse won’t spoil the water. This is the set-up of Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s A Perfect Day, a film that tries to be rowdy comedy and social document all at once. Benicio del Toro and Tim Robbins play the tough guys who have grown cynically world-weary - they act like some kind of rock stars. As the well business lapses into a farce, it is his character that delivers the bitter lines about organizational fuck-up. Mélanie Tierry plays the newbie, the one with a working conscience. So, does it work? A perfect day is crass, but not always successful in its attempt to deliver a harshly comical image of aid work. The result is sometimes simply rather insensitive towards what it is in fact trying to do – the war that it chronicles is at times transformed into a mere background for slapstick and action - not to speak of blasting Marilyn Manson and Gogol Bordello tunes. The film's juxtaposition of the idealistic girl and the gnarly cynical male is tiresome and goes by the book in a cheap kind of way. Indeed, the cynical male cracks jokes to impress the sweet idealist girl - he laughs about getting laid and seeing his first corpse. Of course one could say that these things might exist in real life too, and that real people can be clichés and crack stupid and tasteless jokes. But the problem with A Perfect Day is that it does little to show what this reveals about aid work, bureacracy within organization or the psychological pressure of working in a war setting.

El sur (1983)

Victor Erice's El sur is a masterpiece of colors and composition: it is simply a marvellous-looking and melancholy little film. Even though some plot-devices are badly chosen (maybe thsi is due to the fact that Erice was not able to finish the film the way he had planned), this is a film one will remember. It's one of those films that builds its own tight world. Most films, flat as they are, do not at all suceed in this world-making - and I suppose most don't even try. The story revolves around the relation between a dugther and her secretive father. The father comes from the south, and the girl dreams of this mysteroius place. The father is a man of many secrets, and the daughter tries to reveal what these secrets are. They live in a house far from the city. Sometimes, the father disappear without explanation. The daughter follows her father into town and she tries to make sense of what he does. El sur is a dreamy film that settles you into a landscape and a mood of longing. The emotions are more hinted at than rubbed into your face. The daugther gradually learns of her father's unhappiness.

Even though the mystery of El sur is not in itself extraordinary, the way it is evoked clearly is. In one memorable scene, we see Estrella dancing with her father at an empty restaurant. They are close, yet distant to each other. There is a sadness and wistfulness of this film that is both vivid and distand, as a dream that is about to dissipate. Someone has written that this movie is told in the tone of whispering, and that captures the essence of how I experienced the pace. There are countless scenes of stark beauty. Often these scenes are minimalistic in kind. In one, we see a dark-lit path surrounded by trees. Estrella is riding a bike and the gloomy light surrounds her. This scene is repeated in the film and creates a sort of pattern.

For 80 days (2010)

I must confess that I liked For 80 days (dir. J Garano), fully aware of how bad the plot was, and how primitively the characters sometimes were developed. One of the reasons to like it was the forceful acting of the two leading actresses, who play a pair of friends that meet in a hospital after 40 years. One of the women visit her daughter's ex-lover at the hospital. The woman's husband is a quiet, demanding man. The other woman is a teacher at a conservatory. We come to understand that these two had a sort of fling going on when they were young, but the fling was never expressed or acted on, even though it was somehow acknowledged by them both. In their sixties, they are different people, but they are still attracted to each other. So, basically, For 80 days is a love story about people who haven't seen each other for many years. It's a sad tale about people who want to reach out to each other, who fumble and try to find the right words. Regrettably, the film often choose to take a conventional road in telling the story, so that the film ends up with creating exaggerated and simplistic scenarios along with characters, at least some of them, are so one-dimensional that it is hard to take them seriously. For all this, the film has some beautiful scenes and it is good to see a film about lesbian love that is based on other types of characters than the chic, career-minded adventurer in New York. Had the script been worked on in a different way, this could have been a beautiful film about love and hope.

Who can kill a child? (1976)

I doubt that anyone knows what to do with the film Who can kill a child. While I saw it in a micro-cinema in Brooklyn, the audience reacted in two ways: some seemed confused, while others just chuckled, revealing their appreciation of underground horror film with quirky storylines. I don't know. Sometimes I was as disturbed by the chucklers as I was by the film, which in itself is pretty disturbing, even though more violent films have been made. Maybe it's be beginning of the movie in relation to the rest that is so unnerving. We see rueful scenes from concentration camps and wars - in all these violent situations, a narrator tells us in Brittish English, children are victims. The plot of the film starts off with two Brittish tourists lolling around on the streets of a small Spanish town. They are to travel to an island off the beaten track. There are rumors that strange things are going on there. The Brittish couple keep up their cheerful tourist attitude while exploring the island, only to find that it seems rather deseted, except for some children. Things get creepy. They go into a bar to find something to eat. The bar is empty too. A child comes into the room, and we see that something is the matter with the kid. Soon enough we "know". Or really, we don't know. What we know is that the kids on the island have turned into brutal murderers and killed off the adults. ---- Gore, you sigh. But wait, the thing that makes this film so peculiar is how quiet it is. Mostly, nothing much happens, but we all feel a deep dread in our stomachs. The camera slowly tracks the two main characters in ther confused "tour" of the island. It's a horror movie that has more in common with Rosemary's baby and the Birds than Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What is the point? Are the children taking revenge on the adults? Are we to get a new, more sinister perception of children? Like I said: I don't know.

La Soledad (2007)

La Soledad - Solitary Fragments is a very quiet film. Jaime Rosales, who directed the film, have drawn on many sources: the family dramas of Ozu, Mondays in the sun – and perhaps even ordinary life and routines unraveled in Jeanne Dielman. It is not a perfect film. It does not always manage to muster up the tension necessary for those very long takes featuring in the film. Solitary fragments is largely a film about women. When men appear, they are always in the background. Two female characters make up the heart of the story. A single mother leaves a safe life to pursue a new career in Madrid. A widowed woman has a conflctual relation with her three daughters.

The cinematography used here is curious. The camera is static. But the events are rarely placed in the very midst of the frame. Instead, they take place half-seen, blocked by doors, sometimes reflected by mirrors. The perspective created often feels unreal, but at the same time all-to-real. I think of Fassbinder and his compulsive use of frames split by objects. In many frames, it’s the same here. But where Fassbinder employs artificiality to make a point, Jaime Rosales work with a dry mode of perception, slightly disorienting, but still very mundane. And usually – it works just fine. This technique forces us to open our eyes, listen, see what is to be seen, use our imagination. As I said, there’s not much drama to speak of here. But when something happens, it comes with a shock, as a jolt in the head of the viewer. I will not reveal anything here, though, as that might destroy your viewing experience.  

All in all: it is a beautiful film that you don't want to miss. I heartily recommend it.

Nazarin (1959)

I had a very hard time suppressing my prejudiced conceptions about Bunuel. And well, for all my effort, Nazarin turned out not to have been a very good movie. The biggest problem I had was that it was difficult to follow what the film tried to say. Was it a critique of the catholic church? Of religion? Of “saintliness”? One could of course argue that the film took an open approach to these things, and did not churn out a thesis about this or that. But I rather felt that there was too little good material to reflect on here. From a more technical point of view, the film was mostly a rather bland experience. There were, however, a few nice scenes toward the end. In one of them, we see a small town stricken by the plague. The only thing we hear is the harsh sound of church bells. The streets are empty. The main characters walk around in this desolated landscape. That scene did a far deeper impression on me than all of those scenes with the suffering Christ-like figure who is torn to pieces by the cruelness of Humanity. That is basically what we see in the film: cruel people. All forms of goodness are depicted with an air of tired bitterness. To hell with goodness, it won't survive anyway. What is goodness anyway. That, to me, seemed to have been the message of the film.