I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros) (Pedro Almodóvar – Spain) 90 minutes
I am old enough to remember a time when film critics approached a new Pedro Almodóvar film with all their critical faculties intact. That era ended around about the time of 1997’s Live Flesh and was well and truly vanquished with All about My Mother, released two years later and which garnered Almodóvar the prize for Best Direction at Cannes and the first of his two Oscars. Both those films were excellent and their success was welcome reward for a filmmaker who had, until then, not always been given his critical due. His films throughout the 80s and 90s were of varying quality, of course; the truth is his output since his canonisation at the end of the latter decade has also been uneven. Not that you would know from the critical adulation, where even lugubriously disjointed melodramas such as Talk to Her and Bad Education have been acclaimed unquestioningly. To utter a dissenting voice about El Gran Pedro’s work these days is one of the great heresies of cinephilia, akin to saying unkind things in public about one’s grandmother.
I have quite liked his recent films, with The Skin I Live In, a shrewd reworking of Les yeux sans visage, one of the finest of his career, vindicating his decision to invite Antonio Banderas back into the fold after being absent from his films for a couple of decades. Banderas also appears, in a cameo along with Penelope Cruz, at the beginning of his new film I’m So Excited. That they play airport ground staff whose amorous carelessness inadvertently endangers an aircraft about to take off, gives an indication that the latest Almodóvar is not too solemn an enterprise. The film is a broadly-stroked, garishly colourful comedy set in the cabin of a plane on a flight from Madrid to Mexico City. The cabin crew (or at least those we see on screen the most) are all flamingly camp tequila-slamming Romantics, headed by flamboyant Basque Joserra (Javier Cámara), the pilot and co-pilot are bisexual and bi-curious redpectively, while the passengers include a virginal middle-aged psychic (‘my powers scare men away’) played by Lola Dueñas, a bossy in-service inspector (Cecilia Roth), a caddish heart-breaking Lothario (Guillermo Toledo) and a Bolaño-reading Mexican hit-man (Hugo Silva).
The flight gets into trouble early on when it is found wheel-blocks have got stuck in the landing gear. The cabin crew have luckily had the foresight to tranquillise all passengers in economy class so panic is averted as the plane circles endlessly above Toledo (‘La Mancha-Castilla, not Ohio’, as Joserra specifies), hoping for a runway to come free somewhere. The middle section of the film is cobbled together fairly half-heartedly, held together by a rather gratuitous song-and-dance sequence involving the Pointer Sisters’ 80s classic (hence the awful English title, which lacks the poetic pun of the original). The choreography is provided by none other than Blanca Li, who, you imagine, probably gave her instructions over the phone. It’s a curious use of heavy resources for such flimsy ends but Almodóvar is probably at a point where he can do whatever he pleases, and I’m So Excited is a bagatelle that he most likely put together on the hoof while waiting for a more substantial idea to come along – he chose not to submit it for any of the major film festivals, though, then again, he did likewise with Talk to Her or Bad Education. It’s amiable if forgetful fluff, a vibrant echo of his earlier Movida work made with more resources. Now, I wonder what the critical reaction will be…
Showing posts with label Spain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spain. Show all posts
Thursday, April 11, 2013
Monday, February 25, 2013
La Bande des Jotas - Marjane Satrapi
La Bande des Jotas (Marjane Satrapi - France/Belgium) 74 minutes
Filmmakers of straitened means have long been attracted to the south of Spain. As well as the raft of spaghetti westerns shot in Almeria, there is Fassbinder’s Whity and Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell. Marjane Satrapi is not exactly incapable of mustering together a budget but after the relative flop of her second feature Poulet aux prunes, she decamped to Valencia to film on a shoestring this oddity that is as enjoyable as it is undeniably disposable.
La Bande des Jotas is Satrapi’s third film and her first not to be adapted from one of her own comic books and also the first without co-director Vincent Paronnaud. She takes the lead role herself, a woman seemingly in distress but endowed with plenty of cash (a wry nod, no doubt, to the film’s frugal production). Upon arriving at her hotel she discovers she has mistakenly reclaimed the wrong suitcase from the airport. It belongs to a pair of badminton players, Nils and Didier (Mathias Ripa – Satrapi’s real-life husband - and Stéphane Roche) who are travelling around Spain playing in tournaments. Having got her suitcase back, our heroine takes the pair out to dinner in thanks but then spies a mysterious hood who she claims has murdered her sister and is now trying to track her down.
Nils and Didier then become embroiled in her problems when they accidentally kill the man, who is one of five brothers – Juan, José, Jorge, Joaquin and Julio – the titular bande des jotas. The pair join Satrapi on her peregrinations across the Spanish Riviera, now, in their turn, tracking down the gang.
The film is low-budget but fairly handsomely put together nonetheless (Satrapi and Roche collaborated on the photography and editing) and the director herself is a surprisingly engaging comic presence, a Persian female Woody Allen, if you will. La bande des Jotas is quite clearly a film that was made up as it went along; the action occasionally frays but it provides enough laughs for an improvised comedy. It was presumably intended as a placeholder, or an interim exercise until her next film and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It clocks in at 74 minutes and the use of Impact – the typeface of one million internet memes – in the title sequence sums up the jokiness quite well. It is also more enjoyable than Jim Jarmusch's woefully serious The Limits of Control. We might be better served by a new comic book from Marjane Satrapi (her last, Poulet aux prunes dates back to 2004) but we can be grateful for such an inoffensive curio as this for the time being.
Filmmakers of straitened means have long been attracted to the south of Spain. As well as the raft of spaghetti westerns shot in Almeria, there is Fassbinder’s Whity and Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell. Marjane Satrapi is not exactly incapable of mustering together a budget but after the relative flop of her second feature Poulet aux prunes, she decamped to Valencia to film on a shoestring this oddity that is as enjoyable as it is undeniably disposable.
La Bande des Jotas is Satrapi’s third film and her first not to be adapted from one of her own comic books and also the first without co-director Vincent Paronnaud. She takes the lead role herself, a woman seemingly in distress but endowed with plenty of cash (a wry nod, no doubt, to the film’s frugal production). Upon arriving at her hotel she discovers she has mistakenly reclaimed the wrong suitcase from the airport. It belongs to a pair of badminton players, Nils and Didier (Mathias Ripa – Satrapi’s real-life husband - and Stéphane Roche) who are travelling around Spain playing in tournaments. Having got her suitcase back, our heroine takes the pair out to dinner in thanks but then spies a mysterious hood who she claims has murdered her sister and is now trying to track her down.
Nils and Didier then become embroiled in her problems when they accidentally kill the man, who is one of five brothers – Juan, José, Jorge, Joaquin and Julio – the titular bande des jotas. The pair join Satrapi on her peregrinations across the Spanish Riviera, now, in their turn, tracking down the gang.
The film is low-budget but fairly handsomely put together nonetheless (Satrapi and Roche collaborated on the photography and editing) and the director herself is a surprisingly engaging comic presence, a Persian female Woody Allen, if you will. La bande des Jotas is quite clearly a film that was made up as it went along; the action occasionally frays but it provides enough laughs for an improvised comedy. It was presumably intended as a placeholder, or an interim exercise until her next film and it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It clocks in at 74 minutes and the use of Impact – the typeface of one million internet memes – in the title sequence sums up the jokiness quite well. It is also more enjoyable than Jim Jarmusch's woefully serious The Limits of Control. We might be better served by a new comic book from Marjane Satrapi (her last, Poulet aux prunes dates back to 2004) but we can be grateful for such an inoffensive curio as this for the time being.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Blancanieves
Blancanieves (Pablo Berger - Spain/France) 90 minutes
The craze for silent cinema continues. Following the Oscar-winning The Artist and Miguel Gomes’s half-silent Tabu, the latest offering is from Spain, by director Pablo Berger. Blancanieves, an adaptation of Snow White, is closer to the The Artist in appearance but its sensibility is more similar to Gomes’s. It is not simply a fine silent film that is largely free of gimmicks (unlike Michel Hazanavicius’s Oscar winner) but a first-rate, at times ingenious, literary adaptation.
The action begins in the bullrings of Seville in the early 20th century, with maestro toreador António Villalta at his peak, only to be horrendously gored by the bull when he is momentarily blinded by a photographer’s flash. His pregnant wife witnesses it and goes into labour from the distress. The two are taken to hospital, where Villalta’s life is saved but the wife dies during childbirth. Villalta then marries his scheming nurse Encarna (a brilliantly icy Maribel Verdú, from Y Tu Mama También and Pan’s Labyrinth) and the young daughter, Carmencita, is packed off to live with her maternal grandmother.
After the grandmother’s death, the child goes to live with Encarna, where she is barred from seeing her father, wheelchair-bound and kept captive in his upstairs bedroom, but finds a way nonetheless. All this time she is subjected to the familiar cruelty and life of drudgery in the house’s lower quarters. After finally escaping the house, she meets up with a travelling circus troupe - seven dwarves, naturally. She is unable to remember her name so they baptise her Blancanieves ("like in the fairy tale", a wryly self-reflexive take on the source material). She finds she has inherited her father’s talent in the corrida and becomes a sensation in Andalusia, knocking Encarna off the front pages of the society magazines, provoking her stepmother’s ire.
What makes Blancanieves particularly fresh is it doesn’t slavishly follow all the available tropes of silent cinema; though it is clearly a homage to European films of the silent era, it lets its story breathe and mines other arts and later cinema too for its references. Kiko de la Rica’s hight-contrast black-and-white photography is a delight and both he and Berger excel at capturing the very photogenic charms of Seville. It is a slice of sun-drenched Latin Gothic that stands as an innovative film in its own right while also giving new life to an old fairytale (while simultaneously drawing elements from one or two others). Blancanieves’s success at the box-office in Spain, where it has been hailed as the best film of 2012 by none other than Pedro Almódovar, suggests that silent cinema may have an audience that will sustain it beyond being a simple fad. With the availability of silent films online now, it may well be that more people are receptive to films without sound than there have been since the advent of the talkies. That may or may not be the case but Blancanieves is likely to be a film that will last (certainly more so than The Artist).
The craze for silent cinema continues. Following the Oscar-winning The Artist and Miguel Gomes’s half-silent Tabu, the latest offering is from Spain, by director Pablo Berger. Blancanieves, an adaptation of Snow White, is closer to the The Artist in appearance but its sensibility is more similar to Gomes’s. It is not simply a fine silent film that is largely free of gimmicks (unlike Michel Hazanavicius’s Oscar winner) but a first-rate, at times ingenious, literary adaptation.
The action begins in the bullrings of Seville in the early 20th century, with maestro toreador António Villalta at his peak, only to be horrendously gored by the bull when he is momentarily blinded by a photographer’s flash. His pregnant wife witnesses it and goes into labour from the distress. The two are taken to hospital, where Villalta’s life is saved but the wife dies during childbirth. Villalta then marries his scheming nurse Encarna (a brilliantly icy Maribel Verdú, from Y Tu Mama También and Pan’s Labyrinth) and the young daughter, Carmencita, is packed off to live with her maternal grandmother.
After the grandmother’s death, the child goes to live with Encarna, where she is barred from seeing her father, wheelchair-bound and kept captive in his upstairs bedroom, but finds a way nonetheless. All this time she is subjected to the familiar cruelty and life of drudgery in the house’s lower quarters. After finally escaping the house, she meets up with a travelling circus troupe - seven dwarves, naturally. She is unable to remember her name so they baptise her Blancanieves ("like in the fairy tale", a wryly self-reflexive take on the source material). She finds she has inherited her father’s talent in the corrida and becomes a sensation in Andalusia, knocking Encarna off the front pages of the society magazines, provoking her stepmother’s ire.
What makes Blancanieves particularly fresh is it doesn’t slavishly follow all the available tropes of silent cinema; though it is clearly a homage to European films of the silent era, it lets its story breathe and mines other arts and later cinema too for its references. Kiko de la Rica’s hight-contrast black-and-white photography is a delight and both he and Berger excel at capturing the very photogenic charms of Seville. It is a slice of sun-drenched Latin Gothic that stands as an innovative film in its own right while also giving new life to an old fairytale (while simultaneously drawing elements from one or two others). Blancanieves’s success at the box-office in Spain, where it has been hailed as the best film of 2012 by none other than Pedro Almódovar, suggests that silent cinema may have an audience that will sustain it beyond being a simple fad. With the availability of silent films online now, it may well be that more people are receptive to films without sound than there have been since the advent of the talkies. That may or may not be the case but Blancanieves is likely to be a film that will last (certainly more so than The Artist).
Monday, June 30, 2008
And finally...
Thankfully the quality and excitement of Euro 2008 didn't let up and the tournament produced worthy winners in Spain, even if it was a shame they weren't able to copper-fasten their clear superiority to Germany with a more emphatic scoreline. The Spanish laid their ghosts of past failures to rest to collect their first European title since 1964 (the front-page headline on Marca, the leading Spanish football paper, today is 'It's not a dream, it's reality - we are the champions!') Spain were the most consistent side in the tournament and played some great football with their only flaw being a lack of clinical edge at times. Their attitude was a refreshing reflection of the tournament as a whole; even in the dying seconds of the match, they went chasing a second goal when most teams would have taken the ball to the corner flag to count down time. There were also two touching tributes on the podium after the match, one was the t-shirt worn by Sergio Ramos in honour of his friend and former teammate Antonio Puerta, who died after collapsing during Seville's first game of last season. Reserve goalkeeper Andrés Palop also collected his medal wearing the shirt worn by Luis Arconada in the 1984 final, when Arconada's unfortunate error allowed Michel Platini's free kick to slip underneath his body for France's opening goal. Platini, who presented the Henri Delaunay Cup to Iker Casillas, had also invited Arconada to the final, a touching homage to a great goalkeeper who is too often remembered for two errors, the one against France and the one that allowed Gerry Armstrong to score in Valencia two years earlier in Northern Ireland's shock win.
Casillas is another fine keeper, whom I can admire in spite of my own antipathy towards Real Madrid. Sid Lowe on the Guardian podcast told a story of a young Casillas costing his father an enormous football pools win by forgetting to check in his coupon. With this win, the debt has probably been paid back. It's also easy to forget that that the star of Spanish football, Raúl, was absent from the squad, unpicked since the defeat in Belfast two years ago. The Spanish media have taken Luis Aragones' decision poorly but, given Raúl's previous track record of bottling it in vital games for Spain, more steel was surely needed for this tournament, and Aragones was probably right.
And so ends a great tournament; it has to be acknowledged that most of the great football was facilitated by terrible defending and there is no guarantee that it will be repeated in South Africa in two years' time. But with great international tournaments in both Europe and Africa this year, the future looks bright for international football. One thing I hope doesn't happen is UEFA's intended expansion of the tournament to accomodate 24 teams. We don't need a tournament that allows undeserving underperformers such as Ireland, Belgium and England an easier passage to the finals. The match of the tournament will remain Holland v Russia, as two teams who were exhilarating but ultimately not good enough, produced a dizzying show of attacking football. Hopefully both sides will be in South Africa in 2010. The prospect of returning to watch Premiership football now is a bit disheartening.
And here are some images from a joyous Madrid, captured by an Irishman abroad.
Casillas is another fine keeper, whom I can admire in spite of my own antipathy towards Real Madrid. Sid Lowe on the Guardian podcast told a story of a young Casillas costing his father an enormous football pools win by forgetting to check in his coupon. With this win, the debt has probably been paid back. It's also easy to forget that that the star of Spanish football, Raúl, was absent from the squad, unpicked since the defeat in Belfast two years ago. The Spanish media have taken Luis Aragones' decision poorly but, given Raúl's previous track record of bottling it in vital games for Spain, more steel was surely needed for this tournament, and Aragones was probably right.
And so ends a great tournament; it has to be acknowledged that most of the great football was facilitated by terrible defending and there is no guarantee that it will be repeated in South Africa in two years' time. But with great international tournaments in both Europe and Africa this year, the future looks bright for international football. One thing I hope doesn't happen is UEFA's intended expansion of the tournament to accomodate 24 teams. We don't need a tournament that allows undeserving underperformers such as Ireland, Belgium and England an easier passage to the finals. The match of the tournament will remain Holland v Russia, as two teams who were exhilarating but ultimately not good enough, produced a dizzying show of attacking football. Hopefully both sides will be in South Africa in 2010. The prospect of returning to watch Premiership football now is a bit disheartening.
And here are some images from a joyous Madrid, captured by an Irishman abroad.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
