Andrew Worsdale picks the best out of an exciting line-up for the Spanish film festival
The Spanish ambassador to South Africa, Miguel Angel Carriedo, is a devoted film fan. A few years ago he even became part of a consortium that invested in movies and, sadly, like many others, lost money.
He did enjoy a bit of the acclaim, even though, as he says, tongue delightfully firm in his cheek: ”I didn’t have such a great time because they wouldn’t let me interfere with the filming.”
He put money into three of gifted young Spanish director Manuel Gutierrez Aragon’s films, including the luminous Maravilles, but then gave up and failed to enjoy the profits of the director’s fourth film – a box- office hit called Demons in the Garden.
Last week a coterie of local film critics were treated to lunch by the ambassador at Sandton’s swanky Linger Longer restaurant as a kind of press junket for the Spanish-American film festival which opens this weekend in Johannesburg before moving to Cape Town and Pretoria.
Now I’ve had media meetings with the French, the Japanese, the Dutch and the British – but the Spaniards knocked my cinematic feet off. They’re highbrow without being pretentious, incredibly knowledgable about movies, sexy without being rambunctious and utterly hospitable without being patronising. It’s a pity that so little of Spanish film has been seen in South Africa. This – the first film festival of Spanish and also Latin American titles – hopes to correct that.
The Spanish film industry has always been a contradiction between transgression and faithful sentimental schlock. But the country’s greatest directors have all been cinematic anarchists.
Luis Buuel, arguably Spain’s greatest auteur, was the first to deal in a subversive way with the country’s myths and culture, from Miguel de Cervantes and Diego Velsquez to Francisco Goya. He also probed religion, Catholicism, childhood, sexuality, dreams, perversions – all bounded by a surrealistic vision. As Buuel once said: ”A religious education and surrealism have marked me for life.”
Much the same can be said of Spain’s other leading directors. The country’s film output is marked by strong scenes of transgression balanced against a firm feeling of family values – if you can believe it.
As with Italian neo-realism and the French new wave, Spanish cinema has developed a distinctive style and content from the 1930s to the present. At one point it was totally isolated and censored by the Franco regime. The republican period produced sentimental and supposedly patriotic movies about the nation.
But post-Franco is another ballgame and the emergence of subversive movie- makers like Pedro Almodovar and Bigas Luna (dare one say, Almodovar’s heterosexual equivalent) have given rise to a Spanish cinema that is bursting at the seams. Add to that the fact that cable station Canal Plus (the Spanish version inherited from the French) has plugged a lot of money into film and the presence of the European Union.
Although the Spanish film industry doesn’t rely on it as much as the French or Germans, it is nevertheless kicking impetus into their movie- making.
Perhaps the best explanation for their success, however, is given by ambassador Carriedo. ”Remember the Spanish nation were the biggest card- carrying anarchists in the 1930s, so we’ve always had a sense of rebelliousness,” he said to me over oysters and salmon.
”But more importantly we make provincial, even parochial films. A film from Madrid is noticeably different from one from Barcelona.”
But, all the same, the whole nation goes to see them. The Spanish have a great sense of being unified but different – something local movie industry players could certainly learn from. There is no grand Spanish nation-defining film, just a lot of different ones that make up a cool, funky and very cinematic heritage. Similarly, we don’t need to make the ultimate South African movie.
PICKS OF THE FESTIVAL
Law of Desire
Possibly Pedro Almodovar’s best film, certainly his most contained and, being explicitly gay, his most honest and least flippant. It’s a tragi-comic murder thriller about a director of homo-erotic movies torn between his lover who has no desire for him and a sexy stranger. Add to the concoction his sex-changed brother turned lesbian and her lover’s precocious daughter and you have all the wit and madness common to Almodovar tempered by a truly touching bitter-sweet melancholy.
El Sur
Victor Erice’s 1973 film The Spirit of the Beehive is one of the great modern masterpieces of cinema. Ten years later (evidently he went into commerce for a decade) he directed this piece – a painterly, slow-moving and evocative drama set in 1950s Spain.
The movie is seen through the eyes of a child as she tries to sort out good from evil, not really knowing if there’s a difference. Definitely the most arty movie on the festival but eminently satisfying.
The Day of the Beast
Young director Alex de la Iglesia is a protg of Almodovar, who produced his debut – a cyber-horror pic called Accion Mutante. This is a beautifully mounted, sardonic, blasphemous comedy thriller. A priest is convinced that the anti-Christ is about to be born in the Spanish capital and, in an attempt to meet him, goes on a spree of murder and robbery. It’s a perfectly anarchic and at times tasteless piece of schlock, and true testament to what the enigmatic Mr Marco (counsellor to the Spanish ambassador) says, that this festival is not about being highbrow, ”we also want to entertain people”.
Vacas
Julio Medem’s mesmerising and sometimes surreal movie about the blood rivalry and confrontation of two men getting old. Exquisitely filmed, it was a major hit on the indie film circuit in London and highly acclaimed as both lyrical and disarmingly artistic while still being firmly dramatic.
Naked with Oranges
From Venezuela, this is an epic kind of The Bold and the Beautiful about an art collector who discovers a story from six decades previously during the Venezuelan civil war, where an Indian serving in the army falls in love with a mute white woman. A little soppy for me, it nevertheless has some sweeping historical scenes and could prove a suitable anecdote to all the other cheeky stuff on show.
Bwana
Winner of seven Goya awards (the Spanish Oscar) this is an incisive and sometimes funny exploration of racism involving a taxi driver, his wife and two children who meet an African tramp running from his roots on a solitary beach with a friend.
I know little of the films from Argentina, Chile and Mexico but Argentina’s Hector Olivera, who made a landmark film about the Falklands called A Funny Dirty Little War, has a film called A Shadow You Soon Will Be on show which involves a washed-up computer programmer stuck in the middle of nowhere running into eccentric small-town people after his train breaks down. Should be worth catching.
For full programme details contact Cinema Noveau in Johannesburg or Cape Town, or the Brooklyn in Pretoria.