General Report on Certain Matters of Interest For a Public Screening [1977]

 Pere Portabella, a giant of Spanish political cinema and documentary filmmaking, fused formal experimentation with dissident activism through his films, and carried his progressive commitments into post-Franco Spain and Catalonia through active political participations and drafting the new Spanish Constitution. His involvements, as Spain begun its complex transition from dictatorship to democracy in the late-1970s, found a rich and sprawling manifestation in this hybrid documentary essay – made following the fascist Generalissimo’s death – that remains a landmark of radical cinema. Clocking at over 2 ½ hours, it began on a moody note as we’re given a sombre tour of the Valley of the Fallen memorial. It switched gears right after, and the next 10-odd minutes contained some of the most thrilling footage of protests by Spain’s antifascist brigade – public demonstrations, furious battles with the cops on the streets, and brutal reprisals – set to a pulsating score. The work, thereafter, drifted into deep political discourses, debates and conversations. While these were primarily between representatives from various left-wing parties – Communists, socialists, trade unionists, social democrats, independent Marxists, reformists, Catalan left intellectuals – Portabella included even a conservative and a monarchist into the mix, as they explored the routes that Spain must pursue as it prepares for democratic elections and electoral coalitions. In a fascinating formal choice, he alternated these pluralist viewpoints, and parallel meditations on the past – through collective memories, narrations and visuals – with performative elements. The latter facet was daringly expressed through a particularly unnerving sequence wherein violent interrogation and torture sequences by Franco’s extrajudicial security apparatus, enacted by actors and carrying the feel of a visceral political thriller, were juxtaposed with articles being read out from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Director: Pere Portabella

Genre: Documentary/Political Documentary/Essay Film/Experimental Film

Language: Spanish/Catalan

Country: Spain

Live Flesh (Carne Trémula) [1997]

 Pedro Almodóvar – who’d pivoted from campy, lowbrow farce with his fabulous preceding film The Flower of My Secret – did a free adaptation of British writer Ruth Rendell’s crime novel with this sexy and absorbing tale of pathological obsessions and jealousies setting off violent crimes. Balancing hot-blooded passions with barely controlled restraint – and demonstrating that style IS substance in his films, and thereby the indistinguishability between the two – the Spanish filmmaker mixed the proceedings with romantic and marital complexities, outrageous coincidences, lush melodrama, and sardonic commentaries on Spain’s Francoist past, for a feverishly imagined ménage à cinq. Naïve 20-year-old Victor (Liberto Rabal), who’s become besotted with the ravishing Elena (Francesca Neri) in her 30s after a one-night-stand, inadvertently triggers a catastrophic shoot-out that perennially changes their lives as well as two cops – the saner David (Javier Bardem) and the more volatile Sancho (Pepe Sancho) – and Sancho’s wife Clara (Ángela Molina) who Sancho is insanely suspicious of for her supposed infidelity. That baroque sequence puts Victor in jail and turns David paraplegic. Fast-forward few years later, and a now-hardened Victor is craving for a saucy revenge upon finding out that David has become a star basketball player at the Paralympics and married to Elena, but gets embroiled into a fervent clandestine affair with the much-older Clara instead, who’s desperate to leave Sancho. David, meanwhile, is convinced that David plans to seduce Elena, who’s toned down from his drug-addled past, and this unapologetically contrived setup accelerates rearrangement of equations and reckless flareups. Filled with voluptuous emotions, bold colour palettes, sumptuous soundtrack, and teasing Buñuel references, the film was bookended by trippy “nativity” sequences, with the former featuring Penélope Cruz in a cameo.

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Genre: Crime Thriller/Romantic Thriller/Marital Thriller

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Romería [2025]

 Romería – Carla Simón’s delicate, melancholic and gorgeously sun-kissed third film was a nakedly autobiographical work from her. The Catalan director lost her parents to AIDS when she was six, grew up with her uncle and his family, and went on to study filmmaking. Her delicately realized alter-ego Marina (Llúcia Garcia) has a similar personal arc, and her haunting quest for her deceased parents – alongside reconciliations with her hazy memories of them – informed this deeply personal film. The striking 18-year-old protagonist, who intends to study film at university, needs to get recognized on her father’s death certificate to be eligible for scholarship, and hence travels to the coastal city of Vigo in the hopes of getting a notarized attestation from her paternal grandparents who she’s never met. There, over the course of five days, she meets uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces all of whom welcome her with a mix of warmth and curiosity; her seemingly genial grandfather attempts to “bribe” her with money that’ll allow her to pursue her studies without the need for scholarship and therefore the legal formalities; and her stern grandmother openly disapproves her presence. Armed with her mom’s diary that steers her “homecoming” and a digital camcorder frequently complementing her own eyes, she starts piecing together what really happened to her parents – who embodied Spain’s “lost generation” – through interactions with her newly found family, their oftentimes conflicting accounts, and an unsaid sense of shame surrounding their tragic backstories. Led by the wonderful Garcia and a lively cast, this visually sumptuous work reminded me of such recent films as Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, and in particular, Karim Aïnouz’s docu essay Mariner of the Mountains.

Director: Carla Simon

Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Autobiographical Cinema/Diary Film

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Sirāt [2025]

 Óliver Laxe’s existential road movie Sirāt was both an unconventional film and a film made unconventionally. Combining the hellish journey of outsiders with nothing to lose (except their lives) in Clouzot’s Wages of Fear – or perhaps more appropriately, due to their tonal likeness, Friedkin’s remake Sorcerer – and the dystopian, post-apocalyptic landscapes of Mad Max, with the monomaniac quest of a father for his daughter who’s switched sides with the “philistines”, so to speak, in Ford’s The Searchers, it formed an elemental and sensorial experience. The latter aspect was heightened by its hyper-saturated realism, a visceral audiovisual palette counterpointing a stripped-down narrative, and its embracing of a techno-trance world where music is for dancing rather than listening to. Set in the harsh and visually stunning deserts of southern Morocco – captured through electrifying cinematography and accompanied by a pulsating electronic score – its primal setup followed Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged man who, along with his adolescent son Esteban, joins a subaltern group of nomadic misfits residing outside societal boundaries – and whose raison d'être is to reach transcendence through hallucinogenic music and drugs – in search of his missing daughter. They meet at a throbbing rave held in the desert, and when that’s dismantled by the cops, they embark on a crazy ride that evolves from thrilling and immersive to tragic and shocking, to reach another illegal rave – Luis, hoping to locate his daughter, and the eccentric gang for music that never ends. This was, therefore, a story that begins in media res and ends just as abruptly, and the arbitrary violence, meaninglessness and breakdown of civilization that they encounter served as proxy to the third world war that blazes outside the frames.

Director: Oliver Laxe

Genre: Psychological Thriller/Neo-Western/Road Movie/Adventure/Epic

Language: Spanish/French/Arabic

Country: Spain

El Sur (The South) [1983]

 El Sur, Victor Erice’s first film in a decade since his unforgettable debut with The Spirit of the Beehive – his next narrative feature, Close Your Eyes, would come half a century later – is that rare cinematic gem that succeeded in becoming one despite being an unfinished film… or maybe, because it was one. Adapted by Erice from the novella of the same name by his wife Adelaida García Morales, this sublime exploration of memories, disillusionment, loss and the inescapable ravages of time – awash in painterly beauty and profound melancholy – was supposed to have a runtime of 2-½ hours, but was stopped short at roughly the two-third mark by its producer Elías Querejeta citing that funds had extinguished, but real reasons never fully disclosed. The film as it stood, however, turned into a particularly haunting longing for the mythical “south” of the title as the final part – that was supposed to finally take us there – never got made. Life the earlier work, this too was a coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of a young, lonely and imaginative girl, and was underscored with the desolate remnants of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s totalitarian regime. Estrella (marvellously played by Sonsoles Aranguren and Icíar Bollaín as the initial 8-year-old and the later 15-year-old, respectively), who stays in a remote house in northern Spain with her parents Agustín (Omero Antonutti) and Julia (Lola Cardona) – they were both anti-Francoists and never seen speaking to each other now – is fascinated by her taciturn dad and entranced by the magical “sur”. Hypnotically photographed by José Luis Alcaine, the film’s standout central moment featured a rapturous single-take dance between father and daughter to paso doble music.

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

The Spirit of the Beehive [1973]

 Victor Erice’s celebrated debut feature The Spirit of the Beehive remains both a seminal Spanish film and an exceptional chronicling from a child’s POV. Made during Franco’s fascist regime – which was notorious for suppressing “non-compliant” works of art – Erice was compelled to express his critiques and disillusionment through elliptical, allegorical and allusive means; one therefore must engage in critical readings of the film to interpret its brooding political undertones. What remains unambiguous, however, is that this was a haunting and ethereal masterpiece, and a sublime text on how cinema can be a distillation of magic, poetry, memory, politics and defiance rolled into one. Set in a rundown village in 1940 – with the devastating Civil War having just ended with the Republicans’ defeat – the moody, minimalist and delicately weaved narrative is centred around wide-eyed six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent). Her ageing father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) remains absorbed in beehives, while her mother is lost reminiscing about someone she’s lost in the war. Her closest friend is her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), who loves playing little pranks on her naïveté. When James Whales’ Frankenstein is screened at a rundown theatre which the sisters watch in awe, Ana becomes fixated by the misunderstood monster – more so, when Isabel teasingly convinces her that he exists as a disembodied ghost at an isolated cabin nearby. Consequently, upon encountering a wounded Republican soldier who’s taken refuge there, she helps him assuming he’s the spirit’s manifestation, and is deeply scarred when he’s killed. Torrent, who’d star in Saura’s equally haunting masterpiece Cria Cuervos 3 years later, and Tellería were unforgettable, as was the magnificent, washed-out cinematography by Luis Cuadrado who started losing his eyesight during the filming.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

p.p.s. This also happens to be my 2000th film review at Cinemascope.

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Coming-of-Age/Fantasy

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Ogro (Operación Ogro) [1979]

 Gillo Pontecovro – former chemistry student, anti-fascist partisan during WW2 and Marxist journalist after the war who was catalysed into filmmaking upon seeing Rossellini’s seminal neorealist work Paisan – is perennially associated with his blazing masterpiece The Battle of Algiers, that remains both landmark political cinema and formally daring exercise. Operación Ogro – his largely overlooked final feature – might’ve lacked in pulsating ferocity, but was no less a cinema of resistance that straddled between rigorous documentation of the eponymous operation and ideological discourse on revolutionary actions, and a compelling political thriller too. Shot in washed-out colours, it’s structured along two interweaving strands, thus covering the divergent routes taken by two comrades-in-arms due to deep dialectical divergences despite their shared love for Basque identity and detestation of Franco; this aspect – and how the death of the one whose choices were underpinned by a more violent method represented the end of a chapter – heavily reminded me of Ken Loach’s powerful IRA film The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The primary track, set in 1973, chronicles in riveting details the mission undertaken by four men and two women belonging to the far-left separatist group ETA – the methodical cell leader Izarra (Gian Maria Volontè), the hot-headed former priest Txabi (Eusebio Poncela), Txabi’s wife (Ángela Molina) and the rest – who relocate to Madrid with the plans of kidnapping Franco’s Deputy PM Carrero Blanco (aka ‘ochre’), but changes that to assassination when he becomes the PM. In the melancholic parallel tract, set few years after Franco’s death, ETA has come to the negotiating table led by Izarra, while Txabi continues to be a radical separatist. The music was scored by Morricone while Ana Torrent featured in a cameo.

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo

Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Docufiction/Historical Thriller

Language: Spanish/Basque

Country: Italy/Spain

The Other Way Around [2024]

 The Other Way Around is a break-up dramedy with an idiosyncratic twist. The striking and assured Ale (Itsaso Arana), an indie filmmaker, and Alex (Vito Sanz), an easy-going actor of middling success who’s collaborated regularly with Ale, have decided to end their relationship, for reasons not shared, after having been a long-standing couple. Not only do they continue to be on amicable terms, barring the odd disagreements, while planning their separation – scouting apartments for one of them to shift, dividing up their books and DVDs, informing their friends, colleagues, neighbour, English tutor and even plumber, etc. – they even decide to throw a party to celebrate their break-up, which was once jocularly suggested by Ale’s philosophically-inclined father (played with deadpan touch by director Jonás Trueba’s real-life father Fernando Trueba). As they go about inviting people, they’re met with varying degrees of befuddled reactions, all the while convinced that they’ll eventually get back together. While a carefree, light-hearted, droll and low-key work in every sense, it had a few quirky elements at play underneath the surface. For one, it’s impishly self-reflexive as it obliquely cited Classic Hollywood movies about divorced couples getting back together, while also cheekily referencing Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre and his complicated relationship with Liv Ullmann. Further, it’s also a casually understated exercise in postmodernism as, amusingly, Ale has just completed an offbeat film on a similar subject starring Alex. Shot with a breezy air in Madrid, and featuring engaging turns by the two leads, its most self-consciously funny moment involved intellectuals debating whether Ale has made a “linear” or “circular” film – i.e. a plot-driven work or one of ideas – which could easily be extended to Trueba’s work too.

Director: Jonas Trueba

Genre: Comedy/Marital Comedy

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

La Casa [2024]

 There isn’t a dearth of memorable films foregrounded on siblings and relatives who, upon an unplanned reunion, get flooded with unresolved memories, and tenuously accomplish a semblance of reconciliation. And yet La Casa, Álex Montoya’s bittersweet, seriocomic and deftly layered adaptation of Paco Roca’s graphic novel of the same name, had an enlivening authenticity and freshness about it. The filmmaker composed it through a nuanced mix of myriad emotions – humour, warmth, nostalgia, melancholy, grief, regrets, repressed bitterness – and delicately evoked vignettes that added underlying complexities into this exceptionally intimate slice-of-life tale. The death of their aged father – once a vigorous person who became an ailing, lonely man in old age, and who meant profoundly to each of them, albeit in vastly different ways – brings together three siblings to the now barren, dust-filled house filled with echoes of the past. Their primary intent is to sell off the place. That, unsurprisingly, turns out far more difficult than they’d anticipated. Moreover, while they’ve drifted apart and their lives have taken divergent courses, they still retain fierce bonds which unravel over the course of a few days. The film’s exceptional ensemble cast comprised of David Verdaguer and Olivia Molina as José, a writer, and his editor wife; Óscar de la Fuente, Marta Belenguer and María Romanillos, respectively, as older brother Vicente, his wife and their daughter; Lorena López as the sister; and Miguel Rellán as an ageing neighbour. Exquisitely photographed in warm, muted colours and interspersed with sepia-toned Super8 reels, it’s really a mini-marvel that such a seemingly “unoriginal” film, at the risk of being seeped in contrived sentimentality, instead succeeded in being such a richly textured work and an absorbing watch.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Alex Montoya

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Ensemble Film

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

The Room Next Door [2024]

 Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature-length film in English, The Room Next Door – based on Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through – bore all the distinctive signatures of the veteran Spanish maestro’s serious-toned films. With its two complementary middle-aged women characters, blend of melodrama and artifice, lush visual designs, predisposition with mortality, and wordy script, one wouldn’t make any errors in guessing its director, even if – perhaps on account of it having been made in a cultural milieu far away from his home turf and in a language that he’s not fully comfortable in (thereby necessitating translation of his screenplay from Spanish) – it also felt tad stilted and mannered at times, and lacking in the kind of playful vibrancy that one finds in his best works. It, nevertheless, was engaging enough thanks to the commanding performances of its two lead actresses – Tilda Swinton (who’d also featured in Almodóvar’s tantalizing short The Human Voice) and Julianne Moore –, in the way it tampered its funereal theme with effusive emotions that bordered on the campy, and cinematic references ranging from Fassbinder and Bergman to Keaton and Rosellini. Ingrid (Moore), a bestselling author, and Martha (Swinton), an erstwhile war journalist – old friends who’ve even shared the same boyfriend (John Turturro) – are reconnected after many years when the former suddenly finds out that the latter is afflicted with terminal cancer. As they revive their deep friendship through old memories, anecdotes and regrets, Martha confides into Ingrid that she’s decided to end her life and requests her to be in the room next door when she does that. Almodóvar, interestingly, permeated the atmosphere with an air of mystery, even if the premise was unambiguously clear throughout.

p.s. Watched it at the 2025 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES).

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Buddy Film

Language: English

Country: Spain

Close Your Eyes [2023]

 What could be more meta and self-reflexive than a filmmaker directing a feature-length work after three decades, centred on a filmmaker who abruptly stopped making movies three decades back! Victor Erice, best remembered for his celebrated debut film The Spirit of the Beehives – an allegorical anti-Francoist parable that’s attained mythic position in the annals of Spanish cinema – directed one feature per decade for the next two decades, but hadn’t made any since 1992’s Dream of Light. Understandably, the anticipation for Close Your Eyes, ever since it was announced, was massive among cinephiles, and fortunately one isn’t left disappointed. It begins with the muted footage of a film within film from early-90s, titled The Farewell Gaze, around a wealthy old man hiring a former anti-fascist partisan to find his lost daughter. The leading actor, Julio Arenas (José Coronado), mysteriously disappeared midway – it was assumed that he’d committed suicide, but his body was never found – which led to its director Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo) – also a close friend of Julio’s – abandoning the film, quitting filmmaking, and retiring to a reclusive existence at a fishing village. However, when a TV show revives this old mystery by deciding to make an episode on it, Miguel is forced to revive faded impressions, old acquaintances and his lost love for cinema. Blended with melancholic meditations on memories and mortality, this solemn and decidedly personal work comprised of languorous storytelling, intriguing visual palettes, wry cinematic musings, and an absorbing reunion with Ana Torrent after half a century. As a then 6-year-old, she’d unforgettably starred in the director’s debut movie; incidentally, her screen name was Ana in both films, as well as in Saura’s devastating Cría Cuervos.

Director: Victor Erice

Genre: Drama/Showbiz Drama/Mystery

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

20,000 Species of Bees [2023]

 A temporary escape by a city-dwelling family to the countryside during the summer holidays is never just that in cinema, and Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s sublime and exquisitely textured debut feature used this framework with nuance and restraint for a richly realized exploration of a kid’s complex tussle with gender identity, alongside the family members’ chaotic reconciliations with it. At one point, the kid’s rugged yet perceptive beekeeper grand-aunt (Ane Gabarain) remarks, to assuage emotional turmoil, that there are 20,000 species of bees and all of them are good; this observation articulated the film’s emphatic advocacy for plurality, diversity and acceptance, conveyed predominantly through women’s gazes and shaped by the director’s extensive interactions with an association of the families of transgender minors. An eight-year-old’s turbulent journey from Aitor, i.e. biological male, via the ambiguous Cocó, to Lucía, thus ultimately establishing her self-expression, unfolded in an absorbingly sunny village in the Basque County, amidst her messy extended family comprising of her loving but harried mother Ane (Patricia López Arnaiz) – desperate to convert her passion for sculpting into full-time vocation, while struggling to come out of the shadows of her late father’s problematic legacy –, grandmother (Itziar Lazkano) with whom Ane has a strained relationship, siblings, aunts, cousins, and the afore-mentioned grand-aunt. Suffused with intimacy and fervid undercurrents, the film was particularly noteworthy for its flurry of moments despite its unhurried pacing, lyrical palette, and fine performances by the adults in the cast led by a captivating Arnaiz. But what superseded everything was Sofía Otero’s extraordinary turn as the vulnerable, conflicted and stubborn trans-girl, for which she – at the age of nine – became the youngest recipient of the Silver Bear at Berlinale.

p.s. Watched it at the 2024 Bangalore International Film Festival (BIFFES)

Director: Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren

Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Coming-of-Age

Language: Spanish/Basque

Country: Spain

You Have to Come and See It [ 2022]

 Spanish director Jonás Trueba’s deceptively conceived, structured and titled film You Have to Come and See It – a playful post-pandemic work – was laced with Rohmer’s enchanting influences with its lyrical, disarmingly intellectual depiction of two gentle-natured bourgeois couples. It also had a dash of Godard’s impish subversion with its meta, self-referential coda, and a touch of Woody’s deadpan neurosis too with its urban malaise and rambling conversations. I wonder how many filmmakers can speak of such eclectic references! It began with a rapturous opening montage – Chano Domínguez’s “live” performance of his intoxicating new composition Limbo at a jazz bar in Madrid, counterpointed by alternately lingering on the faces of the four protagonists through soft close-ups that provided observant introductions to them – that, with its leisurely evocation of a relaxing mood through the beguiling choice of devoting nearly 8 minutes in a slender runtime of an hour, was gloriously immersive. The strikingly lovely, bespectacled and erudite Elena (Itsaso Arana) and doodling, fidgety Daniel (Vitor Sanz) – who live in the city – and the pretty, friendly Susana (Irene Escolar) who’s expecting and the casual, carefree Guillermo (Francesco Carril) – who’ve recently moved to the countryside – are old friends meeting after a long gap, presumably on account of Covid and the latter couple’s decision to relocate. The former couple make a reluctant trip by train to the exurbs six months later – accompanied by Bill Callahan’s melodic “Let’s Move to the Country” – and the group have a lazy time catching up on their intimate personal developments, having an al fresco lunch, indulging in political/philosophical banter courtesy Elena’s passionate discourse on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life, playing ping pong, and exploring the surrounding environs.

Director: Jonas Trueba

Genre: Drama/Experimental Film

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Alcarràs [2022]

 Alcarràs was a decidedly political film, even when it wasn’t ostensibly so. Its embodiment of this curious dichotomy – between its themes vis-à-vis form – made it a particularly interesting work. It focussed on a closely-knit agricultural family’s last harvest before eviction from the peach orchard in rural Catalonia that they’ve tilled for generations – and the repercussions thereof, as it isn’t just their only livelihood, but raison d'être as well – because their landlord, refusing to honour the handshake agreement made by his deceased father, wants to raze it down and setup a lucrative solar farm in its place. Carla Simón, in an admirable artistic choice, gave space to every member of the Solé clan in the first film in Catalan language to win the Golden Bear – Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet), the increasingly grumpy middle-aged patriarch who leads the backbreaking harvest; his strong-willed wife who helps him on the farm while also managing domestic chores; their gangly, impulsive adolescent son (Albert Bosch), emotionally confused pre-teen daughter, and carefree, lovable little Iris (Iris (Ainet Jounou); the reserved, downcast grandpa (Josep Abad), and adorable grandma who loves reminiscing; and Quimet’s proud sister, frivolous brother-in-law and their chirpy twin kids who they’re all very close to – through their tribulations and joys, conflicts and camaraderie, falling-out and solidarity. The film, on one hand, was organically interwoven with such topics as fading memories of the Spanish Civil where Catalonia had played a revolutionary role, the advent of green capitalism, the exploitation of farmers by market forces, and use of low-cost migrant labour; while, on the other, it was awash in lyrical naturalism, bittersweet tones, luminous landscapes, quirky moments and the melancholic passage of a way of life.

Director: Carla Simon

Genre: Drama/Rural Drama/Family Drama

Language: Catalan

Country: Spain

Honeycomb [1969]

 The third chapter in Saura’s delicious and delirious ‘Bourgeois Trilogy’ – preceded by the brooding and magnificent Peppermint Frappe, and the stark and tense Stress Is Three – was a sensational exercise in absurdism, and a lacerating satire on the bourgeoisie – their social insularity, vacuous existences, class privilege and moral quagmire, that’re allegorically manifested through subversion of the sanctimonious institution of marriage – worthy of a top-drawer Buñuel. Through its progressively wild and unpredictable narrative arc – it began with an excellent, low-key single-take sequence that situated the viewers in the brutalist architecture of the exclusive villa where the film’s super-wealthy couple resides, to the bleak and shocking denouement – and an unhinged chronicle of marital toxicity that explodes into unfettered chaos and pulpy violence, it heralded a manic eruption of troubling memories, repressed obsessions, lurid fantasies and grotesque fetishes. When the ultra-staid ambiance, sterilized décor and rigid order within the modernist residence of the glum industrialist Pedro (Per Oscarsson) and his gleefully naïve wife Teresa (Geraldine Chaplin) – who possesses an anarchic streak despite having always lived in oppressive domesticity – are suddenly disturbed by the latter’s unsettling regression into her Catholic past, and the appearance of antique furniture in the household that’re antithetical and anachronistic to it, it ruptures the pair’s estranged marital dynamics and provokes them into indulging in a series of increasingly discomfiting, deranged, kinky and hysterical role-plays that’re bound to end on an ugly note for both, even if they’re spectacularly liberated out of their states of moribund stupor and existential decay in the process. Chaplin, who co-wrote the script with frequent Saura collaborator Rafael Azcona, gave an exhilarating turn as the volatile girl-woman who catalyses the couple’s mutually assured annihilation.

Director: Carlos Saura

Genre: Black Comedy/Social Satire/Marital Satire

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Stress Is Three [1968]

 Stress Is Three, the middle chapter in Carlos Saura’s wickedly brilliant and pungently satirical ‘Bourgeois Trilogy’ – which painted scabrous portraits of Spain’s Franco-era bourgeoisie, focusing on toxic and perverse relationships that’re defined by self-destructive obsessions, twisted passions, and unsettling fetishes hiding underneath false propriety – provided for a striking contradiction to the two superb films that sandwiched it, viz. Peppermint Frappé and Honeycomb. While the two films on either side were made in vivid colours, had greater thematic complexities, and broader temporal scopes, this stood aside with its monochrome visuals, narrative conciseness and events set over a single day. These facets, along with its off-balancing tone – which kept playfully veering towards psychological and even physical violence –, and portrayal of simmering marital and sexual jealousy that reached a ferocious intensity, made this an interesting companion piece to Polanski’s terrific debut film Knife in the Water. The film unfolds over a road trip – from Madrid to Almeria – taken by the uptight Fernando (Fernando Cebrián), a well-to-do and feudalist industrialist, his teasing wife Teresa (Geraldine Chaplin, Saura’s muse at that time who featured in all the three films in this trilogy) who he’s obsessed with, and his laidback friend and business partner Antonio (Juan Luis Galiardo) who he suspects Teresa is having a fervid affair with. His jealousy is especially amplified by the ironic tussle between his fears and his desire of being proven right. Grainy B/W imagery, along with the sparingly used pulsating jazz beats, filled the proceedings with electrifying undercurrents of paranoia and tension – to the extent that it felt the film is inevitably progressing towards an ugly denouement – while also complementing the brooding atmosphere with cynical levity and discordance.

Director: Carlos Saura

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Marital Drama/Road Movie

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain

Parallel Mothers [2021]

 Fearless, radical and politically conscious writers, filmmakers and documentarians – from Primo Levi to Eduardo Galaeno, Carlos Saura to Theo Angelopoulos, Claude Lanzmann to Patricio Guzmán – have always told us that one must combat fascism and oppression not just in the present, but also in the past by defiantly refusing to forget. The act of remembering, in other words, is a powerful weapon. Almodóvar, who’s always sided with outsiders, misfits, delinquents, subversives and outcasts in his flamboyant, non-conformist and boldly transgressive filmography, decided to powerfully confront Spain’s murky fascist, Francoist past – which the country’s politicos had decided to obliterate with its “Pact of Forgetting” while transitioning into democracy, and which is finally being restored with its “Law of Historical Memory” – in his dazzling, sumptuous and richly textured melodrama Parallel Mothers. Janis (Penélope Cruz) is a photographer in her 40s who, like her mom, becomes a single mother upon an affair with a forensic archaeologist (Israel Elejalde), whose help she sought for excavation of a mass grave where men were murdered and buried during the Spanish Civil War. At the hospital she befriends pregnant teenager Ana (Milena Smit), who was raped at a rave party and whose mother (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) is pursuing a career in acting. The lives of the ravishing, independent Janis and the rebellious, vulnerable Ana – brilliantly played by the respective actresses – become intricately entangled on account of their babies, and more so upon becoming lovers. The acts of confronting and addressing loss, unhealed wounds, inconvenient truths and troublesome memories – at both personal and national levels – therefore, were the key tenets which the Spanish maestro magnificently captured with sensitivity, sensuousness, passion, verve and through his quintessentially gorgeous aesthetic palette.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Pedro Almodovar

Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Romantic Drama

Language: Spanish

Country: Spain