¡Viva! 2013: Medianeras Review

Argentine director Gustavo Taretto’s offbeat romantic comedy is a charming treat.

This quirky genre-bending rom-com set in Buenos Aries has clear influences from early Woody Allen. It’s two protagonists, Martin (Javier Drolas) and Mariana (Pilar Lopez de Ayala), are perfect for one another but have never met. They share the same worries and thoughts, and their lives are shown in parallel. One will be singing a song on the radio, and Taretto will juxtapose it with the other doing the same. As crucial for any Woody-Allen-esque heroes, they are both riddled with neuroses and existential dilemmas. Both are damaged and depressed, struggling with singledom and isolation.

Mariana is a gorgeous qualified architect recently out of a four year relationship. She has a fear of lifts and a penchant for Where’s Wally books. Her job as a window shopper means she has a collection of mannequins, one of which she talks to and in one odd scene even starts simulating sex with, later to say to it “don’t get any false hopes, it was only sex”. She suffers from urban alienation and muses heavily on the nature of her job: “Sometimes if someone stops to look at the display, I feel like they are stopping to look at me”.

Martin is introduced at the film’s opening, talking in a voice over that accompanies photography of Buenos Aries. This is a homage to the start of Manhattan, (later on, Martin and Mariana are shown watching that film separately, crying) but far from a romantic commentary about a place he loves, he is bemoaning the mismatched architecture and incongruous planning, blaming it for his problems. The director sees it in a more favorable light as he mingles graphic art and charming illustrations of the city with the cinematography, rather like the style in Marc Webb’s  (500) Days of Summer. 

Martin is a hypochondriac and former agrophobe who spends most of his time indoors working as a web designer and being utterly cyber dependent. He has a small dog (the token pet in romantic comedies is one frequent trope that tends to irritate me, but it isn’t a source of too much comedy so it’s bearable), and has never left the country due to his fear of travel. He winds up having a fling with the dog walker that he hires, and attempts internet dating with disappointing results. He compares the contrast between dating profile and reality to the pictures and taste of a Mcdonalds meal.

This sort of film tinkers on the edge of it’s associated genre, it isn’t cliched -rom-com-conveyor-belt-summer release-stuff.  It’s less idealistic, there’s no slapstick or restaurant orgasms in sight,  the comedy is subtle and the plot’s outcome uncertain. (500) Days of Summer played with the rom-com in an overtly obvious fashion that was a bit annoying and pretentious, (although it still remains a guilty pleasure). There is a fine line between a film of this sort being a bit clever, and taking itself too seriously. Fortunately, Medianeras (Sidewalls) relishes in a gooey ending, opting for the light-hearted path. Despite this being the right one, it was still a large leap from the moroseness that preceded it. Suddenly everything is breezy and the characters are no longer lonely or sad, as if love is the only secret to happiness. Still, films are rarely perfect and this one is a whimsical treat that will give a warm glow to many a viewer.

4/5

 This review was written for Front Row Reviews by Sarah Holland in connection with the Cornerhouse/ The original review can be found here

¡Viva! 2013: Después de Lucía Review

Mexican writer-director Michel Franco’s second feature is a dour drama about the disastrous effects of bullying, and it is a powerfully affecting and agonizing ordeal. 

Después de Lucía (After Lucía) is a confident work that was the Mexican submission to the Oscars, it won the Un Certain Regard at Cannes, and the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival. Franco’s debut feature, Daniel & Ana, premiered in the Directors Fortnight at Cannes in 2009 and was shown at the ¡Viva! festival in 2010.

Coping with the loss of Lucía in a recent car accident, her beautiful teenage daughter Alejandra (Tessa ia) and her husband Roberto (Hernan Mendoza) decide to move to Mexico City from Puerto Vallarta to make a fresh start. Roberto becomes the head chef at a new restaurant and Lucía finds a new group of friends at school. Although struggling through their grief, they are affectionate and supportive towards one another, and are simply getting on with things with a stiff upper lip. In one moving scene,  Roberto is unpacking pans in the new kitchen, he pauses suddenly and begins sobbing, before resuming the task. The same happens to Alejandra when on a weekend break with her new classmates, she keeps from them that her mother has died, and takes a break from the party to cry in the toilet.

What begins as a promising social life for this intelligent and amiable young woman takes a bad turn when she has a drunken sex encounter with José, the object of desire of another female in the group, and he films it on his phone. The following day it is all over the internet. He denies any role in this, and we never find out if he is telling the truth. The other girls are envious, and treat her disgracefully. This physical and verbal abuse spreads like a virus, and suddenly Alejandra is a victim with a whole pack against her.

After Lucía reminds you how cruel teenagers can be, and how reliant the high school dynamic is on pressure to conform. Inhumane treatment of another person for no good reason can be infectious. In this film, the domino effect of bullying is completely unforgiving and taken to extremes. The torture goes beyond any harsh words, and extends to violent and sexual abuse.  In one unbearable scene, it is Alejandra’s birthday, and her classmates stand around her with a cake they have made. The cake is filled with some unidentifiable bodily substances and they force it into her face until she vomits. The strident realism of Franco’s style mean there is no relief, no non-diagetic sound or diversion from the unflinching brutality of the situation.

It’s incredibly difficult to endure, far more so than most horror and thriller films, but it’s so well done it’s also completely absorbing. Tessa ia and Hernan Mendoza give wonderfully nuanced, naturalistic performances.  Tessa ia is is controlled and understated as Alejandra, as she accepts what is bombarded at her without much resistance or reaction, internalizing her pain and humiliation behind a hard exterior. The film’s climax offers no solace from the devastating turn of events. After Lucía will leave a long lasting impression; the leads and the director are ones to watch out for in the future.

4/5

 This review was written for Front Row Reviews by Sarah Holland in connection with the Cornerhouse/ The original review can be found here

¡Viva! 2013: Pescador Review

This Equador-Columbia film is a fun comedy about a poor fisherman who discovers a wad of cocaine washed up on his village beach. 

Pescador (Fisherman) is a slick, entertaining Latin American road movie from award-winning filmmaker Sebastian Corder, with a drugs deal at its centre. The setting is a tiny, poor fishing village in Equador. Blanquito (“Whitey”) is a down on his luck fisherman who lives in a small shack with his mother, seems to have lost the respect of those around him, and is undesirable to the opposite sex. We are introduced to him lagging behind his co-workers one morning, being threatened the sack by his boss if he is late once more.

His luck is seemingly about to change when his group come across boxes of cocaine that have been washed up on the beach. After turning a blind eye to the demands of the police, the fishermen sell the drugs back to the cartel for $5000 dollars a brick and a village celebration is soon underway. Blanquito has loftier ideas however. He dreams of self improvement, tracking down his long lost father and of building a new life with his drug money. After delivering groceries one morning to a lavish holiday home he takes a shine to the beautiful inhabitant Lorna, a Colombian single mother and the girlfriend of affluent city businessman Elias (Marcelo Aguirre). Initially he is ignored of course, but once she hears of his plan she claims she can find a buyer in nearby city Guayaquil, and the two team up.

Crespo’s comic performance is pleasingly downplayed and his Blanquito gullible, naive and increasingly likeable. He is consistently generous and trustworthy and as a viewer we are rooting for him. Sympathy is evoked when events turn disastrously wrong. Easily convinced when his mother tells him his father is a local governor, he touchingly buys a suit and new shoes especially for the occasion and turns up with a chauffeured driven car to appear impressive.  Another time, he approaches a prostitute and her pimp, offering to take them out and pay for everything. He wakes up in a scummy motel with no wallet.

Although it admittedly achieves nothing new, Pescador is stylish and enjoyable. The soundtrack is lively and contemporary, and certain elements of the film are vaguely reminiscent of Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien,which can only be a good thing.

3/5

 This review was written for Front Row Reviews by Sarah Holland in connection with the Cornerhouse/ The original review can be found here

¡Viva! 2013: Violeta se fue a los cielos Review

This ambitious, expressionistic feature about Chile's favourite folk musician is a welcome change from standard biopic fare.

Andrés Wood’s intense biography is based on the life of Violeta Parra, the Chiliean singer-songwriter and artist who came from humble beginnings but whose talent and aspirations brought her to international fame. Violeta se fue a los cielos (Violeta Went To Heaven) was Chile’s Oscar submission and won the Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Jury Prize at last year’s festival.

The film is certainly no Walk the Line, James Mangold’s movie based on the life of Johnny Cash and starring Joaquin Phoenix, and by that I mean it is far from a conventional biopic. Steering clear away from linearity, Parra’s turbulent and vibrant life is echoed in the film’s format as her life  events are chaotically presented out of sequence.

There is much to tell here, this is a woman who is likened to a Chilean Bob Dylan, and succeeded across multiple creative mediums. Her key life events are juxtaposed with entertaining footage of a reenacted interview she did in 1962. Wood focuses on her upbringing with her alcoholic, guitarist father (Christian Quevedo); her performances in a travelling band with her siblings;  her search for authentic folk music in remote villages; going solo in Poland, where she discovered in a letter that her baby daughter had died; her time in Paris, where she took her art to the Louvre and had it exhibited; and her tumultuous relationship with Gilbert Favre (Thomas Durand).

The most striking features of this biopic are the beautiful, guitar based Chilean folk songs that enjoy a large presence throughout, and Francisca Galivan’s striking central performance. Gavilan presents an outrageously confident, driven and passionate figure who speaks and sings her mind. Her performance turns the dial up as far as it will go, and has no time for subtlety, but this is her intention and she does it well.

The leaps back and forward in time could have been disorientating, but the result is mesmerizing and absorbing. Frequently we are taken back to Violeta’s childhood, watching her examine her face in a small mirror and make a mess eating fruit. It is a very sensory film that pays much attention to the richness of place and landscape, boasting impressive production values. Many scenes unfold with a series of expressionistic imagesthat tinker on the edges of magic realism. It could be argued that this style is a little self conscious. Yet the ambitious, dream-like style  is a welcome change from standard biopic fare and altogether suits the artistic portrait it captures. Violeta se fue a los cielos is slightly overlong, but a recommended insight into the life of a unique talent which can perhaps be captured by the statement of a Louvre curator: “Leonardo Da Vinci ended up here, but Violeta Parra began here”.

3/5

This review was written for Front Row Reviews in connection with the Cornerhouse. The original review can be found here

¡Viva! 2013: La chispa de la via Review

Álex de la Iglesia’s La Chispa de la via (As Luck would have It) is an abomination that gets progressively worse until it becomes unbearable. For a start, it’s a ‘black comedy’ which is always a tricky genre to get right. I can’t think of any great black comedies off the top of my head. Of course they exist, but they usually miss the mark a little. (Ah, In Bruges that was one, and that was well done. Oh, and Fargo.) This one, starring José Motael as Roberto and Selma Hayek as his wife Luisa, misses the mark entirely. Its intent is to be a satire on the relentlessness and immoral core of the media, or something along those lines, but it is nowhere near intelligent or insightful enough (Harold and Maud is another by the way).

Roberto is an unemployed advertising executive who once showed talent, he came up with the slogun ‘Life’s little spark’ for a Coca Cola campaign, but for the past two years has struggled to find work. He leaves home one morning for an interview he doesn’t get, is ignored by his old acquaintances and has a mildly funny interlude involving a sprinkler, a coffee machine and a soaked suit. On a quest to find a hotel he once stayed in with his wife, he somehow ends up hovering above a half renovated museum floor hanging on to a statue held by a crane. He awkwardly lands with an iron rod stuck in his head and is left immobilized.

Meanwhile, the museum director is giving a grand opening tour of the place and her and her colleague are displeased by the situation, thinking it will ruin their reputation and the precious artifacts of the museum. Soon enough, masses of people are crowding around Roberto to see what the fuss is about. Journalists and photographers arrive in abundance and he is on every TV channel. He is still conscious and immediately sees the potential profit in his situation, ringing around his marketing contacts to arrange exclusive interviews. Product placement is one source of the ‘humour’, as his agent perches by his paralyzed body holding up bottles of a mojito drink and grinning.

When his wife arrives, she instantly goes in to hug him, putting on too much pressure and he cries out in pain. It’s supposed to be funny, but this happens repeatedly. His wife later stamps her feet in annoyance, near his head. When his goth son arrives wearing large black boots, he does the same and Roberto yelps in the same way. Crowds are chaotically always buzzing around him, making the ground wobble profusely and no one stops it. This was really grating, as the doctor says only once that is the rod moves even slightly and touches another part of his brain he could die instantly. It just wouldn’t happen. True, that’s probably part of the joke, but I wasn’t in on it.

Roberto is irritatingly obsessed with money. He may be dying but all he can talk about is how much is being offered, and how he’s a celebrity now. This is obviously the point, and it’s a lecture in how money and fame can’t bring happiness. Family is what is important, as his wife and kids keep telling him. Isn’t this an obvious point to begin with? Roberto is just a broken record, as is much of the film itself. Dialogue, jokes, the statement it’s trying to make, are all hammered to death, hence why it’s hard to care about him or any of the other characters. Near the end of the film there is a rush of sentimentality, but it’s too generic and clichéd to be moving.  Roberto’s kind words about how much he loves his family are also unconvincing as he has uttered so few words about them, except about how he can now pay their tuition fees. As Luck would have It is an all too obvious attempt at critiquing tabloid and television culture, but it can’t decide quite where it wants to be, and ends up in a very compromising position with no spark in sight.

1/5

This review was written for Front Row Reviews in connection with the Cornerhouse. The original review can be found here

¡Viva! 2013: La voz dormida Review

Benito Zambrano’s feature is a powerful and engrossing drama based on the award winning novel by the late Dulce Chacón, which was based on real-life testimonies and set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. La Voz Dormida (The Sleeping Voice) tells the tales of women tormented by the war in an enlightening way, displaying scenes of cruelty and oppression that manage to never sink into melodrama. A film of such charged emotional intensity, with a romantic backdrop, could easily have evoked elements of clichéd sentimentality. Thankfully this is avoided as the lead performances are weighty and moving, and the film captures with empathy and unflinching honesty a vile epoch in Spain’s political history.

The focus in on the fate of two sisters during the frightening period of Franco’s dictatorship when those opposed to the regime or connected to them are imprisoned or executed. Proud and spirited Hortensia (Inma Cuesta), a politically active Repulican, is seven months pregnant and experiencing barbarous conditions in a Ventas prison where she awaits the death penalty. Her dissenter husband, Felipe, is hiding in the mountains and her innocent and apolitical sister Pipita (Maria Leon, who won Best Actress kudos at the San Sebastian festival) has moved from Cordova to Madrid in a naive attempt to help her sister’s impossible situation.

Barely literate, Pipita manages to hold down a job in an affluent household as a maid, working for a cold mistress who is introduced painting images of boys in their uniform giving the fascist salute. One one occasion Pipita desperately and brazenly pleads with a merciless general, the grandfather of the home, to help her sister. He later spits at her “only God and Franco can help her now”.

Amongst the suffering, Pipita meets and falls for charming fighter Paulino “Black Jacket” (Marc Clotet) when she reluctantly agrees to deliver some forged identity documents to her brother in law. The scenes between them are touching and with a dose of humour as Pipita’s charisma and wit shines through. (Another, unexpected comical touch is the doctor leading the birth of Hortensia’s baby with a cigarette casually hanging out of his mouth). The difficult circumstances that their love withstands is actually a true story.

The style is understated and the cinematography is  without any particularly original features, yet this is irrelevant when there is so much here to hold attention. The opening scene for example goes straight for the jugular when a terrified woman has been called forward by the callous wardens and nuns to be killed by firing squad, between her sobs, she says “I can’t move, I’ve wet myself”. Equally harrowing is the way religion and the state blur as one, militant atheists in the prison are badly beaten when they refuse to kiss the foot of a Jesus doll and Hortensia is subject to much abuse when she refuses to have her child baptized. The Sleeping Voice has much to be admired, Zambrano has created an engaging exposé of experiences that were forced to keep quiet for many years.

4/5


This review was written for Front Row Reviews in connection with the Cornerhouse. The original review can be found here 

¡Viva! 2013: 30 años de oscuridad Review

This intriguing documentary from Manuel.H.Martin is engaging from start to finish. Nominated for the Best Documentary Award at the 2012 Goyas, 30 Years of Darkness uses pleasing animation to illustrate the stories of 'moles' that were forced to hide away due to the Franco regime after the Spanish Civil War.

The focus is on the astonishing life of Manuel Cortes, a socialist former barber turned Mayor of Mijas, and the remarkable ordeal he underwent during thirty years in confinement. With the help of his wife Juliana, he hid in the walls of their Spanish home, always with the possibility of being discovered.

Only she and his father knew of his whereabouts, his presence was even kept secret from his young daughter for several years. He had to peer at her through a small hole, unable to embrace or play with her.  Jesus Torbado co-wrote the book that tells Cortes’ story, and along with different historians enlightens the viewer on the historical background (essential information ashamedly, in my case) in an accessible fashion.

Cortes’ experience is an inspiring statement of how far a man would go to escape death, yet it also pose the question; is a life lived in such a way worth living? Sadly but unsurprisingly, other ‘moles’ mentioned had fought with madness and taken their own lives. Each man had his own methods of making life bearable. One man, hidden in an attic for decades, enforced upon himself a strict regime of reading and learning.

Cortes, much to his wifes dismay, coped by simply peering out of the window at life passing by in the street below. Obviously, this was a huge risk. He would also listen to the radio religiously, using it to speculate about the fate of the world around him, and listen out for any indication of a changed situation in Spain when he would be a free man.

Distress and fear was not restricted to the men themselves. Their wives and children underwent serious psychological stress and pressure in an attempt to keep such an important secret. Villages were divided as trust dissipated. Cortes’ wife burned all photographs of her husband, only for one of her neighbours to hand one in to the authorities in an attempt to appear on the side of the Franco regime. If a woman became pregnant, she had to fabricate numerous lies to fight off raised suspicion.

30 Years of Darkness will certainly give your daily woes some perspective.  These are tales of  loss, humanity and the repercussions of war and dictatorship. It is recommended as an intimate insight into extraordinary lives and as a means to learn about crucial aspects of Spain’s tortured past.

4/5

This review was written for Front Row Reviews in connection with the Cornerhouse. The original review can be found here