Selections from Sunny Spain and a Trivia Question!

Like the song says, “Well I’ve never been to Spain”, but I feel I have, thanks to that country’s best films and film-makers. Though Spain’s surface imagery evokes other “S” words like “sun”, “summer” and “sangria”, the unique, slightly twisted character of its cinema sheds a more penetrating light on a rich and vibrant culture.

Going back just over seventy-five years, two Spanish natives had first been drawn to France to adapt a new form of artistic expression to the medium of film. These two young Spaniards were Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, and the movement they led was called “surrealism”, which grew out of theories of dreams and the subconscious first advanced by Jung and Freud.

Thus Bunuel and Dali’s first feature-length release, the mesmerizing “L’Age d’Or” (1930), contains no traditional plot but instead a series of striking dream-like images- a cow on a woman’s bed, a large, formal delegation arriving on a barren island for no apparent reason, a vision of fully bedecked cardinals arrayed there on a craggy rock, and amidst all the pomp, a couple rolling around lustfully in the dirt. These arresting depictions would never have made it past censors of the day had the picture not been billed as a “madman’s dream”. As it was, “L’Age d’Or” still became a scandal, reviled in particular by the emerging Fascist movement. Unlike the Fascists, the movie survived, and today is revered as a cinematic landmark, skewering what Bunuel saw as oppressive, outmoded societal forces, including (most controversially) the Catholic Church.
Bunuel and Dali would soon fall out over religion, but the director would go on to make many more distinguished films over the next forty-plus years, never losing his surrealist roots. My own later Bunuel favorite is “The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeosie” (1972). This sublimely strange comedy of manners tracks the constantly thwarted efforts of a group of upper-crust Parisians to have a dinner party. Hosts and guests at this assemblage include Jean-Pierre Cassel, Delphine Seyrig, Stephane Audran, and most memorably, Bunuel favorite Fernando Rey as a coke-trafficking Latin American ambassador. One of the Spanish master’s funniest films, the Oscar-winning “Charm” gleefully savages the manners and mores of the upper crust, employing fanciful farce to attack the well-heeled scions of society as decadent, elitist, and amoral. Buñuel’s dream-within-a-dream sequences, which involve ghosts, terrorists, and sundry other characters, help bring this inspired extended joke to a level of divine absurdity.
Just as Bunuel passed away in the early eighties, the nation’s cinematic torch was being handed off to another wildly inventive Spanish director, Pedro Almodovar. He’d make some pungently offbeat entries in that decade, most notably the Oscar-nominated screwball comedy, “Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown” (1988). But his best was yet to come, with 1999’s affecting “All About My Mother”. When her son is killed in a hit-and-run accident, devastated single mom Manuela (Cecilia Roth) returns to her old Barcelona stomping ground. After reuniting with transvestite hooker Agrado (Antonia San Juan), she meets Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a young nun with troubles of her own. Through a series of coincidences, Manuela becomes personal assistant to Huma Rojo ( Marisa Paredes), an actress whose autograph her son was seeking the night he died. An absorbing, character-driven drama with lots of twists and turns, Almodóvar’s “Mother” is an homage to female actresses- and anyone with a maternal instinct. With his trademark visual flair and empathy for fringe feminine type (hookers, transvestites, druggies, and distraught single women), Almodóvar spins an engaging, melodramatic story with heavy allusions to “All About Eve” and “Streetcar.” Roth, Paredes, Cruz, and San Juan give marvelously spirited performances, all of which helped the movie win the Best Foreign Film Oscar.
Three years later came another Almodovar triumph. In “Talk To Her”, tabloid journalist Marco (Dario Grandinetti) falls for feisty bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores), the subject of a celebrity piece he’s working on, but she is gored in the ring and sent to the hospital in a coma. In an adjoining room, private nurse Benigno ( Javier Camara) devotes himself to caring for Alicia (Leonor Watling), a beautiful dancer who for years has lain comatose after a car accident. Meeting by chance at a theater, the two men strike up a friendship. A slyly subversive ode to all forms of love, “Talk to Her” is an intimate, involving tale that examines the dark, even perverse nature of masculinity with great compassion. As always, Almodóvar coaxes exemplary performances from his actors, especially Grandinetti-whose teary Marco is movingly guilt-ridden about Lydia’s injuries, and Camara, playing a naive man whose obsessive attachment to Alicia takes a black-comic turn. Carried by its brilliant visual style (including a mini silent-film fantasy evoking Buster Keaton), “Talk to Her” is an audacious love fable with an enormous heart.

As the millennium approached, yet another Spanish maverick would explode on the film scene: one Alejandro Amenabar, who, at the tender age of twenty-five, released the mind-bending “Open Your Eyes” (1997), later Americanized into the (inferior) “Vanilla Sky”. “Open” concerns Cesar (Eduardo Noriega), a man endowed with youth, looks and money, advantages that make him smug and careless. When he meets the stunning Sofia (Penelope Cruz) at a party, it’s love at first sight, which infuriates the unbalanced Nuria, Cesar’s casual paramour of the moment. Nuria then takes him for a wild car ride that ends with her death and the disfigurement of Cesar’s face. It seems Cesar and Sofia’s romance is over before it’s begun, until a new procedure restores his looks. But just as our hero gets his physical beauty back, his mental health starts to slip. Gradually we learn the extraordinary explanation for Cesar’s bizarre visions and behavior. A multi-layered, nightmarish whodunit, the intense Noriega makes Cesar’s psychic torture palpable, while Cruz personifies the ideal of feminine beauty- ephemeral, tantalizing, and just out of reach. This dark, boldly inventive film, accented with intriguing futuristic elements, keeps its audience engrossed and guessing until the very last frame.

After helming “The Others” (2001), a tingly, old-fashioned spook-fest starring Nicole Kidman, Amenabar returned to native soil to film his sublime, Oscar-winning “The Sea Inside” (2004). When a diving accident leaves 26-year-old poet Ramón Sampedro (Javier Bardem) a quadriplegic, the once-active Ramon relies totally on others to care for him. With his dignity gone, he wages a campaign for the right to die, with the help of activist lawyer Julia (Belen Rueda). Based on a true story, this heart-wrenching, inspiring drama propelled Bardem to international fame. The actor’s soulful, charismatic performance deserves all the plaudits, but Rueda is also a commanding presence, playing the legal adviser who questions her own position on assisted suicide when Ramón—still insisting death would be a welcome reprieve—falls in love with her. Amenábar handles the romance and philosophical jousting with consummate skill, especially in a sardonic exchange between Ramón and a fellow quadriplegic priest. Challenging but hopeful, “The Sea Inside” is a gorgeous film about what makes life worth living. Trivia Question: Name an actor or actress who has worked with more than one of these directors...