Strangers on a mountain

This is a Festival review of Fiction (Ficcío) (2006)

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18 September (expanded version to come)

This is a Festival review of Fiction (Ficcío) (2006)

This film by Catalan film director Cesc Gay, Fiction (Ficcío) (2006), screened (at 2.30 p.m. on Saturday 6 September) as part of Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), curated by Ramon Lamarca (for the third year running)

When a collection of that urbane Argentinian writer and librarian Jorge Luis Borges’ stories (and pseudo-essays) was made under the title Ficciones*, that word, although so close to Fictions, had a significance that the English substitute lacks, but which is present in : fictive / fictitious / fictional .

As with Russell Hoban, Borges’ writing career seems to have circled around the nature of reality – what is subjective, what is objective – in miniatures such as ‘The Secret Miracle’ (‘El Milagro Secreto’, published by Sur in 1943) to ‘Borges and I’ (‘Borges y Yo’, first seen in the UK (?) when translated in the collection Dreamtigers, originally The Maker (El Hacedor), which was published in 1960. There are similar hints here that Fiction (Ficcío) (2006) is not quite what it seems:

Is, then, that sequence with the cabin a sly reference to the episode on Mt Olympus in John Fowles’ bestseller The Magus** (in its way, a masterclass in the novel as mirage and deception) ? And what does, amongst other things, the perspective of the video footage that we see several times at the start indicate about [the status of] what we are seeing (and yet, despite ourselves, get drawn into) ?

Do we, by our engagement, act out a fantasy of identification with what we know is fiction that is mimetic of the development what we come to see on the screen ? One has to ask, not just because of Gay’s later film V.O.S. (2009) (as screened at Cambridge Film Festival 2012), with its playful insistence not so much on blurring (as maybe here) as rather contraposing a film with its own making, but also simply because one does not draw attention to fictitiousness without a reason :

We have here both being fecund (here, as in the later film, there is a pregnancy shared by friends), making new relationships, and the creativity at the heart of being fictive (it is not for nothing that Àlex (Eduard Fernandez) makes films and has come to Santi’s house to try to work on a screenplay), yet, at the same time, mortality, getting lost (which, with Dante’s example***, bears more than one interpretation at once), and what Hoban (using a Spoonerism in his title for an essay (collected in The Moment under The Moment****) called Blighter’s Rock.

Words like bitter-sweet were coined for films such as this, where its script (co-written by Cesc Gay with Tomàs Aragay) additionally, calculatedly yet not unkindly, plays with our preconceptions (as Gay continues to do in V.O.S.***** (a video-clip can be seen here), such as where Àlex is when he arrives at Santi’s, and who Santi (Javier Cámara) and he are to each other, since they josh as if they are a gay couple – or who Judith (Carme Pla) is in relation to them both.

Earlier, we have seen Àlex arrive, we have seen a neighbouring property for sale and firewood being tipped off the back of a lorry at his direction, and we have (provisionally) tried to make sense of these elements, and of his reactions to the property and its contents (including Santi’s portrait on canvas (with cactii)).

Then, at first sight of Mònica (Montse Germàn), we – and Àlex – seem to say ho-hum at her being a violinist, a fellow creative, both because we are trying to get a toe-hold in this situation (where, all of them together over dinner, Santi feels able to make off-colour sexual remarks out of the blue) – and Àlex seems so wrapped up in his world, where he turns things down almost as a stock reaction (as protection for his time and work, which seem to be – and so he is unproductive ? – preoccupying his mind, as it does (though much more so, and naggingly) in Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect (1987)).


Yet for all the knowingness (or because of it ? – after all, the film is Ficcío, which is a feminine Catalan noun, capable of meaning invention or fabrication), what unfolds seems on a plane akin to the fantastic in A Canterbury Tale (1944) or Roman Holiday (1953)…

Or it feels more like a David Lean for our times than a Vendredi soir (2002) (or a precursor to Midnight in Paris (2011)).

Were it not, though, for the very end of the film, whose unfolding, for its latency, is almost as much a miracle as that of [Nuovo] Cinema Paradiso (1988) : in the centre of the film, Judith and Santi seemed almost intent on leaving Àlex and Mònica behind (though we later learn that they have other reasons to have done so) – and with but the vaguest of instructions where to meet – and, as Santi (who has fallen asleep) has given access to his video-footage to Sílvia (Àgata Roca***), we wondered what images he may have caught.

Is this fabrication within the terms of the story itself, a product of time, place and behaviour, or is it simultaneously that the film itself, an invention just as much as the words and music of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds that we hear, effortlessly leaves us with the notion that we have maybe co-created the film with Gay, by our attention and participation ?


End-notes

* First published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London, 1962. Then issued by Calder in its Jupiter series in 1965 (and later reprinted by Calder & Boyars).

The first part of Fictions is already a volume, under the title The Garden of Forking Paths; the second is headed ‘Artifices’, another resonant word.

** Resented because he did not think it the best of his work, but writers from Hoban (the success of whose Riddley Walker (from 1980) in no way seemed to promote the rest of his novels – not evenFremder (from 1996) ?) to A. A. Milne or Tove Jansson have found (or would have found) that what they thought best is not always what they are (or will be) known / remembered for…

*** Inferno, Canto I, lines 2 to 3 :
[M]i ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.


**** Jonathan Cape, London, 1992.

***** Where Àgata Roca, who appears later on, is part of the two interrelated couples, along with Vicenta Ndongo (who played Mar Vidal in Tasting Menu (Menú degustació) (2013), also screened in this year’s Camera Catalonia strand).


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Camera Catalonia at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 Part I : Q&A with Mar Coll, director and co-writer of We All Want What's Best For Her (2013)

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15 September

Summary account of a Q&A at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 with Mar Coll, director and co-writer of We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem il millor per a ella) (2013)

* Contains spoilers *

As detail fades already, this is necessarily an impressionistic account of a Q&A that followed the second screening, at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (#CamFF), of We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem il millor per a ella) (2013) with director and co-writer Mar Coll, and hosted by the curator of Camera Catalonia (for the third year running), Ramon Lamarca, at 1.00 p.m. on Friday 5 September

Next on the blog (the 1,000th posting), a write-up of Q&A2 from @camfilmfest with Mar Coll, director of We All Want What's Best For Her...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 13, 2014

The first screening of We All Want What’s Best For Her at Cambridge Film Festival, at 6.15 p.m. on Thursday 4 September, had been a UK premiere and so was also followed by a Q&A*.

Ramon Lamarca and Mar Coll at Festival Central - image courtesy of Tom Catchesides

To judge only by the end of that previous Q&A, this second one maybe gave a little too much weight to the question of Geni’s character (played beautifully by Nora Navas**) being a woman. That said, Ramon has since indicated that, because Birds Eye View is interested in and for exploring issues of gender and society (in relation to film-making), they had been very present in the discussion on Thursday evening – some might therefore be coincidentally interested in the following Tweet :

25 best films directed by women http://t.co/sHRuxtFxc7
— Raindance Film Fest (@Raindance) September 14, 2014

The reason for asking about Geni’s gender is that the main friend, on whom the film’s handling of the topic of recovery Mar Coll and her co-writer had based the premise, was a man called Eugènio (hence Eugènia, shortened to Geni) – maybe one of those slightly irritating facts that everyone wrongly thinks that they are alone in having heard and then so many people ask about it…

In fact, Mar did not think that it would have made much / any difference for Geni’s character to have stayed as a man (and, unfortunately, the reason that she gave for making the change has not registered mentally). [However, one is – only slightly – reminded of Cambridge Film Festival 2011, and confronting British actor and first-time director Paddy Considine with the possibility of such a reversal in his Tyrannosaur (2011), i.e. the idea of Peter Mullan’s character Joseph switching, say by becoming Josephine, with that of the now-everywhere Olivia Colman, so that we have a battered man (they exist), rather than a battered woman…]

For those who had seen Mar’s film before, this repeat screening was an opportunity to notice that, however ambiguously (and, of course, fully deliberately so) the question of paying the taxi-driver may have been left, we do not see Geni’s wedding ring after when she decided (after a hesitation) to leave it with him as a ransom,: the driver has been mean to her, and could she – on some level – have been acknowledging her husband Dani’s own meanness and have been making a symbolic sacrifice ? (For example, we soon see Dani (Pau Durà) criticizing Geni for stumbling in her speech, not talking in full sentences because she is upset, and how he patronizingly cajoles her, whilst all the time calling her ‘babe’.)

Mar acknowledged the possibility (which another audience member thought might even have been at the subconscious level of a Freudian slip) that parting with the ring is symbolic : as expected in the best of film-making, Mar wants the viewer to conclude what he or she thinks happened before / is happening on screen. (So when, after the Q&A, it was briefly mentioned that maybe Geni senses that Dani is attracted to Geni’s sister Raquel (Àgata Roca***), and perhaps has even been having an affair with her, Mar just agreed about the attraction, and left the rest as a possibility**** (although it is consistent with Dani’s lack of arousal when Geni, feeling close to him, tries to initiate sex on her return home, if he had been with Raquel earlier.))

Portrait of Mar Coll by, and image courtesy of, Tom Catchesides (@TomCatchesides)

As to future projects, Mar tempted us with mention of an exploration that she is doing with a group of film students, working on an adaptation of a Pinter play, and which your correspondent established to be Betrayal. When Mar asked, many of us knew the play, even the Jeremy Irons / Ben Kingsley / Patricia Hodge film (which Mar indicated that she was less keen on), so that sounds something to look forward to…


To come (when time / energies permit) : transcript / write-up of a interview that Mar Coll kindly gave about the film and its main character…

In the meantime, this is a link to a pre-Festival review (written with the kind assistance of Ramon, the producers of the film, and the Festival), which this account of the Q&A, and, in due course, the interview are intended to amplify (as the review had consciously been of a non-spoilery nature)


End-notes

* At which Tom Catchesides’ (@TomCatchesides’) striking double portrait of Mar and Ramon was taken, when Ramon interviewed Mar (together with Birds Eye View) :

** Whom we had seen before, in the Catalan strand at the Festival in 2012, as the mother in Black Bread (Pa negre) (2010).

*** Whom we also saw during the Catalan strand two years ago, in V.O.S. (2009), and also this year in Camera Catalonia, in the same director’s (Cesc Gay’s) earlier Fiction (Ficció) (2006), which screened at 2.30 p.m. on Saturday 6 September – review to come...

**** At Enric’s – Geni and Raquel’s father’s – lunch-table, we seem to gather that Dani and Raquel knew / shared with each other at university, which strengthens the parallel drawn in the review with that wonderful predecessor Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).

Mar was pleased with that link, and also with having spotted the design influence of Allen’s earlier, neglected drama Interiors (1978) (for making which he had to endure such criticism, even abuse, because it was a drama, not comedy :

A style of film to which, after Match Point (2005) and Cassandra’s Dream (2007) (a review that, implausibly, has more than 10,000 page-views on the blog…), he has only fully returned to great acclaim, in Blue Jasmine (2013).)


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

More like Pirandello

This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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20 September

This is a review of V.O.S. (2009), as screened at Cambridge Film Festival (@Camfilmfest) 2012

V.O.S. (2009) (which denotes that it is the original version, but with sub-titles, i.e. not dubbed) was introduced as a film within a film, taken from a play within a play (which is by Carl Lopez), but it is more like Pirandello than anything else, with Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte thrown in for good measure, plus a hint of Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry.

For the four principal characters do not have - are not shown to have - any existence outside of the film, and though they are stepping in and out of the role as scenes are played out (and envisaged, in discussion, as having taken or to take a different course), it's as though their life is on the set or lot, which makes the experience of watching a lot like that of seeing Nine (2009) or Dogville (2003).

Woody Allen is even mentioned by Clara (Àgata Roca), the pregnant partner of Ander (Andres Herrera) who is seemingly writing the film as it goes, as if it were a linear process that leads up to the scene that we see at the beginning : one audience review that I have seen recently at Cambridge Film Festival critiques an accent as if were less convincing at the beginning of shooting and that that fact is necessarily reflected in where the scene appears within the film.

What does the suggestion that the actors have a life beyond the parts that they play add, when doors that we have been shown into a hospital theatre are later revealed as a mock-up, but then have figures dressed for a procedure emerge from them and appear to be received by the crew as if they are real surgeons or the like? As far as I could see, it merely put a layer of doubt as to whether any of the scenes played out have any status, which is something that Allen has explored, for example, with the use of a chorus (in Mighty Aphrodite (1995), with the alternative realities of Melinda and Melinda (2004), and in Harry or Stardust Memories (1980).

That said, the story of how Ander and Clara become a couple is still an engaging one, because it shows how they have interacted with Vicky and Manu, and it is not as if Allen has just done it all before. Those who are interested can read more in Variety.


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