Back in Berlin¹, the silence(s) behind the chatter : A Festival preview of Les distàncies (Distances) (2018)

This is a Preview of Les distàncies (2018) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2019)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

19 September

This is a Festival preview (uncorrected proof) of Les distàncies (Distances) (2018) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2019)

The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Friday 19 October [in Screen 2 at APH (Festival Central)] at 5.45 p.m.

Principal themes (alphabetical order) :

* Fears
* Friendship
* Jealousy
* Possessiveness
* Surprises


If it makes you happy
It can't be that bad
If it makes you happy
Then why the hell are you so sad ?

'If It Makes You Happy' ~ Sheryl Crow (from her album If It Makes You Happy)

Those who recall the films Barcelona Summer Night (2013) or Barcelona Christmas Night (2015), during #CameraCatalonia² at Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (@camfilmfest), will find themselves recollecting another side of meeting to party : which is when the heart, and its affections, and the mind, and its afflictions, will not necessarily co-operate with such aims.

Les distàncies (Distances) (2018) is not a million miles away, in mood, from texts by Milton, and how Handel sets them, in L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, HWV 55 - or even from the Pixar film Inside Out (2015) ?

Hence loathed Melancholy,
Of Cerberus, and blackest Midnight born,
In Stygian cave forlorn,
'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy;
Find out some uncouth cell,
Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,
And the night-raven sings;
There under ebon shades, and low-brow'd rocks,
As ragged as thy locks,
In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell

'L'Allegro'³ ~ John Milton

For, whereas the Barcelona films arguably took up the frailties of our relations with each other, be they ineptly saying the wrong thing, vying for another's attentions, or (nearly) making the same mistake again, two factors mitigated against those elements being treated 'heavily', and so risking over-balancing the lighter feeling of the film(s) overall⁴ (than that of Les distàncies) :

First, those films were in strands⁵, which meant that one did not (or could not ?) easily follow the film as a whole, and yet leave one's thoughts for long, say, in over-analysing, in Barcelona nit d'estiu (2013), the stages of interaction / attraction between Albert and Roser. Or, in both films, with the plight of Miki Esparbé - who is also in Les distàncies (Distances) - as the hapless prospective, or actual, father (as the case might be).

In addition, some of the strands were, in themselves, intended to be lighter in mood, such as Miki Esparbé, barely knowing how to react to fatherhood, let alone the fact that it becomes known to others when he only just knew of it, or the two friends, chasing after the same girl in a way that did not preclude a ruthless mistranslation from English by the one who speaks it.

In Les distàncies (Distances), we see writ large how a difficult situation for the entire cast of five, albeit one of their own making or choosing, so quickly puts finer feeling beyond easy reach, and thereby exemplifying our tendencies to sleuthing, sabotage (and self-sabotage), and side-lining or side-stepping others : for example, we see someone, who has no more right to be in a building than the person who comes to call, pull out all the stops to be deflective and intrusive of that other’s feelings, and then to find and be very disrespectful to that person’s possessions afterwards.

As we will find out, almost no one has a good reason to be in Berlin – at least, not one that, behind the pretext, was known to the others – and the hurts and the expectations, the unspoken attitudes and the assumptions, soon become exposed and raw. As with the double-doors between the parts of the flat in Michael Haneke's Amour (2012), we those in the one that Comas / Alex has acquired being used to partition and barricade the space.

Except that it was a pair of principals, the great Nora Navas (Natàlia) and Francesc Garrido (Daniel) in L’adopció (Awaiting) (2015) (during Camera Catalonia in 2016) showed how a stressful situation and having to be in another country did not merely double their difficulties, but magnified the uncertainties within the relationship, and, in Júlia ist, the new experiences and opportunities in Berlin are tempered by ambivalences that arise from being there.

In a very effective touch at the close of the film, all the lack of communication comes out all at once, and some things that we thought that we understood at the time have assumed a different meaning.


End-notes :

¹ During #CameraCatalonia 2018, we were also in Berlin (most of the time) for Elena Martín's brilliant Júlia ist (2017) : Martín played Júlia, and directed and co-wrote the film. (As well as the preview (by #UCFF), Sarah Henkel wrote this review for TAKE ONE.)

² Plus Q&As afterwards, with guests from the cast(s) in conversation with the Catalan programmer, Ramon Lamarca : always a feature of Camera Catalonia, for guests to come from Catalunya to talk about their work, with Ventura Pons and Claire Bloom last year (2018), talking about Miss Dalí (2018).

³ 'Il Penseroso' embraces Melancholy, as the opening of 'L'Allegro' (as quoted) rejects it / him, but - for the purposes of Handel's libretto, in setting them for L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato - James Harris arranged and interleaved Milton's orginal antithetical poems, and Charles Jennens originated the text of a third voice, in 'Il Moderato'.

⁴ Though not just the darker nights around Epiphany (6 January), which is when, in Catalunya (as in Spain as a whole), gifts are given (not the UK's wonted 25 December), perhaps made for a slightly more sombre (reflective ?) feel to Christmas Night ?

⁵ However, these were not strands in the discrete, but interlocking, sense of a unity, which is what Esteve Soler gives us, for this year’s #CameraCatalonia, in 7 Raons de Fugir (de la societat) (2019). (The film is Soler's adaptation, for cinema, of portions from his dramatic work, and which (with David Torras and Gerard Quinto) he co-directed.)


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

Midsummer Night's Revelry and Revelations

This is a Festival preview of Barcelona Summer Night (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2016 (20 to 27 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

12 September

This is a Festival preview of Barcelona Summer Night (Barcelona, nit d'estiu) (2013) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2016)

What happens whilst waiting for the main event can be more important…

In our recent history, hearing the news of the shooting of John Lennon, or an occasion such as New Year’s Eve 1999 (but also built up by The Millennium Bug – and what its dread consequences were supposed to be), are alike often cited as moments when we can be confident of remembering where we were, and what we were doing, at the time :

However, Director Dani de la Orden’s film does not concern itself with learning the hard central facts of something that has happened (with subsidiary reports that follow, as the story ‘breaks’) - or the immediacy of wondering which city’s fireworks were going to be the best (Sydney Harbour Bridge ?), but about the curious nature of the time in between, where uncertainty precedes expectation… A comet called Rose (Roser in Catalan) is coming, but what will it / she do, what does it mean right now ?

A prodigy of fear and a portent
Of broached mischief to the unborn times

Henry IV, Part I (Act V, Scene 1)

Forty-eight years after Shakespeare’s death, there was another such bright comet, which not only provoked fears for what it might herald, but actually also turned out to precede both The Great Plague¹ (1665) and – as if it could then get no worse – The Great Fire of London (1666). Fear and portents indeed !

Albeit Shakespeare is present only in a low-key way in this film (for those who choose to find him), it is relevant to quote him because, be it in the accidental or deliberate confusions of A Midsummer Night's Dream (or those of As You Like It), he deals with themes and emotions that continue to occupy twenty-first-century hearts and minds² - ones which, for this reason, have long permeated Continental culture and literature. (Chaucer adapted Giovanni Boccaccio in The Canterbury Tales (in 'The Knight's Tale', for example.)

So, then as now, friends lead each other on, or astray, or even lead themselves off course. Although Barcelona Summer Night is an ensemble film, some characters may not have anything else in common, since it comprises six temporally matched strands, which do not intersect each other (even if, in passing, we may notice some little 'crossings-over'). In this respect, it necessarily shares something with Tasting Menu (Menú degustació) (2013), which was set amongst the diners on the closing night of a restaurant on the Catalan coast, and [had its UK premiere] at Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF / @camfilmfest) in 2014 : on these pages, its Festival preview had, as its sub-title, A night of enchantment, misunderstanding, and phone-calls.

Here, there are perhaps fewer phone-calls, and whereas the sensibility of Catalunya may seem drawn to what enchants us (and also to what leads to misunderstanding), some of the energy in this film better resembles V.O.S. (2009), another Catalan film, which is surveyed in What is Catalan cinema ?, which looks more closely at films from Camera Catalonia in previous years at the Festival : Barcelona, nit d'estiu is not as playful (or knowing) with the cinematic medium, but the visual and relational vibrancy is of a different kind from that of Menú degustació.

Of course, the film is carefully constructed to have these qualities, but there are feelings of immediacy and naturalness in how it is shot, with cinematographer Ricard Canyellas ably showing that interesting the eye is not inconsistent with, or an interruption in, telling a story, and that cinema should neglect to do so : one could justly ask whether mere story-telling on celluloid deserves to be called or in the cinema...)

The film is also proud of Barcelona (the capital of Catalonia – Catalunya, in Catalan), but does not wish to be more than rooted in the city, rather than making it the much-coined character in its own right, with a clear 'personality', Which, although the screenplay was not originally set there, is what Woody Allen may have successfully done in Vicky Cristina Barcelona³ (2008) [Just as he had (with co-screenwriter Marshall Brickman) in Manhattan (1979) (and was to do again in Midnight in Paris (2011)).]

~ ~ ~

Not to say too much, but facets that Canyellas and de la Orden – and writers Dani González, Eric Navarro, and Eduard Sola – glint off include the following (in no particular order, maybe some imagined ?) :

* FC Barcelona (Barça)

* Montserrat, a legendary twenty-four-hour ice-cream parlour

* The view-point of Bunkers del Carmel (Turó de la Rovira)

* A semi-confessional drinking-game, in English called ‘I have never…’ (it really exists – will it catch on here ?)

* The LGBTQ and club scenes

* Plus, of course, Inca prophecies about Roser (‘Rose’), the comet that everyone is waiting for…


And what portent does Antoni Gaudí’s most famous building in the city have for the night's events ? At the time, surrounded as his cathedral is by cranes, the non-Catalan half of a couple is perhaps less than impressed :

It looks like Mordor, with the eye

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans

‘Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)’ ~ John Lennon⁴

* * * * *



End-notes :

¹ Indeed, some continue to hypothesize - and seem back in vogue, for doing so ? - that it was the meteorite that gave rise to the plague (through microbes from outer space, brought in via the meteorite). Naturally, many of the seventeenth-century associations were more grounded in fear and judgement, and of a less scientifically causal or nature...

² This film is far less complicated than As You Like It, which centres on a woman (Rosalind), pretending to be a man (Ganymede), and teaching a man (Orlando) to woo her (as if she were Rosalind) - and all that, in the process, happens all around her... By contrast, the film's love-coaching is fairly uncomplicated ! (But might Rosalind's story crop up in another way ?)

³ The film may have relatively little to commend it, beyond the montage of city-sights, and the contribution of Penélope Cruz (Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in The Academy Awards 2009 (@TheAcademy)) ?

⁴ Though the words are first attributed to Allen Saunders, in Reader’s Digest in January 1957, according to the Quote Investigator web-site.


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