Subtle resonances with Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) (work in progress)

This is a Festival preview of Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) (2017) (for CamFF 2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 October

This is a Festival preview (work in progress) of Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) (2017) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2017)

It is truly sad that, with a budget estimated (by IMDb (@IMDb)) at €12,000,000, Tale of Tales (Il racconto dei racconti) (2015) gave us – in Toby Jones – a man in love with a flea... (And content, so it goes, to marry his daughter to whomsoever might identify, for what it is, the flea's skin.)

Though IMDb does not estimate the budget for Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) (2017), it gives the revenues for the opening weekend (in Spain – 81 screens) as €153,159 : it does not exactly spell out what total return there was on that €12,000,000, but one film had a seven-week shoot, whereas one shot for rather longer, from 15 May to 2 August 2014.

It would be very poor scripting, if it were not obvious that this preview values Incerta glòria much more highly than any figures from box office (or budget) – let alone any notion that Tale of Tales ‘must be’ better, because it has the said Toby Jones, and even Salma Hayek, on its cast. What it did have is a relevant portrayal of monstrosity and / or evil, and what Incerta glòria has is a much more nuanced one – one that even blurs the lines between parable, prophecy and the past (as was conceivably even implied by the very title Tale of Tales).

By contrast (whatever turns Tale of Tales may take to seek to surprise), the attitude that Incerta glòria (2017) adopts is not a binary one, of knowing / choosing good from evil, and with that being that – even though that dichotomy, if not simply on its own, is at the root of Guillermo del Toro's excellent Pan's Labyrinth (2006) : if Ofelia (in Pan's Labyrinth, set in the Spain of 1944) knew for sure how to do it (which is the point of the story), the film locates itself - through her - in opposition to her step-father Captain Vidal and his hunts for the anti-Francoist Maquis. (As with C.S. Lewis and his seven Narnia novels, it is on its supernatural - allegorical – level(s) that is made powerful.)


Not for the first time, Lewis’ all-embracing world of Narnia [in childhood, his brother Warren (‘Warnie’) and he co-created such a world (Boxen)] shows us a character, in Jadis (The White Witch - the name is French for 'formerly' ?), with sociopathic behaviour : Edmund is seduced, by the warmth of her sleigh / furs (all highly sexually suggestive, just as Meret Oppenheim’s famous fur-covered saucer, cup and spoon), but seduced into what ? Into betraying his brother Peter and sisters Susan and Lucy to Jadis… (A connection here to Camera Catalonia from three (?) years ago, with Fill de caín (Son of Cain) (2013) – on (and on the way to) the river afterwards, #UCFF chatted to its director, Jesús Monllaó, about traits of ‘being successful’.)


[...]


It is not just because we have a longer treatment, in Incerta glòria, than in the other films of this year’s Camera Catalonia that it is likely to be the most affecting film in the strand, but because it very poignantly treats of the subject of The Spanish Civil War*, which is often near to Catalan hearts.

In this year's #CameraCatalonia, programmed as ever by Ramon Lamarca, he's a faithful companion to Marcel Borràs :https://t.co/B0pUkfhtGC pic.twitter.com/OsCLuOlfxF

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 19, 2017

Left to right : Oriol Pla (as Juli), and Marcel Borràs (Lluís)

Initially, we may be reminded of Pa negre (Black Bread) (2010) for historical re-creation and verisimilitude : a film from the very first time that #CamFF programmer Ramon Lamarca brought Catalan cinema to Cambridge Film Festival, in 2012, and – as one recollects – so popular that a third screening was put on.


[...]


A very careful (i.e. non-obvious) use of colour-grading, and the textural quality of the set-design and / or chosen, built location, are just some other reasons to love the look of and enter into the world of this film (and watch it multiple times, to see it unfold differently, with a knowledge of the beginning from the end) ; as with Pa negre, one retains the underlying sense of a filmic presentation, but a very subdued one, which allows one to couple with that of falling more and more deeply into its Weltanschauung : except for films that desire to alienate, this just is a feature that tends to unite the best of cinema.


End-notes:

* So called, at any rate, as we heard from Professor Paul Preston, when he accompanied co-director Jordi Torrent (@nycjordi) for the Q&A after Héroes Invisibles (Invisible Heroes) (2015) (subtitled Afroamericanos en la Guerra de España, which #UCFF interpretatively rendered as ‘The part played by Afro-Americans in The Spanish Civil War’, and so not decribed as a ‘civil’ war).


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

A short Festival review of Black Bread (2010) : Who eats bread ?

This is a short review of Black Bread (Pa negre) (2010)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 October

This is a short review of Black Bread (Pa negre) (2010), as screened

at Cambridge Film Festival 2012 (@Camfilmfest)

Black Bread (2010) has, even allowing for twists and turns, quite a fragile plot, by which I mean one that is susceptible to being betrayed for someone who has not seen it.

It begins with a cart being sent over a cliff, and with Andreu, who has witnessed what has happened, raising the alarm. It is the pivot, did we but know it, for everything that happens, and for Andreu (quietly, yet intensely played by Francesc Colomer) to try to seek out the right things to hate in these troubled times, from his father's caged birds, to distance himself from him, to his cousin Núria, for trying to seduce him when he was too proud and disgusted by her.

For, in boyhood, Andreu is on the edge of manhood, wanting to make the right allegiances, even though his father's previous counter-revolutionary activity has left the family and its livelihood, and his position in life, compromised. Father and mother (embodied by Roger Casamajor and Nora Navas) keep things from him, but he is determined to find them out.

As I said in opening questions from the floor at the Q&A afterwards (to producer Isona Passola), Does a story such as this find its own authentic voice in children as its witnesses, or do they select themselves by their interest in mystery and secrets?


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Catalan strand

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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13 October (updated 25 October)

By way of an an announcement, I want to write next about four more Catalan films that were kindly brought (along with V.O.S. (2009), already reviewed) to the festival this year, which I am sure was a very good and also well-received initiative, The Body in the Woods (1996), Warsaw Bridge (1989), and The Night Elvis Died (2010). And I nearly forgot to say Black Bread (2010).

What I can say now is that, to write effectively about the middle of these three, I would really need to see it again, whereas the other three are clear in my mind. That said, I have less to say about the first, and would prefer to concentrate on the other two.

Regarding Warsaw Bridge (1989), it came as a surprise to me (although subliminally I recognized the connection, in the festival programme, when making this one of my selections), that the prize-winning book (of the same name) within was one of the landmarks from a stay booked at a hotel in the former East when I visited Berlin seven years ago, meaning that I was so many stops before, probably, the omnipresent Friedrichstraße.

However, rather than self-psychoanalyse why I can retrieve only the ending (which solved a mystery), and, vaguely, a slightly evasive acceptance speech or press questions from the award-holder at a busy reception around a pool at night, it is better to seek out a copy to fill in the gaps, and to talk about Body. We were told that it was a sort of Catalan Twin Peaks, which was something that, for not having followed it, only helped me vaguely.

It turned out to be not quite what it presented itself to be, an investigation into a crime, but rather the manipulation of evidence, gender and even human remains in a self-interested and alarmingly corrupt way. That said, that revelation came after an immensely slow-burn, and after a string of people, who at first denied that they knew anything (or more than what they said), collapsed under the real or imagined threat of violence (or other penalty) made by the woman lieutenant: it felt like too much of a deferral, not to mention a massive misdirection, to merit the hoped-for pay-off.

Not just that, but that the depiction of events, whether in recall or in real time, made no especial use of the resource of film as a medium (as against t.v.), and so seemed rather prosaic, as if not made for cinema. A good piece of work, but not, for my money, in the same inventive league as, say, V.O.S., in being for and of film per se.

As for the films that remain, Elvis now has a review, as does Bread.


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