Infinite series : A Festival preview of 7 Raons per Fugir (de la societat) (7 Reasons to Run Away (from society)) (2019)

This is a Festival preview of 7 Raons per Fugir (2019) (for Cambridge Film Festival)

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

13 October

This is a Festival preview of 7 Raons per Fugir (de la societat) (7 Reasons to Run Away (from society)) (2019) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2019)

One of the cast, Aina Clotet, is expected as a Festival guest of Ramon Lamarca, programmer of Camera Catalonia, for a Q&A following the screening on Tuesday 22 October (please see below) - and also that of La filla d'algú (2019), earlier that evening

The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Sunday 20 October [in Screen 2 at APH (Festival Central)] at 6.30 p.m., and again on Tuesday 22 October [in Screen 1 at APH (Festival Central)] at 10.30 p.m.

Principal themes (alphabetical order) :

* Callous behaviour
* Inconvenient reminders
* Money
* Opportunism
* Self-preserving pragmatism


Just as reactionary politics, or the corporate and fiscal push for so-called neo-liberal values (a term itself an insult to the real notion of 'liberality' ?), might promote policies in the name of, and by invoking, such seemingly positive things as order, progress or commitment, but hypocritically mean the opposite (and challenge others to say so), so Esteve Soler flips those words (and four others) on their head in this film, in an open, but ironic and creative, critique of our subversive attitudes towards each other nowadays.

7 Raons per Fugir (de la societat) is of a highly Swiftian, satirical nature, and, where there is most humour, it is often of an audacious nature – our laughing despite ourselves, in surprise, or at the working-out of a scenario to a logical but grim conclusion (or, again, at its casually working-through to an end that we had not envisaged) : we might know (or think that we know ?) Jonathan Swift from Gulliver’s Travels*, but it was he, after all, who gave the world that sustained but succinct killer essay that we know as ‘A Modest Proposal’…

Not uniquely in Camera Catalonia 2019, as it so happens, 7 Raons per Fugir (de la societat) (7 Reasons to Run Away (from society)) (2019) is a multi-stranded film. Yet it is more obviously so (as if it were New York Stories (1989) - or, more relevantly (though not a film), David Eagleman's Sum : Forty Tales from the Afterlives), and it is most likely to appeal to those who rejoiced in the film-making of Marc Crehuet's El rei borni (The One-Eyed King) (2016) and / or Rudy Gnutti's In the Same Boat (2016), which were both screened during #CameraCatalonia 2017 at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest).

As some will recognize, pairs of images from, respectively, The Wachowskis' The Matrix** (1999), Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), and François Ozon's Dans la maison (In the House) (2012) - all at the intersection of individual behaviour or drives and of the societal force(s) that [we let] govern us (and give us those drives and behaviour ?), but, of which, Germain Germain (Fabrice Luchni), as manipulated by Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer) (and Jeanne Germain (Kristin Scott Thomas)), is most cynically 'on the nail' for 7 Raons per Fugir.


[...]


End-notes :

* So we may know Swift's most famous title, but do we as little know it, from a children’s or other heavily edited version, as the true work of this Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin as if we do not know that it was actually published as Travels into Several remote Nations of the World. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver (1726) ?

** The latter is now proving highly relevant to the greater prominence and recognition of the causes that Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion are promoting.

*** Somewhat arbitrarily, these are likely to be the most famous ones from what, with The Animatrix (2003), are the four connected films (five, if The Matrix 4 does get released in 2022), because there are likewise multitudinous possibilities, in The Matrix Reloaded (2003), when Neo meets The Architect, and, in Matrix Revolutions (2003), the possibilities – witnessed by a score of other Agents Smith – reduce to 1, then 0, when Smith and he fight :

(But the many serving-girls cum sex-slaves in Cloud Atlas (2012), of whom Sonmi-451 is the one who ‘got away’ (once she had undeniably been shown her future), and the fate(s) of many, at the hands - and whims - of the warring Abrasax siblings, in Jupiter Ascending (2015), are all pertinent additional examples of Crowds and Power.)


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

What is seen – or maybe not quite seen – in the half-light ?

This is a Festival preview of La vida lliure (The Free Life¹) (2017) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2018)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2018 (25 October to 1 November)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

7 September

This is a Festival preview of La vida lliure (The Free Life¹) (2017) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2018)

The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Monday 29 October [in Screen 2 at Festival Central] at 7.15 p.m.

We are thoughtfully introduced to a beautiful setting on Menorca (which, however, we do not see that often in full sunshine - please see the comments below) by footage of what appears to be the sinking of a vessel by a U-boat, and so we are partly located in time : as with everything in this film, right through to when, starting with a jazzy title-sequence, the end-credits roll² (and which one therefore cannot afford to miss), there is a significance to it all, but probably only the avid readers of certain types of fiction would be alive to them all.

For, when reading Joyce in Ulysses (or even Finnegans Wake), it is not as if we need to be able to know all the different languages that he uses, or follow the references that he makes to Dublin (current as at 16 June 1904), to take in the novel's sweep³.

Here, Marc Recha's La vida lliure (2017) is a similar, but direct, immersion of the senses, which just asks us to see and hear as much as possible, and absorb it : a gorgeous sound-scape complements cinematography that, at least, apparently feasts itself on the effects that can be achieved by using available light (in what seems to have been a shoot of only 15 days) – and they will blossom wonderfully in a darkened auditorium where a film like this belongs, projected on a cinema-screen and evoking aspect of the penumbral, crepuscular and nocturnal :

If we can think of how Marc (Michel Quer) looked at Venice in La redempció dels peixos (The Redemption of the Fish) (2013), and what director Jordi Torrent showed us through his visitor’s eyes [here is a link to the trailer (on the industry film-sharing platform Vimeo)], or of Agustí Villaronga and his co-writers, in setting Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) (2017) in Aragón in 1937, we will have suitable film-references from previous seasons of Camera Catalonia in mind.

Four stills : from La redempció dels peixos (above), and Incerta glòria (below)

What we essentially have here is a boy (Biel) (who noticeably gets an interest in his name above that in that of Tina, his older sister), and both of whom are now with their uncle on Menorca (Minorca), because their mother could not take them with her to Algeria. (We do not know where they came from, but might guess that it is not one of the other Balearic Islands, but the mainland territory of Catalunya [Catalonia], far from here ? [Incidentally, the Catalan director Villaronga was born in Palma, on Mallorca (Majorca).])

A physical geographical map of Islas Baleares (The Balearic Islands) - from Wikipedia

In a residence by the harbour, a man calling himself Rom, from whom – without much force or effect – their uncle tells them to stay away. Yet, other than their uncle lovingly spending time with them when he rests, and their doing jobs around the farm that he tenants, there is little to occupy them.

Biel (Macià Arguimbau), Rom (Sergi López), and Tina (Mariona Gomila)

Time on their hands does not exactly lead to mischief, but we will find – amongst other things, if we are observant – that Rom fixes up a swing that their uncle did not find time to do (and which he had forbad Tina attempting, when she suggested it). For, part of the purpose and intent of the film is to acclimatize us to the sounds and rhythms of this simple place and the way of living there, and to get used to what stays the same (or to what changes) - as if, ourselves, we become Tina and Biel... ? :

Super film - carefully and quietly shows us its location and has it subtly change before our eyes !

— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) September 28, 2018

Although Núria Prims is credited for a very minor part in the film, Ramon Lamarca (who programmes Camera Catalonia at #CamFF) stressed that she also carried out the important role of coaching Biel (Macià Arguimbau) and Tina (Mariona Gomila). (Prims strikingly played La Carlana last year in Incerta glòria, and one suspects that she may have done the same office for, as well as being the mother of, her murdered husband’s supposedly illegitimate children⁴ in the film.)

Núria Prims (as La Carlana) on set in Incerta glòria

As in Guillermo del Toro’s superb Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) (2006), La vida lliure’s success depends on their performances, and therefore on our being engaged with whether - and, if so, the extent to which - they should trust Rom, of whom their uncle seems to disapprove strongly (and whom, with mistrust, he even confronts).

We may recognize Miquel Gelabert from El cafè de la marina (which these pages prefer to translate as The Harbour Café¹) (2014) - Libori, the inn-keeper father to Caterina (Marina Salas). Likewise, from last year in Camera Catalonia, Sergi López as Rom - from when he played a cynically unwelcoming uncle Enric to Gabriel (Àlex Monner) in La propera pell (The Next Skin) (2016).

Miquel Gelabert (and Marina Salas) ; below, Sergi López (R) (with Àlex Monner (L))

Those are simply observations, in case anyone is wondering why the face of Rom or the uncle might be familiar, but they are not given to suggest that, unlike Sílvia Munt [adopting Josep María de Sagarra, adopting Pagnol] in The Harbour Café, La vida lliure is likewise observational cinema per se, or essentially driven by the characters and their more-or-less known (or guessed-at) motivations.

In a sense, though, the film will come to us, if we come to it and treat it on its own terms, and, as with Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), we should bear in mind how it opened, what we have noted in between in that light, and how it closes :

Stills from El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) (2006) [Doug Jones and Ivana Baquero]

Until which point, the gift of the use of light in Hélène Louvart's cinematography (please see the stills above), and in the beauty of the sound-design [on the film's web-page on IMDb, three individuals and a mixing studio are credited for the Foley], has similarly been a lesson in creating atmosphere, which furthers our mental uncertainty about a town or port that we have not seen, or about the influenza, which we similarly cannot see, but of whose results we hear.

The images are exact - it's our understanding that lacks precision

They are the ‘big things’ of life that penetrate - as in Michael Frayn’s powerful war-time novel Spies ? - into the consciousness of Tina and Biel, but from which they are expected to remain at a distance : as much as from why their mother had to travel without them (even though she is able to write to them) and leave them in this place⁵ ?

Tina (Mariona Gomila), their uncle (Miquel Gelabert), and Biel (Macià Arguimbau)

The #CamFF synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here,
and it screens on Monday 29 October [in Screen 2 at Festival Central] at 7.15 p.m.

End-notes :

¹ Without being a speaker of Catalan, one always hesitates about how / whether one should translate the definite article. (Thus, #UCFF has argued that Immense Beauty is nearer to what La grande bellezza (2013) conveys than the word-for-word English title.)

Galatea Ranzi and Toni Servillo in La grande bellezza (2013)

In some languages, the article must be there with a noun, i.e. one cannot just say Dolce vita - it has to be La dolce vita. Here, vita and vida are clear cognates, and so a less literal title in English might be A Life of Freedom ?

² At BAFTA (@BAFTA), they decently require that members and those whom they invite as their guests stay in their seats until the last line of the closing credits and the house-lights have gone up. (One forgets, from a solitary visit in 2015, but the curtain may go across as well.)

³ That date in June was that of his first date with Norah Barnacle, the woman whom he married. For such and much, much else, we have illustrated and / or foot-noted editions of Joyce (as for The Bible), such as Ulysses Annotated ! :

As to 'sweep', Joyce opens the Wake with riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs

⁴ Much hung on La Carlana's assertion of their illegitimacy, and, in this (and elsewhere), she may have deceived the local Republicans – who would have killed them, and her, too. Whereas they allow her to become stronger, almost unchallenged, until the battle for the soul and heart of Catalunya (Catalonia), against the will and weapons of fascism, erupts at the end of the film - with her sons and she retiring together under the covers : the significance of how Incerta glòria finishes, as if she has fomented this display of war-like action, will hardly have been lost on a Catalan audience.

La Carlana (Núria Prims) in Incerta glòria

⁵ As to what writer / director Marc Recha has done with what is in and amongst the credits, presenting the film’s title is deliberately ‘held back’ until just beforehand. As, perhaps, with Debussy’s titles to the works in his two Books of Préludes : only shown to us when relevant ?

Thus, the foot of the close of 'La cathédrale engloutie' (tenth in the first Book of Préludes) (taken from http://myricaeblog.wordpress.com/second-year/march-challenge/la-cathedrale-engloutie)

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

Captured in amber - or Skin, touching skin

This is a Cambridge Film Festival preview of The Next Skin¹ (2015)

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

3 October

This is a Festival preview of La propera pell (The Next Skin¹) (2015)
(for Cambridge Film Festival 2017)

The synopsis, duration and other details for the film can be found here

Screens on Saturday 21 October at 8.30 p.m.

The question that arises with cinema may sometimes be whether to value a stone for itself -

or for its fossil contents ?

Or - as with the best pieces of amber (even if not strictly constituting ‘a stone’) - for both ?

A mosquito in amber
Photographed (and licensed for use) by Didier Desouens

Early on, La propera pell (The Next Skin¹) (2015) sets its scene in the Pyrenees (with a sparing score by Gerard Gil, and a sound-design that echoes the mountainous landscape). It is then located there, save in retrospect, for the duration, as Michel (a French social worker) travels with and accompanies a teenager², along with the family that lost Gabriel eight years earlier, to settle him in.

In this film, the part of that it that is its location is neither over- nor understated : it is not one of those films where it is typically called (for want of anything better to say) ‘another character’ (or brooding), but it is where it is, and even Ana, Gabriel’s mother (who is ‘from the south’), needs to bear with it³.

Nothing is rushed in this film-making - the initial sounds, and then shots, of thawing ice assure us of this. The cinematographic choices that have been made prefer for what we see to be realistic to our visual sense, and so do not show us sharply what cannot be seen so clearly, and, at other times, employ for narratorial purposes uncertain images, or the effects of a shallow depth of field.

Using the word ‘uncertain’ just now (and – impliedly – ‘unclear’) reflects Isaki Lacuesta and Isa Campo’s tacit acknowledgement to us, as directors, that there is much that just will not be explained in La propera pell [or, as is the custom, in this preview]. However, it is not likely to be – as with Michael Haneke’s films, such as Amour (2012) – that the director / writers profess (as Haneke does) no more than we to know what happened : rather (with work on the script from Fran Araújo), they seem to have differently made such uncertainty part of their subject-matter, i.e. how they tell and / or show what we see. (Thus, one need not necessarily conceive of their not knowing what they choose not to show, but more - in order to put us in the position of the characters - of not showing it.)

The scope of the film is largely located in the time that Michel (Bruno Todeschini) safely believes that he can stay away (before feeling obliged to return to his colleagues). In fact, despite his having been much in the midst of the fuss and friction of unexpectedly fraught relationships and reactions [although – believably – just as often not happening to be there, too (with his off-screen actions are not accounted for)], not only is Michel increasingly not our eyes and ears, but we are also not simply or largely left to decide what we make of the tension, and of the past to which it relates.

Instead, we co-puzzle with the principals about what meant what, and why people’s attitudes might be as they are : from the first, we are aware of Sergi López' (Enric’s) generalized scepticism towards Àlex Monner² (or anyone in the position of his long-lost nephew Gabriel). What we come to gather more is in what his suspicion may be thought to reside… but we will wait in vain for La propera pell to spell everything out.

Àlex Monner and Sergi López

As alluded to in the heading of this posting (elaborating on how the preview has been titled), maybe we will feel ourselves invited, in watching the film, to judge what is true : it may be that one expects of films that, when they have ended, they have apparently said their piece. Yet, if one had watched El virus de la por (The Virus of Fear) (2015) in that expectation, during last year’s Camera Catalonia, the truth is that it simply would not even have 'spoken' fully, if the only time available for it do so was before being due at another screening.

Rubén de Eguia (Jordi) in El virus de la por (2015)

At face value, El virus is naturalistic, but its director, Ventura Pons, is arguably not intending it to be realistic per se. Such a reflective and thoughtful film needs time for us to be of a mind with it, and a film that may seem to concern itself with one thing (i.e. the staff of a sports centre and their interactions with those who use the facilities) may prove to have other pre-occupations⁴ :

What it is to be human, and not just frightened - but terrified - in the face of forces that one does not control or understand.

Brian Dennehy (as Krapp) with tape-recorder⁵

As to Samuel Beckettt, his dramatic œuvre is as varied, about memory and the past⁶, as just the fraction of it that is represented by Krapp's Last Tape (or Not I) - but we could tell from them alone that he knows what it is ruminate, recollect and recall. Likewise, in Company (masterly amongst the last of the prose works), whose limpid telling - which begins with A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine (and then travels via reflection and cogitation such as Deviser of the voice and of its hearer and of himself. Deviser of himself for company) - may most obviously appear to descend, via a closing form of words, to a single word :

[...] And you as you always were.

Alone.


Whether heard or read, this word (although it may literally conclude Company) simply is not summative of the foregoing text, or of the import of having experienced the beauty of the writing, the intricacies of the thoughts and the imaginings...

Similarly, with La propera pell, it is suggested that we ought not to let its closing scenes limit what – given space and time – we would find ourselves thinking further. Sometimes, making an instant judgement at the end of a film may satisfy, but only where one it is in virtue of a revelation at its end that its worth consists :

Can we find ourselves content to feel that - within what the film does tell us - there is no scope to think beyond the terms of a single notion of What really happened ? If we cannot view it as such a film, it is one where to reflect about what has been seen will yield what it most means to us.

Screens on Saturday 21 October at 8.30 p.m.

End-notes :

¹ It seems likely that, as with the phrase mon propre peau in French, the Catalan title translates as 'My own skin'.

² * If you were at Cambridge Film Festival for Camera Catalonia last year, Àlex Monner may seem familiar to you : he played the footballer Jordi in both Barcelona Summer Night (2013) and Barcelona Christmas Night (2015).

³ Assuming, that is, that Ana is Catalan (not Castilian Spanish), the south may be The Balearics, or within the land-mass of mainland Catalunya, and we do not know why Ana (Emma Suárez) moved. (Presumably to be with her husband (??).)

⁴ Thus, on this level, the process of the film – the presenting plot and whether it seems plausible – is subsidiary : how we get to the final scene is less important than realizing, as Jordi (alongside Anna, Hèctor and Laura) is besieged at the end of the film. (Or near the end of the film, before the camera lifts smoothly back to the omniscient vantage-point that it occupied at the start…)

⁵ Taken from ‘Brian Dennehy Knows His Krapp : A discussion with the star of Krapp’s Last Tape, opening this week at the Long Wharf Theatre’, Christopher Arnott’s posting for New Haven Theater Jerk (on 28 November 2011).

⁶ Not for nothing was Beckettt a devotee of Proust and À la recherche du temps perdu (of which Harold Pinter wrote a screen-play).


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