Strangers on a mountain

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

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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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)

Inside his mind : Iago in the midst

This is a review of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
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19 August (corrected 20 August)

This is a review of Othello (Otel.lo) (2012)

Chances to see during Cambridge Film Festival (#CamFF) 2014:

Only one screening presently scheduled (please see the note on screenings below), at 1.00 p.m. on Sunday 7 September (Screen 2)


The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so;
And will as tenderly be led by th’nose
As asses are.

Act I, Scene iii, 390–393

Sometimes the strength of a film lies in the resonance with which it reminds you of your other viewing – and reading.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, composing a story, in essay form, that touches on the life of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes (Pierre Menard, ‘Author of the Quixote’ (‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’)), imagined how someone (in this case, the fictional Pierre Menard) becomes as Cervantes, partly, at first, by living in exactly the same circumstances as Cervantes and then ends up recreating, word for word, parts of his most famous oeuvre (so, maybe, Borges mocking - amongst literary and intellectual fashions and factions - the Laplacean theory of determinism (as well as the writer(s) whom academics consider the model(s) for Menard) ?) :

In a similar way, this film invites us to consider whether Othello is a flawed tragic character, distant from our lives as a character in a play by Shakespeare (whose fictionality is celebratedly emphasized by claims that it relies too heavily on a stolen handkerchief*) – or whether the pressures that cause Othello to believe Desdemona unfaithful (and kill her) can be made to act on a Moroccan amateur actor (Youcef), who has been cast in that role for the film that we see being shot (though nothing explains the manner of the direction).

Yet it is no mere framing device, nor no piece of Brechtian alienation technique (Verfremdungseffekt, in the original German), to have cast and crew alike visible to us, but, rather, something that enables us to feel inside the depths of the Shakespeare story : seeing what happens to Ann (Desdemona) and Youcef, a real-life couple for two years, as they play the lead roles is enhanced by seeing how constructed film is as a medium, where, say, the people who hold the sound-booms must also play their part, and this approach is at the centre of why the film has been made. (Otherwise, it would be a much longer Othello, shot on the black, curtained stage-set, and looking like a filmed play (please see below).)

The direction that we see of Youcef, Ann and Kike (as Michael Cassio) on camera may not exactly be Peter Brook (or the play’s adaptation that of Steven Berkoff, or Charles Marowitz), but it is experimenting with the actors and their performances, seeking the life in the latter, trying to find engagement with the text (a word that we see so often in the sub-titles, signifying Action !) : unlike this dynamic process (which is also at the much lighter heart of another Catalan film shown at Cambridge Film Festival, V.O.S. (2009)), we are also reminded that, when we watch a film, it is a finished, duplicated artefact, which will be the same to-morrow as next week (if we choose to watch it again after this evening’s screening).

Otel.lo is, at times, painful to watch, because it goes beyond the stories that we hear about how directors get the take that they want (such as were circulating about the love-scenes had been shot in Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013)) and into the immoral manipulation and lies of Dangerous Liaisons (1988), yet it is worth doing so because of how immensely it enriches our sense of the operation of jealousy, flirtation, attraction – as real, living feelings and behaviours.

However, as the film develops, and the cast is being put upon, one is in mind of Gloucester, sightless on the heath in King Lear, saying ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport’ (Act IV, Scene i)**. Or of Samuel Beckettt’s ironic mimes Act Without Words I and II, with their characters being prompted from without, as well as tempted, seduced, and disappointed.

Linking with texts such as these, and entering into the world of the film, actually widens our appreciation of what happens on screen : scenes with the actors in character become as real as, or more real than, when Ann and Youcef talk singly to camera, with the director asking them questions. Here, unlike the effect of Polanski’s Venus in Furs (2013) (whose ‘staginess’ seemed to negate one’s interest, and to make one question the purpose of the film over the original play), laying bare the artifice heightens the drama.


It may be, as the title’s rendering suggests, a low-budget production that is depicted (for it is a modest team), but, as those who experiment with their cinema- or theatre-going will know, a big budget is not a guarantee of greater satisfaction. For example, another Catalan film that screened at last year’s Cambridge Film Festival, The Redemption of the Fish (La redempció dels peixos) (2013), was made on almost no budget, but the film is beautiful, using natural light wherever possible, and without no compromise over quality.

Though running at just over an hour, Otel.lo is complete in itself and not (unlike last year’s micro-budget film The Cherry Orchard (2013)) one that shows preparation for a performance that we do not see : performance and the production are integrated, at all levels, and one simply could not desire the intensity of Otel.lo for longer. As has been suggested, it is meta-textual in a way that is highly thoughtful, and it is sure both to arouse interest, and to provoke differences of opinions about what its core-values are.


Othello :
Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil
Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body ?


Iago :
Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.
From this time forth I never will speak word.

Act V, Scene ii, 297–300

This is just one of six Catalan films (Camera Catalonia) that can be seen at Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (@camfilmfest / #CamFF) - Thursday 28 August to Sunday 7 September (both inclusive). Three others are reviewed here, and What is Catalan cinema ? is also about the Catalan strand at the Festivals in 2012 and 2013...



Note on screenings, etc. :

NB The allocation of films between the three screens at Festival Central can always change (as can, if one is coming from a distance for a specific film, the programme as a whole) : if the audience for a film scheduled for Screen 3 (the smallest screen, around half the capacity of the largest, Screen 1) proves greater than expected, it may end up being swapped, so there could be a change in the exact time of the screening, too

In the programme (for which that is a link to the where the PDF file can be downloaded - printed copies are available at Festival Central and all good local outlets), some slots are also marked 'TBC', and popular screenings may be repeated : announcements are on Cambridge Film Festival 2014's (@camfilmfest's) web-site (please see link, above), as they are of alterations to the programme or the allocation between screens


End-notes

* E.g. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693).

** Yet, later in the play, Edgar (who had providentially met Gloucester) feigns other identities to lead his father to what the other thinks is the edge of the cliffs at Dover – Gloucester is persuaded to believe that he has survived pushing himself off the edge, and that his life thus has a meaning.


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

Catalan strand

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

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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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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