I’m less scared this way ~ Natàlia

This is a Festival preview of Awaiting (L’adopció) (2015)

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

5 October

This is a Festival preview of Awaiting (L’adopció) (2015) (for Cambridge Film Festival 2016)

Even down to the name Natàlia (originally meaning ‘Christmas Day’) and also when in the year the film is set, one could be tempted to make much of clear elements that parallel the account of The Nativity in Matthew’s gospel¹. Although acknowledging them, since they may inform one’s understanding of Awaiting (L’adopció) when reflecting on the film afterwards, what director Daniela Fejerman primarily seems to have on her mind (with her co-writer Alejo Flah) are questions of what, emotionally and otherwise, something is truly worth, and whom one trusts – and why.

Which is not to suggest that Awaiting conveys itself as applied moral philosophy (or sociology) : no more so than when those matters figure, in dramatic terms, in the films of Ken Loach (e.g. Jimmy’s Hall (2014)), or in the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit (2014)), which are also set in a different stratum of society – please see the following paragraph. Rather, these are questions in life that we can find ourselves asking at any time, such as :

What am I willing to continue to do, even given what I have already invested of myself ?

Daniel (Francesc Garrido) and Natàlia (Nora Navas)

Unlike Loach, which is perhaps typical of Catalan cinema, we are concerned with a middle-class couple, but we see still how pressures, both from within the wider family and from the situation to which Daniel (Dani) and Natàlia have committed themselves, feed each other, and affect them both. In a film such as We All Want What’s Best For Her (Tots volem el millor per a ella (2013), which director Mar Coll brought to Cambridge Film Festival in 2014²), some of us may already have had the chance to see the remarkable psychological insight that, then as now, Nora Navas (Natàlia) brings to her roles. (There, her life has been turned inside out by the emotional and relational consequences of (what we learn was) a car accident.)

For this quality, in Awaiting, Nora Navas is well matched by the portrayal of Dani by Francesc Garrido, who runs a gamut of emotions with her – in his case, from joy, desire, and impishness to angry frustration, resignation, and despair. We have a strong sense of a pair whose understanding of each other, and patience with and belief in Lila (whose local agency has arranged their visit), is put to severe strain by what happens after they have travelled to Lithuania in the expectation of being able to adopt a child (a son ?).

It has to be said, for those who need everything explained to them, that - in common with lacking a complete explanation of the world of Geni (Nora Navas) in We All Want What’s Best For Her - they will look in vain for anything other than what can be inferred or hazarded about that which we see : for example, what Dani and Natàlia’s positions in life are, back in Catalonia (Catalunya in Catalan), or why there is a difficult relationship between Natalia and her father (Jordi Banacolocha), which (as Geni also does) she is obliged to start addressing...

Uniquely, just after the visuals behind the credits have imparted a sense of passage into coldness and otherness, we are privileged with a knowledge of the sort of difficulties that have been left for Dani and Natàlia to face - momentarily, we are prepared for the symbolic emptiness that is conveyed to them by the slatted belt of the carousel at baggage reclamation. When it stops, all that is there – as they look into the hall behind them (and as Juan Carlos Gómez’s camera gradually pulls back to show us) – is a perfunctory Christmas tree : the principle is immediately established that perhaps they need to wait to see what is happening.

Even so, at first we see that they are trying to influence what is happening – despite the fact that the airport official and they are both uttering words that the hearer(s) do not understand – except that, just when we may be noticing the repetition, Natàlia identifies it to Dani³. There is then a sense of their stepping back, and reclaiming what they share – what they have together, as an outlook, a sense of humour, and so on.

I have a good feeling about this ~ Natàlia

So, after meeting Lila (Larisa Kalpokaitė), being driven to their flat, and, when they are alone, the playfulness of their interaction early on, they take drags on a cigarette that they smoke in common - there is a continuing lightness in the interplay (before going on to have more fun with what Lila said, telling them that they need to dress to impress) :

Dani : The coffee is disgusting.

Natàlia (echoing his tone) : Disgusting.


The adeptness of the cinematography is an essential ingredient in what makes this a film to cherish, but the camerawork is enmeshed in the other qualities of the film-making : so, Gómez edges in, or comes around, carefully and in order not to intrude on our attention except for effect – just as when editor Teresa Font, at a few significant moments, uses montages, with fast-cutting between shots, to reflect the changing contours of emotions as different as buoyant pleasure and trying to meet a need for consolation.

We’ll leave it up to God ~ Dani

Xavier Capellas

Such contrasting aspects are implicit in Xavier Capellas’ score for the film (Capellas both directed the ensemble and played piano for the soundtrack, which is nominated for Best Original Music at the VIII Gaudí Awards, and the film for three other 'Gaudís'), and the way in which his original work of composition is used apart from, and yet in harmony with, the simplicity of solo piano - numbers from Béla Bartók’s Gyermekeknek (For Children⁵), feelingly played by Dani Espasa :

On the drive out of town, to the orphanage, there is the return of what is most easily characterized as the sadness-tinged theme of the title-music, except that – above sounds of what resembles cembalon or zither, but may well actually be that of a domra⁶ [the link is to YouTube (@YouTube)] – we hear how it is opening out into euphoria, led by violin (María Roca), but then through the accordion-playing of Josep Vila Campabadal.

In all of these deep changes and sometimes difficult plunges in the feelings, we are with – but fearful for (as we are for Nora Navas, as Geni, in Tots volem el millor per a ella [We All Want What's Best For Her]) – Natàlia and Dani, and whether what they want will heal them ; or harm them. What takes place with Bill Murray, or Scarlett Johansson, in Lost in Translation, is still a long way from being wholly dissimilar, as to cultures 'clashing', but the drama is somehow more akin to that within hearing what befalls the The Holy Family in Egypt (or Bethlehem)...



There are two scheduled screenings of L’adopció (2015) [the link is to the #CamFF web-page for the film] during Camera Catalonia (the links below are to the booking-pages for each screening) :

* Sunday 23 October at 8.45 p.m.

* Tuesday 25 October at 12.00 noon

* * * * *

The other four films in this Festival's Camera Catalonia are also warmly commended (the link is to the strand's own #CamFF page) - other previews to come very soon... but meanwhile there is :

Camera Catalonia highlights the varied and creative output arising from one of Europe's oldest cultures: https://t.co/ZHn0rClL8q pic.twitter.com/4oFYqqk1lQ

— Cambridge Film Fest (@camfilmfest) October 15, 2016

End-notes :

¹ The Gospel According to Matthew 1:18-2:12 (link to the text at Bible Gateway (New International Version)) – also the basis of a masterpiece of film-making by Pasolini, Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew) (1964)).

² Mar Coll was the guest of Ramon Lamarca, who has now curated Camera Catalonia for five years running at Cambridge Film Festival (alongside his interests in 3-D and / or Retro cinema), for two Q&A sessions after screenings of her film at the Festival.

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

³ The first of several repetitions (and questions of who can follow the words of whom), which are a small hint at Lost in Translation (2003), but, except on the surface, this film goes on to speak of quite different experiences, and in its deepest moments.

⁴ This year, Camera Catalonia contains Sex, Maracas & Chihuahuas (Sexo, maracas y chihuahuas [a link to the film's IMDb page]) (2016), a documentary about 'the incredible life of the musician Xavier Cugat'. From Cugat’s era, by contrast with now, we may have heard accounts of how Gilda (1946) was put together ‘along the way’, or seen how the zaniness of Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) also provides evidence of his (in studio terms) ‘unconventional’ methods of developing the film on set.

For his talk during Cary Grant Comes Home For The Weekend Festival 2016 (@carycomeshome), Mark Glancy looked into some of the film's documentary and other sources from the production, gleaned from researches at RKO.

⁵ From Vol. 1 (Sz. 42, BB 53), seven or eight pieces from a set of eighty-five, written for those studying the pianoforte. (Unlike Mikrokosmos, Sz. 107, BB 105, which is probably more famous, these are not graded exercises, and the pieces are not technically very difficult.) Plus we significantly hear the Allegro molto e mesto [played on YouTube (@YouTube) by The Matangi Quartet] from Beethoven’s String Quartet in F Major, Op. 59, No. 1 (the set of three that are together often called ‘the Razumovsky quartets’).

⁶ As is hardly unusual with IMDb (@IMDb), the instrumentalists, or their instruments, are imperfectly credited in listing the ‘Music Department’, because Eduard Iniesta does not, according to L’adopció’s (Awaiting’s) closing credits, just play guitar (guitarra), but bouzouki and domra as well, which are listed first… (One could describe the domra [the link is to YouTube] as related to the lute, but from Russia, and with three or four metal strings.)

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

Light floods in : through windows, and into souls

This is a pre-Festival review of El Cafè de la Marina (2014)

More views of – or before – Cambridge Film Festival 2015 (3 to 13 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

14 August

This is a pre-Festival review of El Cafè de la Marina (2014)
(for Cambridge Film Festival 2015)

Funny how a few words on a ticket can say so much

[Claudi]

It is a tribute to a cinematic adaptation of a play, let alone of a celebrated one in verse, when such a film feels cinematic, and when there are not great traces of its origins : the review, on these pages, of August, Osage County (2013) was probably not alone in finding that the film badly failed both tests (so did Venus in Fur (La Vénus à la fourrure) (2013)).


The place on the Catalan coast that director Sílvia Munt, when in conversation, said that she had been scouting for has, as we will movingly see at one point, a history, but meaning more than that what once happened here : recognizable individuals, who made a living from the sea, and had families and their community on this shore. It is two centuries on from the time of Born (2014), also showing in Camera Catalonia (at @camfilmfest / #CamFF), but we have that same sense of how the past is still with us, and has given us what we call the present*.

For those who know it, the story of Josep María de Sagarra’s play El Cafè de la Marina has similarities to that of Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille trilogy** (coincidentally referred to in the informal interview with Munt, before the film screened for the first time in the UK). (The first two parts in Daniel Auteuil’s adaptation, Marius (2013) and Fanny (2013), screened at the Festival in 2013, with Auteuil playing César, the anxious father.) The resemblances are there, though it is hardly as though de Sagarra’s status should depend on this single play or its origins. (In company with A. A. Milne, he seems to have been prolific as poet, playwright, novelist, translator and journalist, even if Milne is forgotten for those things.)

Four great films on one #CamFF 2013 page : Not only the Pagnol / Auteuil adaptations, but the colourful Drako Zarharzar (@DrakoZarharzar) [and a Q&A with the equally colourful Toby Amies (@TobyAmies)], and the best film missed (in error) at the Festival

Moreover, from Chaucer – using dream poetry in French to found his own – to Shakespeare – never seeming to have a plot (even of plays such as Lear or Hamlet) for which he had not relied on one or more sources – writing can be far more about the telling than the story itself (and we do not denigrate One Thousand and One Nights, or The Decameron, for that). Just as de Sagarra wrote a play in verse form, what we need to respect is that Munt has distilled its essence into a film of around eighty minutes.


We begin with two young friends, larking around in what turns out to be the cafè of the title (a bar, to the edge of the foreshore, rather than what English means by the word), on the beach, and in the village : back at the bar, one of them (Rosa) is our means of introduction to her sister Caterina, and Libori, their widowed father, and it is the eve of Rosa’s wedding (to Rafel). Already, Munt has taken us out to the fishing-boats and around about, and, although much time is concentrated in the bar (or on tables outside for the wedding), the film feels liberated from having had an original stage-setting.

An important element is in the soundtrack, which is partly Joan Alavedra’s original melody ‘Marinada’ (and his arrangements for accordion of other compositions), partly a traditional Catalan fishing song, and partly Xavier Capellas’ compositions for himself on piano and various combinations of six other instrumentalists (including Josep Vila Campabadel ?? on accordion). When we meet Rosa and her friend Gracieta, their excitement – whose exact cause is unknown to us – is there in what sounds like a zither, mandolin, and guitar. Later, when Caterina is first talking about her life, as Gracieta makes herself up, we just have soft guitar that does not detract from a visual encapsulation of her position : in focus, just Gracieta’s reflection, and, blurred, Caterina (seen in the mirror (right)) and Gracieta (foregrounded (left)). Likewise, as bride and groom leave the reception, accordion and the chalumeau register of the clarinet catch Caterina’s feelings.

Rosa, and her father

The film is all about feelings. We may, though, have seen – during Camera Catalonia at the Festival in 2014 – in Tots volem el millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013), and Ficcío (Fiction) (2006), that there is a reserved side to Catalan behaviour, morals and personality that is not so different from British equivalents (or, for that matter, traditional Russian ones ?), and the playing helps guide us : when someone is being looked out for, we have quiet guitar, piano and cello, but the same instruments, with energy and rhythms, comment on a scene where encouragement has been offered. (Likewise, there is the intensity of light, both when it penetrates into the bar, and in its heightened quality on the walls of the inescapable buildings.)


Ultimately, it is in highly poetic imaginings (easily delivered as more than the equal of those of Marius in Auteuil’s film), and otherwise just in silence, that what matters most is going to be spoken in El Cafè de la Marina. However, Munt has, twice before, effected a wholly filmic transposition between parallel scenes, where the scoring (or, in the latter case, the use of accordion), by leeching from one into the other, has helped prepare the ground for us.


Maybe more importantly, we also gain, in this act of cinema, a sense of a world of events where our connectedness is not mere cause and effect, or consensus rationality [@russellhobanorg], and where what we dare to do, or hope for, matters : utterly different references, admittedly, but the sort of message that continued to attract The Wachowskis in making Cloud Atlas (2012) (or, even if others may have disparaged it, Jupiter Ascending (2015)).


End-notes

* Through the histrionics of the mother (Meryl Streep) in August, Osage County (2013), maybe we are meant to see something other than the stage-ridden behavior of an aggressive and abusive woman, who has tried to dominate her daughters, and about history… However, dislike it though the contemporary critics may have done, Woody Allen achieved far more in Interiors (1978) (and then in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) [first seen at Cambridge Film Festival]), the former of which influenced Mar Coll with the look of Tots volem il millor per a ella (We All Want What’s Best for Her) (2013), which screened twice at last year’s Festival (both screenings had Q&As afterwards).

** Those who have the desire – and a good grasp of Catalan – can find on the Internet what is thought to connect Pagnol and de Sagarra, whereas this link (to the Wikipedia® web-page) tells one fairly little : http://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josep_Maria_de_Sagarra.


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