Pina

Wim Wenders biopic of the late choreographer Pina Bausch caused half a dozen people to walk out of the QFT in Belfast when I watched it this week.
There is a barely suppressed sexual energy, often violent, about many of Bausch's pieces but I also suspected that the walk-outs may have had more to do with people not really understanding what was happening. I certainly didn't.
The highly stylised movements and interactions between the dancers set to a mixture of classical, jazz and contemporary music defies interpretation.
Like abstract painting or avant garde music, contemporary dance is intended to express the inexpressible, to tug at some emotion that can not be articulated by mere words.
Bausch's best-know piece, Cafe Muller, involves women in clinging white chiffon dresses, with their eyes shut tight, seeming to be reluctantly dragged by some unseen force from one end of a stage to another, while a waiter hurls tables and chairs out of their way. It features as the opening scene of Pedro Almodovar's Hable Con Ella.
It is a Beckettian scenario, absurdist and non-sensical. I haven't a clue what is going on while watching it, what it is supposed to mean or symbolise, but it is strangely moving.
The film Pina was narrated by members of the German-based dance ensemble who worked with Bausch, some of them for more than two decades.
There was footage of Bausch herself, occasionally dancing or talking about her methodology, but Wender's, correctly concentrated on the dances she choreographed - visual representation of her psychic landscape.
There were generous extracts, sometime recreated in the urban setting of Wuppertal in northern Germany where Bausch's Tanztheatre company were based.
Even though the QFT screening was in 2D it was cinematographically stunning. I would love to see the three-D version but can't see it getting an airing somehow in our local moviehouse.
Pretentious? Probably, but a superb and inspiring 1hr 45min experience.

Barcelona

Despite a concerted effort to track down navajas (razor clams) in Barcelona I failed. Not that this should be the basis on which to judge a city - undoubtedly they were on the menus of restaurants I walked past, it is just that I never found them.
Despite that I enjoyed some great meals there - pulpo (octopus), calamares (squid), gambas (prawns) and bacalao (Basque-style salted cod). Some good Catalan wine as well.
Barcelona is an easy city to navigate around and after three days I felt I had sussed out its lay out. La Rambla which runs from Placa Catalunya down to the city's port is as good a place as any to start. It is a great people watching stroll favoured by both tourists and residents alike.
A few steps away into one of the side streets can take you into a contemporary shopping centre or else in cobbled alleyway with Tabac shops, cafes, crumbling churches and private residences.
Closer to the harbour the streets become slightly more tacky, with sex shops and an occasional street walker lurking in a darkened alleyway. It is the territory of Almodovar's Todo Sobre Mi Madre and the novels of Manuel Vazquez Montalban (Offide being the novel of choice to accompany me on this visit).
Last week I watched Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona to put me in the mood for my visit. The film seemed to be partly funded by the Barcelona tourist board as a showcase for the city's delights. Woody had clearly been watching a few Almodovar movies before he shot this. While I'm a fan Allen's movie came across as cloying and derivative - check out the scene where the Vicky and Juan Antonio are watching the guitarist and compare it to the scene where Caetano Veloso sing Cucurrucucu Paloma in Almodovar's Hable con ella.
I also found VCB to be glaringly naive, one of the character's, Vicky goes to Barcelona and raves on about studying Catalan culture, yet she can't even speak Castellano, never mind Catalan but somehow manages to spend lots of times perusing books in libraries.
Despite its artistic pretentions it is an enjoyable movie but one in which all the main actors are totally overshadowed by the performance of Penelope Cruz.
She also starred in Todo Sobre Mi Madre, playing a nun who falls pregnant to a Aids-infected, transexual prostitute. Other characters are a single mother whose only child has been run down and a stage actress who is obsessed with her drug-addled lesbian lover. Can't see Woody tackling this somehow.
It gives only a passing nod to Barcelona's more iconic locations, a brief scene outside the Gaudi cathedral - which features regularly in VCB. Infact it could have been set anywhere as the location is superflous to its dark story of a woman coming to terms with her own grief, by reluctantly becoming a source of comfort to others.
I'm still reading Offside, the fourth Montalban novel I have in my collection, but it was interesting to find myself at the start of the week wandering down the streets where his fictional detective Pepe Carvalho had been a few hours earlier as I read the first few chapters on the plane. Review to follow.
I also picked up a new novel while I was there - La piel fría (Cold Skin - originally written in Catalan and published as La pell fida) by Albert Sánchez Piñol, a novelist from Barcelona. Its main protagonists is an Irishman (a former IRA member) who is working for a scientific expedition in the Antarctic and who ends up confronting killer aliens. There is a psychological undercurrent to this sci-fi story which at first glance I can get the gist of but which will probably take a lot of cross-referencing with my dictionary to get all its nuances. There is an English language translation, but apparently it expunges all references to the central character's Irishness.

Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces)

THIS is pure classic Pedro Almodovar, a story within a story, and a movie within a movie, that cuts back and forward in time and is shot in a highly stylised manner.
As in Hable con elle (Talk to Her), La mala educación (Bad Education) and Carne trémula (Live Flesh) Almodovar depicts his characters living in the present and then flashes back to a key event or series of events in their past.
Harry Caine (formerly known as Mateo Blanco) is a blind writer living in Madrid who is approached by a younger man, calling himself Ray X, who wants to pay him a fortune to write a script based on his relationship with his father.
However, Mateo recognises his voice as that of someone from his past and with the help of others manages to place him.
The film flashes back to 14 years earlier when Lena, played by Penelope Cruz becomes involved with billionaire businessman Ernesto, who is in his 70s.
She wants to be an actress and approaches Mateo who gives here a role in a film he has written and which she persuades Ernesto to finance.
Ernesto's son, Ernesto jnr, - who Mateo recognised as Ray X, films the filming and then delivers the footage to his father who employs a lip reader to find out what Meteo and Lena are saying to one another.
There is some fine acting from José Luis Gómez, who plays Ernesto, and you can almost see him being eaten up by jealousy as he realises that Lena and Mateo are having an affair and that Lena loathes him.
In a fit of rage he pushes Lena down a staircase - a knowingly cinematic scene and one which is repeated in the film that Mateo is making to explain why Lena, when she returns to the set of the film she is staring in, is wearing a plastercast.
Despite Ernesto's violence Lena returns to him, telling Mateo that she must stay with him until the movie is completed but when she is injured again the lovers flee Madrid and hide out on the island of Lanzarote.
Ernesto gets back at them by paying the editors of the film that they were working on to choose the worst takes and splice them together and release it to a huge fanfare which is panned by the critics and in sees Mateo and Lena being ridiculed.
Mateo decides to go back to Madrid to sort things out, leaving Lena in Lanzarote but on the way to the airport a car crashes into the them, killing Lena and leaving Mateo blind.
He can still write but no longer direct films so he insists that he should from then on be known as Harry Caine, his pen name, and that Mateo Blanco the film producer died alongside Lena.
By recounting the story Mateo is reconcilled to the past that he has tried to kill off along with his former identity and in the telling he begins to realise that many loose ends have not been tied up.
It is a film full of symbolism, Dario, the son of Mateo's agent Judit empties a bag of torn photos and starts to piece together a picture of Lena and Mateo, just as he helps Mateo piece together the events that lead to his lover dying.
There are visual clues as well as verbal ones scattered throughout the film that help pave the way for a series of denouements towards the end.
In the scenes where Lena is pushed down the stairs, Lena remarks that it is the sort of thing that only happens in movies, and it does here, twice. Almodovar is proudly cinematographic auteur who is not afraid to acknowledge that this is cinema rather than gritty reality.

The Man of My Life by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

A novel set in Spain, or rather Catalonia, incorporating obscure religious sects, a world-battered outsider, fine wine and Mediterranean cooking was just too much for me to ignore. I’d never heard of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán until I spotted this in No Alibis bookshop in Belfast but now I will probably have to track down the rest of the novels in the Pepe Carvalho series.
The plot is flimsy and the writing is not great – although this is a translation – but there is a lot crammed into this supposed crime-fiction-genre novel – there are at least three recipes in here and dozens of other references to food, which had me salivating and on one occasion running to my larder and fridge to see if I could at least approximate one of the dishes.
In the course of trying to track down the murderer of the son of a leading businessman, the Barcelona based detective Carvalho also manages to reignite affairs with two former lovers, ruminate on the nature of nationalism and Catalan separatism, Cathars, Satanists and Barcelona Football Club.
The original Spanish (Castilian) title of the novel was El Hombre de mi Vida, which sounds a bit like the title of a movie by Pedro Almodovar. However, the cinematic backdrop, at least in terms of location, is probably more akin to Woody Allen’s New York as Montalbán leads us through the streets of Barcelona, past and present, lamenting the destruction of the old and celebrating its revitalization.
Montalbán ruminates on Catalan nationalism, how an autonomous region of Spain can assert its identity while incorporated in a nation state that itself is being slowly amalgamated into the larger, bureaucratic machine that is the European Union. The text is splattered with Catalan phrases and bits of folklore.
The plot is as much a platform for Montalbán to rehearse his take on globalization and an interesting take on Satanism – “God is lord of this world, and Satan is the negation of the idea that his creation is good. Satan is our critical intelligence, the culture of resistance.” (P178).
A pro-globalisation activists discussing Catalan nationalism says: “nations built on sentiment are an obstacle… that’s why we have to create them and destroy them at the same time”. (P192).
This is as much a novel of ideas rather than a great story, although the last 30 pages do re-engage with the traditional novel form and re-humanise the detective Carvalho and lift him from being a purely philosophical, and occasional culinary literary vehicle, into that old favourite of a hard-bitten detective on whom life has crapped and left him nothing to wipe himself clean with.

Hable Con Ella

Following my musings on Spain in my last post in which I used an image from the Almododvar film Hable Con Ella (Talk to Her) it was almost inevitable that I would want to watch it again. It is my favourite film and strikes me as a complete work that operates at a variety of levels. It has a fairly straightforward narrative, but it is filled with symbolism, cinematic vignettes, mini stories and minor characters that enrich the overall narrative.
That it should be viewed as symbolic is clear from the very start as the film opens with a dance sequence, Café Muller, choreographed by Pina Bausch which is being watched by the two central characters Benigno and Marco, who are sitting beside one another in the audience but who have not yet met.
The film ends with another piece of dance theatre and sandwiched between them within the main body of the film are numerous choreographed sequences.
The second scene where Benigno, a male nurse, and his colleague Rosa, wash and dress the comatose patient Alicia is a highly stylised piece of cinematic ballet as are the bullfighting sequences in which the female matador Lydia appears. Similarly the scene where Lydia is dressed by her, male, assistant is also a beautiful piece of cinema in which careful lighting and closely choreographed movements are used to create a highly intimate moment.
The female bullfighter has been much commented on as an attempt by Almodovar to challenge the macho world of the Spanish male but he also does so in other more subtle ways. Marco weeps at the performance of Café Muller and we see him welling-up on a number of other occasions as he remembers the pain of his breakup with his previous partner Anglea. Yet it is this highly emotional man who ends up with Lydia the bullfighter – who out of her matador garb is intoxicatingly feminine in short body-hugging dresses and dripping barely covered by a towel as she steps from a shower.
Despite his vulnerabilities Marco is portrayed as a sophisticated man of the world – an Argentine-born journalist who works for El Pais and who has written a series of travel books.
In contrast Benigno is portrayed as sheltered and naïve – described as a “retard” by his boss. He spent his youth nursing his mother who was confined to bed, not because she was ill but because she was “a bit lazy”. He is slightly creepy and stalks Alicia to the point where he arranges an appointment with her psychiatrist father so that he can get into their home and while there sneak into her bedroom – yet it is he who ends up nursing her after she is left in a coma following a road accident.
We see the former stalker Benigno washing down Alicia’s naked body and looking after her every need, to the point where he is even allowed to clean up her period. He confesses to Marco that the four years he has spent nursing her have been the most satisfactory of his life.
Benigno’s journey from a sad and lonely obsessive through to the imprisoned, unshaved “psychopath” who raped his comatose patient is dramatic and yet despite his crime it is hard not to feel sympathy for his action which was driven by devotion and desire for the woman in his care.
And here Almodovar sets us up with a moral dilemma for his audience – by raping Alica and impregnating her Benigno proves to be her redemption as she miraculously regains consciousness and we are left with the philosophical conundrum that if by performing an act of evil something good is the result can we still judge the original act as evil.
Marco’s development is more subtle than that of Benigno and he emerges from his morose, introspective self pity to engage with Benigno. He even shares some his traits, his obsessiveness and loneliness, and he admits to Benigno that he too is very fond of still-comatose Alicia. Marco is redeemed by his unquestioning support for the incarcerated Benigno when all others have abandoned him even though he is horrified by his friend’s crime.
Almodovar uses Hable Con Ella as vehicle to show of his considerable skills as a filmmaker. It jumps back and forward in time – and even contains a flashback within a flashback – but never seems to lose its narrative thread.
It even contains a film within a film, which he uses to symbolically depict the rape of Alicia. The silent movie tells the story of a man who drinks a potion concocted by his mistress which causes him to shrink until he ends up just a few inches high and cavorting over her naked body from where he “disappears inside her for ever”.
Almodovar also manages to strategically place objects and sequences of dialogue that hint at deeper levels of meaning.
On Marco’s bedside table we see a copy of the novel Las Horas (The Hours) by Michael Cunningham, while beside Alicia’s hospital bed is the novel version of La Noche del Cazador (The Night of the Hunter).
Alicia’s dance teacher, played by Geraldine Chaplin, describes a ballet she is working on set in the trenches of World War One where the ethereal emerges from corporal depicted by female ballerinas emerging as the souls of dead male soldiers who have been killed by warfare.
It is the dancer Alicia who eventually emerges from her near-death state while Benigno, whose rape of her instigated her recovery, is incarcerated in prison and eventually in a grave after he takes his own life during an attempt to induce himself into a coma through a drugs overdose so that he can “be with Alicia” whose recovery he is unaware of.
Throughout, Almodovar paces his main narrative with slight distractions and humorous interludes. The female nurse explaining how she can tell how well a man is endowed by the shape of his face and the pretty receptionist who works for Alicia’s father answering the phone and telling her friend that she has just had “an elephant-sized dump” (surely one of the great lines in cinema) add nothing to the plot but help create a multi-layered feel in which numerous elements mingle.
The visual impact is enhanced by the soundtrack by Alberto Iglesias which for me is now so synonymous with film that even when playing it while driving in my car I can visualise the scenes that each track accompanies.