Unholy in Toledo: The Skin I Live In

Let’s be clear about something: the title of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 film Law of Desire is both emblematic and entirely cheeky with regards to this filmmaker’s singular body of work. There are no laws where Almodóvar’s characters’ desires are concerned—at least none that can’t be broken in the spirit of audacity, subversion, showing off, or compulsive plot-twisting—just an immaculately crafted blur of reptile-brain urge and wild ambition, a confusion of longing, desperation, memory and gender.

His latest film, an adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s 1995 novel Tarantula, plunges into some as yet uncharted (by Almodóvar at least) and especially unsettling territory, with the innovative, fabulously resourceful and seriously messed up plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, back with the writer/director who made his name for the first time in two decades) plumbing the unexplored depths of posthuman sciences in his efforts to restore order to his shattered family. There’s a beautiful young woman sequestered and constantly monitored in his rural Toledo home and laboratory. She’s both a captive, stolen away from a whole other life, and something invented. The mad doctor is, in a sense, building himself a new wife. He is attempting to recover a dead life. Most interestingly, his endeavour is driven by the conviction that all that makes us who we are is infinitely malleable once we start to tinker with the outside. The external, he believes, determines the external. And to be sure, in Almodóvar, surfaces really do matter.

Given such a premise, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) is often extremely creepy. It’s also perhaps a little too cool and clean and clinical, too bogglingly plotty and over-calculated to truly love, but the highly composed grand design has things to ponder, revisit and re-admire. (Like Hitchcock, Almodóvar makes movies that even when flawed are tough to truly exhaust.) The source material aside, the obvious model for this macabre tale of obsession, isolation and transformation is the great 1960 French horror film Eyes Without a Face, directed by Georges Franju, who also made a movie about an abattoir that has to be seen to be believed, or has to be seen to know how much you probably wish you didn’t see it. Most Almodóvar has very clear roots in earlier, beloved, canonical films, but this one doesn’t accentuate homage with much warmth, and there are only a few fits of his characteristic humour. (One highly memorable and totally appalling example of this includes an uneasy reunion between Redgard’s assistant and some guy in a tiger costume.)

I feel like I keep wanting to warn you all about what The Skin I Live In lacks, but the truth is that despite all that I was still totally engaged with it, and some months after first seeing it, I’m easily lured into thinking about it, drawn into conversations about it. It’s fleshy, prompts goosebumps, and gets under the skin.

"Getting lost doesn't help creativity at all": Javier Bardem and Alejandro González Iñárritu on their Biutiful collaboration

“The movie is like a Francis Bacon painting,” Javier Bardem says when asked to characterize Biutiful, the film in which he portrays a dying man who communicates with the recently dead while moving through a crime-ridden contemporary Barcelona that itself resembles some outer circle of the inferno. “Some people can take it. Some can’t. Some people can look at the surface and then go deeper to see the love beneath, the compassion that’s woven into the horror of life.”

Babel

Biutiful is the fourth feature from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu. Following his alternately acclaimed and denounced tripartite, “globalized” drama Babel, Biutiful is most closely related in ontological terms to González Iñárritu’s second feature 21 Grams. It’s his first movie in his native Spanish since his exhilarating multi-narrative debut Amores Perros. It’s also the first he’s made without screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga. When González Iñárritu and Arriaga inamicably parted ways after fighting over credits for Babel, I wondered if their individual subsequent films would indicate which of them was responsible for the heavy-handedness and dependency on dramatic irony that increasingly plagued their collaborations. But both Biutiful and Arriaga’s recent directorial debut The Burning Plain make clear that the tendency was mutual. There are numerous moments in Biutiful that possess a certain penetrating eloquence, but they’re set within an at times oppressive framework far too eager to declare its self-importance, too proud of its fitfully successful attempts to say something meaningful about “the world we live in” generally, and the world of illegal migrant laborers specifically.

What makes Biutiful essential viewing then isn’t its socially burdened narrative or its ostentatious, immaculately crafted mise en scène—it’s Bardem’s impossibly rich, marathon central performance, and the way that performance is nurtured and heightened by González Iñárritu's precision approach. The shoot took place over five months, and as we watch Bardem’s flawed hero, Uxbal, wither away from the cancer that’s rapidly consuming him, while frantically trying to leave his children in the best possible position to continue in his absence, we’re watching a performance so immersive, so exhaustive, so rife with resonant contradictions, that by the end we can’t but feel we know this man somehow. We know he’s sick when the other characters don’t. We know his fateful errors in judgment and his efforts to do good. We witness his conferences with the dead, though Bardem never plays the supernatural bits any differently than the ones where he’s collecting money or feeding his kids. Uxbal clings to life while desperately maintaining some essential dignity, and when he’s finally forced to let go the loss is almost palpable in a way that the movie’s poetic intimations of an afterlife can’t diminish.

González Iñárritu and Bardem were promoting Biutiful during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival. We meet them in hotel rooms, separately, as though we’re interrogating them, hoping to pit one against the other in a ploy to get good copy. But despite the fact that the more divisive aspects of Biutiful could be regarded as representing a battle between Bardem’s deeply felt movie and González Iñárritu’s somewhat forced one, between an Oscar-nominated performance viewers are inclined to surrender to and a ruthlessly sculpted directorial vision some will be annoyed by, both artists make clear from the get-go that Biutiful is the result of a much-desired alliance. Bardem wanted to work with González Iñárritu, particularly for the way he works with actors, and González Iñárritu wanted to work with Bardem. The role of Uxbal, father to two children, husband to a woman suffering flamboyantly from bipolar disorder, and a sort of managerial figure for numerous underworld enterprises, was based to some extent on González Iñárritu’s own father, but written specifically for Bardem to interpret.

“Javier’s physically very strong,” explains González Iñárritu, “but, after having known him for eight or nine years, I know how delicate and sensitive he is on the inside. This Minotaur’s face of his envelops a poet’s soul. It’s a strange combination that attaches itself nicely to Uxbal, who’s a tough guy, a street guy, but at bottom is a vulnerable, sophisticated spirit. Primitive culturally, but spiritually sophisticated.”

When told about González Iñárritu’s assessment of his persona, Bardem considers this for a moment. “Tough on the outside and tender on the inside…” he says. “Like a melon!” We all laugh. “Melon Brando!” he then quips, and we laugh even harder. He immediately apologizes for the bad pun, but his ease and warmth loosens up the whole room. Bardem draws a curtain, pours himself some water, sits with us, rather than before us. He seems happy and relaxed, yet he’s frank with regards to the movie’s bleakness.

“Alejandro told me from the beginning that this was a tragedy,” says Bardem. “Like a Greek tragedy, where the gods enter the story in order to remind human beings how weak they are, how much help they need, and how little help they’re going to provide, because they have to learn by themselves.”

We discuss González Iñárritu’s infamous perfectionism, his habit of doing dozens of takes for every camera set-up. Bardem claims that while this approach can be draining it always led him to the best results. I tell Bardem that for all the scenes of intense drama, for me the most memorable was one where Uxbal openly confesses his terminal illness to a complete stranger in a noisy nightclub. The scene is moving because, in a sense, Bardem seems to just throw the line away, making nothing of it. Bardem, whose performances in Before Night Falls and The Sea Inside have already made him an old hand at on-screen death, points out however that even that scene was the product of countless takes and varying approaches. His performance only appears casual. But Bardem also acknowledges the importance of balancing lightness and weight when telling a story such as this, and credits his junior costars with helping him to map out his character’s degrees of gravity, as well as shake it all off when the workday is over.

“Alejandro didn’t want the kids to feel they were witnessing something real, something they’re going to bring home with them,” Bardem explains. “Everything was a game. Those kids would play their emotions and when he says cut they’d go back to their toys and do goofy things. That’s the way it has to be. You have to learn to detach yourself from the material at some points or you get lost in your own thing, and getting lost doesn’t help creativity at all. Some days were harder than others, but through the kids I learned how to go back to the days when I’d be playing a galaxy warrior one moment and then have to go home or off to class the next. I didn’t have to say to myself, ‘Hold on, I was just a galaxy warrior, how am I going to focus on the mathematics now?’ No. You jump. That’s what it’s all about. Be there, experience what you have to experience, but leave a little room in your brain where you tell yourself this is fiction.”

Death looms over every scene of Biutiful. It comes for Uxbal and it comes for many other characters too, especially those surviving on the fringes of the society. Death is finally the central theme of Biutiful: how to accept it, to prepare for it, to reconcile oneself to its mysteries—though it’s slightly less mysterious for the likes of Uxbal than it is for most of us. We see Uxbal in a wintry forest, a place resembling this world yet clearly not of it, a place where he meets someone from his past, someone long gone. Uxbal’s connection to an afterlife is no mere fantastic construct for González Iñárritu. It’s inspired by the director’s own experience with people who he feels possess a genuine ability to see things most of us don’t, things hidden from the established senses. As González Iñárritu sits perched on his chair, trying to come to terms with our questions about what drove him to make Biutiful, there’s an undeniable feeling that his encounters with such people humbled him, and are meant to endow the work not with despair but rather with a sense of wonder.

“The character of Uxbal’s spiritual advisor, or mentor, was based on a woman I met in a very rundown neighbourhood in Mexico City,” González Iñárritu explains. “It was cold out, and I was wearing all these layers, these sweaters and coats and scarves, so you couldn’t see any part of my body below my face, and yet this woman immediately knew that I’d recently had surgery. She didn’t make a big deal about it. She just asked me how I was recovering. These people, it’s not like they’re trying to see something—they just know it. It’s a gift. They don’t want you to pay them. It’s a kind of burden they carry. The good news, or maybe bad news, is that all of them say that death is not the end. On the contrary, it’s just the beginning of a long and fucking hard road.”

Touching from a distance: Penélope Cruz and Lluís Homar on all that's elusive and alluring in Almodóvar's Broken Embraces

The first images we glimpse in Broken Embraces are difficult to locate in the chronology of its fevered, convoluted narrative. They hover somewhere in the midst of not only the movie but also the movie’s genesis. We see an actress on a film set preparing for another take. Her name, we’ll later learn, is Lena, and she’s played by Penélope Cruz. But these images were taken on the fly, without Cruz’s knowing they would be used in the movie, that she was meant to be performing. So in a sense it’s Cruz herself, not Lena, who we observe in this moment of pure presence pulled loose from the self-consciousness of the actor working for the camera, a stray fragment striving toward some symbiosis of art and reality. It is in any case a captivating entrée to this fourth collaboration between Cruz and writer/director Pedro Almodóvar.

“We are like lovers,” Almodóvar has said of he and Cruz, who decided to be an actress after having seen Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up, Tie me Down (1990) as a teenager. Indeed, Broken Embraces can be read as a love letter from an auteur to his muse. It’s a story told in four parts, encompassing two different periods in the life of its protagonist. Mateo Blanco was a successful director, until one day he decided to make a very Almodóvar-like comedy called Chicas y Maletas and cast as its lead an unknown named Lena, who was smart, gorgeous and possessed a raw talent. But Lena was tethered to a rich, older, fearsomely possessive man named Ernesto who once helped her when she was desperate. Mateo and Lena fall in love and gradually everything goes to hell—Ernesto is the movie’s financier, and he won’t let her go, even if it means destroying the project. Tragedy strikes, Mateo loses both Lena and his sight, and with this double-loss he also abandons his name. So Mateo Blanco is killed and Harry Caine takes his place, just a writer now, not a director, blinded, and thus better equipped to retreat into the shadowy embrace of the past. Until the past catches up with him. Mateo can’t get Lena back, nor can he regain his sight. But Harry Caine can illuminate some lingering mysteries about how it all happened. Turns out he can also finish his movie the way it was intended, which in Almodóvar’s cinema of cinema adoration is some kind of happy ending. In Mateo’s movie, if not in life, Lena can live forever.

It’s fascinating to see Almodóvar play with Cruz’s persona in Broken Embraces, peppering her image with a little Audrey Hepburn, a little Goldie Hawn, a flash of Rita Hayworth in Gilda (46). Yet Lena surpasses references, emerging as a complex and finally terribly moving character, the ostensible femme fatale overwhelmed by her own allure. She’s a woman desired into oblivion, tormented by compromise, crushed when she attempts an escape. Cruz hauntingly embodies this woman slowly being torn apart. I and a gaggle of other writers were able to sit with Cruz and during last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, where Broken Embraces had its North American premiere. More diminutive than I’d imagined, especially after having seen her inhabit the screen so fully in Almodóvar’s Volver (06), Cruz wore a simple floral print dress, pink cardigan, and platform sandals. She sat cross-legged, as if attempting to fill more of her chair. Yet when she spoke it was with a confidence and grace that defied her stature. “I don’t think Lena is weak,” she explained. “She has one challenge after another. She becomes a great actress in life, if not in movies. I see her as three women in one: who she really is you can see briefly when she’s in love; then there’s the character she creates to be with Ernesto; and there’s the character that she plays in Chicas y Maletas. Some days we would go from one to other…”

Some of Cruz’s earliest work was with Almodóvar. In Live Flesh (97) she was a prostitute giving birth on a bus. In All About My Mother (99) she played a nun. At some point she attracted the attention of American filmmakers and appeared in a flurry of American movies, like All the Pretty Horses (00), Vanilla Sky (01), and Sahara (05), yet she was rarely cast imaginatively. She might have become lost in Hollywood, another beautiful face with an exotic accent, typically required to do little more than fulfill a stereotype, arguably not unlike her fellow countryman Antonio Banderas, whose career was also launched with several highly memorable appearances in Almodóvar movies. But Volver changed that. Almodóvar had no difficulty imagining Cruz as more eccentric, more dynamic, more robust, and Cruz got an Oscar nomination. She didn’t win for Volver; she won instead for her supporting role in Vicky Christina Barcelona (08), where she did in fact play a stereotype of the fiery, nosy, lusty Spaniard—though she did it with tremendous verve, thank you very much.

Cruz with Almodóvar

Cruz is grateful for her success, yet seems equally cognizant of the role of luck in navigating the vagaries of the film industry. “The moment Lena meets Mateo and tells him she wants to be an actress—I couldn’t do it without crying,” says Cruz. “I was getting the feeling back of meeting Pedro when I was 17, and I was thinking, ‘What would my life have been had I not been able to share with him that I want to be an actress?’ I had to cry between takes.” Cruz and Almodóvar are close friends, so close that they feel able to read each other’s thoughts. But their camaraderie doesn’t compromise their work ethic. “I feel the same butterflies in my stomach when I’m on the set working with him as with any other director,” Cruz says. “My biggest worry is to have him go home disappointed at the end of our day of shooting. I want him to be happy, to feel that I’m giving him 100%, because he’s given me time after time huge amounts of trust. It’s intimidating because he’s so honest. He’ll tell you if you’re good, he’ll tell you if you’re bad. He’ll tell you in great detail. That’s what’s so addictive about working with him, this honesty.”

Almodóvar’s famous perfectionism and frank criticism had the same effect on Lluís Homar, who played Mateo/Harry. Not only a veteran of Spanish film and TV but a long-established actor and director in Barcelona’s theatre community, Homar had a significant role in Almodóvar’s Bad Education (04), but couldn’t have foreseen the commitment he was to take on with Broken Embraces. Homar also turned up to do publicity during TIFF, an endearing figure clad in red jacket, tight black jeans and cowboy boots, with pale eyes that sparkle in the sunlight. Those eyes spend much of the movie lost in some melancholy inner-vision disguised by Mateo/Harry’s habitual amiability. Homar and Almodóvar spent countless hours with a multitude of blind people to get a sense of Mateo/Harry’s state of being. It was only when they finally met a blind man who didn’t seem blind did Almodóvar tell Homar, “There’s Harry.” “It’s very strange,” Homar said of this model for his character. “He looks you right in your eyes, but he doesn’t see anything.”

In a sense, Mateo/Harry’s blindness helped Homar surrender to Almodóvar’s process. There are key scenes in Broken Embraces where Almodóvar will cast off his dominant shot/reverse shot pattern and let the camera simply glide between two characters in conversation, falling on one or the other in turn, though not necessarily when you might think. When asked about this method Homar shrugged and laughed, admitting that after the first few takes he had to just forget the camera altogether, to be truly blind as it were. Homar never worried about making a wrong choice because he trusted Almodóvar completely to set him straight. “He knows the characters so well,” Homar says. “Even when he says things to you over the course of production, things he just tosses off very casually, you want to run away and find a microphone to record every word. Each sentence or each gesture you’re to perform—he knows exactly what he wants.”

Among the elements that make Broken Embraces an essential chapter in Almodóvar’s career are scenes that literally demonstrate an aspect of his working methods. Toward the movie’s end, 14 years after Chicas y Maletas was released in a mangled version, Mateo is able to re-cut the movie, comparing various takes. Cruz initially thought that the “bad” takes would allow her and her co-stars to indulge in some broad acting, but her director was after something far more suggestive. “It was hard because we thought we could do whatever we want and just make it fun and exaggerate,” recalls Cruz. “But Pedro wanted something so subtle. I think that’s the point. If you see a scene play out, and then you see the same scene just two degrees lower or higher… it’s like music, if it’s just a little bit off you don’t feel the connection. It’s hard to explain what it is.”

Hard to explain yet unmistakable when you see it work. Broken Embraces is a somewhat wordy movie by Almodóvar’s usual standards, yet it still contains images so rich as to seem almost indescribable. There’s a moment when Harry approaches his television. On screen is the last image ever filmed of he and Lena together. He has the image slowed down so that each frame is frozen for a moment. He places his hands on the screen, fingers spread, as though able to touch what’s long gone, to embrace a faded memory through the intangible magic of the moving image. It may just be the most personal image Almodóvar has produced.

2000s: the decade in horror

What is horror? Something that invokes unease? Repulsion? What does it require? Surely not the supernatural, since so many horror films are grounded in realism and concern real-life horrors, and so many of the best ones are drenched in ambiguity. Is it something to do with how the past clings to us as we try to move forward in life? Something to do with death perhaps—though there are things worse than death. Let’s agree that horror films trade in some form of violence, though psychological or spiritual violence frequently trumps physical violence, which has the potential to just leave us numb or queasy, like a roller coaster ride.

Session 9

The genre seems to shift with every generation. What do the 2000s say about the way we fear and tremble today? Do we need graphic torture to keep us awake through the night? I confess that I can’t get too worked up over novel approaches to bodily desecration for its own sake. Torture cinema is certainly horrifying, but it’s also fundamentally boring. Like a dose of dysentery. The more I look over this list of my favourite horror films of our dwindling decade, the more I see how many endure for pretty much the same reasons the great horror films of the 30s and 40s or of the 60s and 70s endure. They strike a balance between unnerving mystery and a guttural, creeping certainty about something repellant. Something waits for us in the shadows. Something irrational, yet possibly real. Some shard of nightmare that lingers with us when we wake. Something common sense urges us to avoid. Yet we go to the movie anyway.

The Others

The Others (2001) leaned heavily on a hundred-year-old template, yet where the film finally lands is a brilliant twist on The Turn of the Screw. It was also the film that convinced me of Nicole Kidman’s talents. I’d found her too icy to be the sensual leading lady previous roles pitched her as, but playing this stern mother charged with protecting her two weirdly-diseased children in an enormous, apparently haunted house, she was both convincing and transfixing. The film found a strong companion piece in The Orphanage (07), also from a Spanish director, also featuring a woman, a house, and a past demanding to be acknowledged. And Belén Rueda carried that film just as boldly as Kidman did hers. It was a little cornier as I recall, yet there are things in it I haven’t stopped thinking about.

Birth

Speaking of Kidman, I’d propose that one of the most haunting horror films of the 2000s may have suffered critically, and maybe commercially, for not being regarded as horror at all. It’s only in the final moments of Birth (04), when Kidman’s heroine, shattered by her uncertainty over the case of the little boy who claimed to be her dead husband, that its generic status is confirmed. I missed it when it first appeared and only caught up with it later on DVD—and only after I’d devoured Warner’s Val Lewton box set, which greatly informed my reading of the film, which deserves to be considered among the finest works of Luis Buñuel’s old collaborator, the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.

The Descent

Speaking of birth, the birthing/cavern imagery in The Descent (05) made for some of the most potent meta-body horror of the decade. As it became more fantastical, aspects of the film were perhaps a little too conventional, and too silly, to maintain suspension of disbelief, but this story about an all-girl spelunking trip was at the same time too effective an exploitation of claustrophobia, both external and internal, to be written off.

The Ring

I’m tempted to include the deeply creepy, if, again, sometimes very silly The Ring (02) on this list. I only hesitate because I can’t quite call Gore Verbinski’s US remake any sort of significant revision of the Japanese original (1998)—except perhaps for whatever fresh resonance it generates from Naomi Watts’ central performance, which offers some vivid emotional variation we just don’t get from Nakano Matsushima. But I’d rather champion something else from Japan altogether. Séance (00), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s fresh, inventive adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon, is perhaps the finest example of the director’s unique, hushed horror aesthetic, drizzled with guilt.

The Devil's Backbone

The Devil’s Backbone (01) or Pan’s Labyrinth (06)? Both films involve children, both concern the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and both were made by the immensely talented Guillermo Del Toro, who hails from Mexico but makes most of his best films, these two included, in Spain. I’ll choose the former, a ghost story, if only because it’s a purer example of the genre, and because the conceit of the unexploded bomb in the courtyard is one of the most inspired pregnant objects in recent film.

Spider

Session 9 (01), featuring a riveting central performance from Scottish actor Peter Mullan, gets my vote for best haunted house of the decade. Okay, it’s actually an asylum, not a house, but this is the movie’s bravura premise, which finds a small group of labourers pulling the asbestos out of the Danvers State Mental Hospital, a decrepit old shell of a building, and combines two of the best foundations for horror: the phantasmagoric and the looming threat of mental illness. The film is nearly as good as David Cronenberg’s Spider (02), adapted from Patrick McGrath. It’s also about the vaporous frontiers between lucidity and madness, between victim and predator, and also a bloody good showcase for a tremendous British acting talent, in this case Ralph Fiennes.

Let the Right One In

Equating the discomforts of lycanthropy with those of puberty, Canada’s own Ginger Snaps (00) was undoubtedly a superb, inventive application of a familiar monster mythology into an adolescent context. But I have to say I was even more impressed by Let the Right One In (08), which took a similar tack with vampires but accentuated its tale with greater specificity of location, period, mood and art direction. It’s just a weirder movie in all the right ways, less generic yet still hugely entertaining, going even deeper into questions about gender, development, and the vertiginous sexual confusion of childhood.

Pontypool

Can I make it up to Canada by declaring Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (08) as easily the smartest, most deliriously bizarre spin on the zombie movie of the decade? It takes William Burroughs’ notion of the word as virus and runs with it like a screaming, foaming at the mouth maniac. Admittedly, it finally struggles hard to make complete sense, but it generates so many interesting questions along the way that coherence seems of secondary importance. It also the confines of a small town radio station and the deep, dark Ontario winter into a cocktail of serious chills.

Drag Me to Hell

I had a lot of fun with Drag Me to Hell (09), Sam Raimi’s return to horror after a long season of super hero hi-jinx—though like Raimi’s Spiderman movies this feels very much the product of comic books, specifically of the EC variety. A pretty, somewhat conceited girl just wants to manage a bank, but she gets stuck with a witch’s curse she can’t shake off, while Raimi sticks us with a surprise finale that left everyone in the theatre where I saw it reeling. Nothing, however, freaked the shit out of any big crowd I sat among like Paranormal Activity (07/09). Orin Peli’s demonic home movie horror is crude as all hell—it’s supposed to be—but its this very sense of the real, which it firmly held onto until its very stupid final moment, that imbued it with a feeling of campfire tale terror that’s so difficult to work over modern audiences with. Utterly reliant on contemporary technology, the movie is arguably designed for our age, yet more than anything else I’ve written about here it utilizes the most old-fashioned, if not primordial tricks in the book. It also hit number one at the box office last weekend. Go figure.

Three fiery, famous lives, under-examined, overcooked, burnt to a crisp: Little Ashes

In 1933, while visiting Buenos Aires, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca gave a lecture on the aesthetic properties of duende, a force that can be located in certain works of art or folkloric traditions, such as flamenco, yet resists clean, orderly explanation. It has something to do with the abyss, with a deeper sadness that speaks from experience, with a strangeness that shakes loose unexamined fragments from the firmament of the unconscious, with an inescapable connection to one’s roots, with a sensuality never entirely distanced from the diabolical, with earthiness and desire and death. (Trying to define duende can be a bit like trying to define film noir; sometimes it’s simply whatever makes something otherwise routine, such as a crime drama, or a poem mediating on loss, into something rich, chilling, and mysterious in ways that extend far beyond the solving of a mystery.) Little Ashes is a movie about García Lorca as his formative youthful encounters with filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dalí, and, let me tell you, does it ever not have even a drop of duende.

Though made, perhaps, with commendable intentions, Little Ashes, written by Philippa Goslett and directed by Paul Morrison (Solomon and Gaenor), effectively takes three of the 20th century’s more incendiary artists and tames their shared youthful reveries into something grotesquely bland and safe, an assembly of biographical conjecture in which the term “outrageous” is most firmly kept within quotation marks, and annoying affection, rather than artistic revelation, is celebrated. It’s like the worst thing Christopher Hampton never wrote. More earnest and awkwardly acted even than the Hampton-scripted Arthur Rimbaud-Paul Verlaine movie Total Eclipse. It goes to show that there’s nothing, not surrealism nor sadism, not dada nor death metal, that cannot be appropriated and converted into stuffy museum pieces, sordid soap opera, or soul-deadening muzak. My recoil exacerbated by the fact that at least one of the three figures in Little Ashes is among the artists whose work I treasure more than any other, I’m fighting the temptation to call the movie an abomination, because that word just sounds a little too exciting to be applied to what’s found here.

It starts in 1922, when the soon-to-be dark luminaries García Lorca (Javier Beltrán), Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) and Dalí (Robert Pattinson) converge at university in Madrid. Much ostensibly iconoclastic wankerspeak about revising the values of art is tossed about in mealy-mouthed Castellano accents, since, unfortunately, the proceedings are largely to be spoken in English by one Spaniard and two Brits. Dalí upsets the status quo with his foppish ruffled shirts, giddy non sequiturs (“I would love an enema!”), and advanced talents, arousing the admiration of Buñuel and the erotic desire of García Lorca, whose quiet homosexual longings find an eager receptacle in Dalí’s sexual ambivalence and overriding urge to be adored.

The development of artistic vision in Little Ashes is largely reduced to shallow manifesto spouting. To be fair, the story’s emphasis is meant to be on the peculiar and fragile dynamic of the relationships, yet here too, despite a valiant and genuinely sexy supporting turn from Marina Gatell as the sole woman to intrude on this very male milieu, we’re asked to be satisfied with boilerplate conflicts that depend on our acceptance that Lorca was a sensitive saint cursed by an oppressive culture, Buñuel a belligerent homophobic thug with, most astonishingly, no sense of humour, and Dalí a poncy, profoundly pretentious idiot. Now, I’m not trying to suggest that Dalí wasn’t, too a depressingly large extent, a poncy, profoundly pretentious idiot, since there’s an awful lot of evidence to support this characterization. But it is the most essential business of biopics to transcend the superficial depiction of their subjects, because otherwise what’s the point? I doubt that Little Ashes would have ever got any sort of theatrical release at all were it not for Twilight star Pattinson’s sudden stardom, but it surely won’t do his career any favours to be found hamming it up wincingly, playing a public figure all too large for life to begin with. Of the central trio only Beltrán can muster up any emotional integrity from the material, so Lorca, at least, might not be rolling in his grave.

Dalí, José Moreno Villa, Buñuel, García Lorca, José Rubio Sacristán

Already dead: The Hit

The mystery at the heart of The Killers—whether we refer to the version starring Burt Lancaster (1946) or the radically reconfigured too-violent-for-TV version with Lee Marvin (64)—concerns a marked man’s resignation to death. What would make an ostensibly vital young man accept his executioners without a fight? Why wouldn’t he run when he knows they’re coming to snuff out his life? The special genius of the 1964 version is that, good to its title, it’s actually about the killers, allowing them to ponder openly the psychological state of the person they’ve disposed of—something hired killers aren’t supposed to do. Half the point of hiring a killer is to place murder in the hands of someone with no personal investment in the victim. But the movies have been telling us over and over that killing’s rarely so simple a task, and killers, for all their repugnancy, can feel strangely close to us. They can help us sort through big questions that stories about far noble people have a harder time addressing.

British director Stephen Frears’ The Hit (84), written by Peter Prince, returns to the muddy existential stream of The Killers, though it’s not directly related to either previous film or to the Ernest Hemingway story upon which those films were very loosely based. It follows London mobster-turned-supergrass Willie Parker (Terrence Stamp) from his testifying against his cronies in court to his idyllic life in hiding in Spain, a life that, ten years after his betrayal, is about to end. He’s abducted by a thin, funereal figure in a pale suit named Braddock (John Hurt) and a flamboyantly unseasoned thug of an apprentice named Myron (Tim Roth). They are to drive Willie over the border to Paris where they’ll finish the job in the presence of their employer. But what begins to eat at the voluble Myron, and perhaps even at the stoic Braddock, is how detached Parker seems about the whole thing. He’s positively serene, explaining, with a shrug and a smile, that dying’s no big deal. “It’s as natural as breathing.” Why isn’t he nervous, groveling, wriggling away? He must have something up his sleeve.

As with The Killers, there’ll come a point in The Hit where the nature of this resignation will be exposed. Well, kind of. Unlike the victims in The Killers, Willie’s interior logic doesn’t seem to be dictated by frustrated romance or unconscious desires for suicide. What’s especially interesting is how The Hit, which may very well not have been written with The Killers in mind at all, seems to have learned a little something from both Killers. It initially has us identify with Willie, who may be a dirty snitch, but whose desire to escape the London underworld for the Costa del sol is hardly tough to relate to. He’s also handsome, charming, and utterly watchable. Which is to say he’s Terrence Stamp, who would bring a similar flair to a not dissimilar character many years later in The Limey (99), which itself appropriated images of Stamp playing yet another sympathetic criminal in Poor Cow (67).

But then something deliciously odd happens, something the classicists say you’re not to do. The Hit switches protagonists, gradually abandoning Willie in favour of Braddock, the least forthcoming guy in the movie, a man whose true identity is so elusive that the final words spoken are questions put to him about which of many men he might actually be. Hurt is at his most fascinatingly blank. He doesn’t answer. And this blurring of identities, along with the burrowing into a new life while shedding the old one, along with the Spanish landscape and the beautiful young woman along for the ride (Laura del Sol), recalls yet another movie about unspoken desperation and the complicated assimilation of roles and duties: Antonioni’s The Passenger (75). So besides helping us to rediscover a forgotten gem of 1980s British cinema, a movie that’s smart, artful, strange, often gorgeous and entertaining enough to recommend to just about anyone, not to say brilliantly acted, Criterion’s new DVD release is also a fascinating little piece in a larger cinematic lineage, pointing both backward and forward toward a number of history’s more interesting movies that deal with the psychic geometries of death, assassination, secrets, and surrender.

Among Criterion’s typically superb special features, there’s a terrific essay by Graham Fuller and an audio commentary that finds Frears, Prince, Hurt, Roth and editor Mick Audsley recalling in relaxed, accessible language the thrill of moving into features after years in British television, the challenges of making a road movie in a foreign country with very little money, and how awesome is Spanish legend Fernando Rey, who plays a key supporting role. I especially appreciated Roth’s personal musings on the diversity of performance styles on display. The Hit was one of Roth’s first major roles, and, while watching a shot that features he, Hurt and Stamp seated together in the car, he draws our attention to how elegantly distinct acting sensibilities can harmonize, all of them playfully rubbing up against one another for the camera to simply soak up. All in all, a treat.

Spanish stratagems: Timescrimes, King of the Hill

It is the province of smarter science fiction makers to invest as deep if not an even deeper sense of wonder in the simplest, most familiar apparatus as they would the monolithic machines of elaborate fantasy. In Timecrimes (Los Cronocrímines), a pair of binoculars becomes just such a vessel of intrigue. When Héctor (Karra Elejalde), having recently moved into his country house with his wife Clara (Candela Fernández), begins to explore the peripheries of his property with his binoculars, it is as though the bizarre, mind-boggling journey he will soon set upon has already begun. And of course, it has already begun.

The mysterious phone call; the sight of a pretty girl undressing in the woods; the upturned dumpster and abandoned bike by the side of the road; the mute, scissors-wielding maniac whose face is obscured by a pink bandage: all of these items which pull us so deftly into this story are luring the curious, casually voyeuristic Héctor into a trap whose genesis will prove unusually elusive, even by the standards of more synapse-sparking sci-fi. The chain of causality in Héctor’s spiral into misfortune, injury and alienation from his own existence remains to the very end impossible to trace back—though god knows Héctor himself tries arduously to figure it out.

Before I confuse you too much, let me clarify that Timecrimes is, as you might guess, a movie about time travel. (And before you read on, I'll warn you that it's kinda hard to decide what a spoiler is in Timecrimes, so read as your own discretion.) But rather than hurl its protagonist centuries into the past or eons into some far-flung future, Spanish writer/director Nacho Vigalondo’s pretty ingenious and hugely sinister little feature debut tosses hapless Héctor a mere couple of hours back, which results in tremendous havoc. He catches sight of his own double doing everything he did two hours ago. He’s told by the mysterious lab technician (Vigalondo himself) who got him into this nightmare scenario, whose own motives are kept pretty obscure by the sweaty urgency of the story, not to interfere with what is, so to speak, deigned to pass. So Héctor, clumsy, middle-aged, overweight and easily exhausted, must run around frantically setting up reenactments of things that haven’t happened yet. Suffering from a persistent disconnect between seeing and being, he becomes tangled in a loop. The craziest part of it is that the avalanche of weird shit that got him into this mess is now rendered as echoes of their own internal continuum of events.

Newly out on DVD from Mongrel, Timecrimes is all action and often chillingly hilarious, a hybrid of an especially well-oiled The Twilight Zone episode and some especially physically taxing silent comedy. It manages to stay compelling even when you can see exactly where it’s going. Naysayers could make a case for it’s being a movie about little more than its own geometries. There’s talk of an American remake, and with the right talent—Cronenberg has been rumoured—I could certainly see how Vigalondo’s premise could be imbued with some darker layers of psychology. But you could just as easily laud the film for this very same sort of purity. It sets up an intricate network of activities that need to be fulfilled and deposits the utterly committed Elejalde into the thick of it like some poor, out-of-shape gerbil in some cosmically forbidding exercise wheel.

Like Héctor, Quim (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is an errant Spaniard who stumbles into the wrong place at the wrong time and winds up caught in a stratagem whose design or purpose is obscure. King of the Hill (El Rey de la montaña) begins with Quim getting robbed by some hot young babe (Maria Valverde) in the washroom of Spain’s most desolate gas station. At first it seems like he might be finding himself the antihero of some sexy, fatalistic rural neo-noir. He should be so lucky! By chasing after the girl and getting lost in some unpopulated mountain range, he’s actually slipping into a rethink of Deliverance or Duel, the randomly selected mark of some unseen maniac hunter with a rifle, scope, pooch and predilection for tormenting his prey.

King of the Hill is out on the Dimension Extreme DVD imprint, though I’m not sure what’s all that extreme about it save for a few particularly nasty looking wounds. Directed by Gonzalo López-Gallego from a script by Javier Gullón, the film shares Timecrimes’ unfussy, action-oriented rigour but lacks its wit and eye for odd detial. López-Gallego uses the bleak location well and cranks up tension with his insistence on tight shots that fragment the action and disorient the viewer at precisely those moments when we’re grasping for some visual context. But while its simplicity can be read as a virtue, the film is so miserly with exposition that it risks long stretches given over to not much more than scrambling around, panting and crying out in pain and desperation and not much else. We do eventually get some hints at what sort of twisted creature has fixed Quim in its sights, but the little we do learn winds up feeling rather trite. Maybe it would have helped if Quim could have gone back in time and wound up with Don Siegel, or maybe John Boorman or Walter Hill in their 1970s prime as his puppet master.