SPLALit - Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Literature and Culture

Friday, February 23, 2007

Babel directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

As an Academy Award nominee for best picture, “Babel” was a startling choice. The movie, which was written by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is composed of three stories held together by a slender thread, and the mood is darkly calamitous; even the few joyous moments are suffused with dread. In the Arriaga-Iñárritu world, if something bad can happen it happens—hardly a typical American movie’s view of life. Earlier, the two men made, in Mexico, the bloody, turbulent “Amores Perros” (2000) and, in the United States, the dolorous “21 Grams” (2003), which starred Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, and Benicio Del Toro. Now, however, the collaborators have had a falling out (each claiming the greater credit for what appears in the movies). As they seem to be heading in separate directions, these fate-driven films can be seen as a kind of trilogy. All three send characters from separate stories smacking into one another in tragic accidents; all three jump backward and forward in a scrambling of time frames that can leave the viewer experiencing reactions before actions, dénouements before climaxes, disillusion before ecstasy, and many other upsetting reversals and discombobulations.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

36th New Directors/New Film Series

Novelist/director Paul Auster's "The Inner Life of Martin Frost" will open the 36th New Directors/New Films series slated for March 21 - April 1 with screenings at MoMA's Titus 1 Theater and Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater. Argentine director Alexis Dos Santos' "Glue" will be the second opener for the series, one of three on offer from the South American country in the series out of a total roster of 26 feature length films and six shorts. Also on tap this year is Sundance grand jury winner "Padre Nuestro" by Christopher Zalla. [...]

"El Custodio," directed by Rodrigo Moreno, Argentina, 2006

The remarkable character actor Julio Chavez ("A Red Bear," ND/NF 2003) disappears into the nearly silent role of a middle-aged bodyguard for an important politician, and the cleverly paced, slow-burning tale is a mesmerizing portrait of a man whose all-consuming job is that of an invisible human shield. The measured movements of Chavez's alienated Ruben are destined to reach a breaking point, when this shadow can no longer deny his own repressed feelings. Director Rodrigo Moreno develops his masterfully wrought psychological thriller in the celebrated minimalist style that has put recent Argentine cinema on the international map. Chavez received the Best Actor award at this year's Havana International Film Festival for this performance. [...]

"Glue," directed by Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina/UK, 2006

Two boys, Lucas and Nacho, and their sidekick, Andrea, are growing up in a small remote town in Patagonia where they are experiencing the growing pains of adolescence. Lucas contends with his parents' imminent divorce. Nacho obsesses over music and sex, while Andrea is preoccupied with her too-slowly developing body. Once the three connect they become inseparable. This award-winning feature by first-time filmmaker Alexis Dos Santos reflects an intensity possible only by a talented risk-taking cast and a story rooted in the director's intimate knowledge of his subject. Scenes were shot in an improvisational style, capturing the wild beauty of Patagonia's hot, dry and windswept summer landscape. A Picture This! release.[...]

"Meanwhile," directed by Diego Lerman, Argentina, 2006

Violeta can't decide if she wants to move to Ibiza with her boyfriend Mono or just break up with him. Dalmiro's ceramics business isn't going so well, but things might be looking up. Sergio and Susana are trying to start a family. These and other characters form the rich tapestry in Meanwhile, the second feature by Diego Lerman. He focuses here on those in-between moments in people's lives--those times after a decision's possibilities have been accepted but before it's been put into effect. His characters move in and out of each other's orbits, sometimes affecting final decisions or inadvertently foreshadowing unexpected consequences, together creating a portrait of a generation used to waiting and enduring. [...]

Book Review: The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud by Julia Navarro

Spanish author Julia Navarro's debut novel The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud (John Murray £10.99, pp416) is a religious suspense thriller with an epic quest, an age-old secret conspiracy and a secretive group of people who will, naturally, stop at nothing. But Navarro moves away from the Grail and Mary Magdalene to focus on the Turin Shroud, that relic believed by many to bear the likeness of Jesus. In Navarro's novel, the shroud has fabled powers that the aforementioned stop-at-nothing types want.

Since scientific testing has conclusively proved that the real shroud is no older than the Middle Ages, Navarro's book starts without the 'could be true' factor. However, she writes well (and is beautifully translated by Borges's recent translator, Andrew Hurley) and her characterisations are strong. Tosh of a superior quality. Read More

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Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Melbourne Latin American Film Festival

Judging from the titles available for preview, this year's Melbourne Latin American Film Festival is strong on hero-worshipping documentaries and movies that show deprivation through the wide eyes of cute children.

Is this the cream of the continent's filmmaking output? Probably not, but it's clear that the festival's programmers had more than the love of "pure cinema" on their minds.

Notably, the gap between art and propaganda is less bridged than disregarded in Hector Cruz Sandoval's KordaVision - a jolly profile of the Cuban photographer Alberto "Korda" Diaz, best-known for an iconic image of Che Guevara still cherished by countless idealistic students worldwide. It's interesting to learn that Korda began as a fashion photographer, but changed tack after he was advised by no less a guru than Richard Avedon that his revolutionary images were closer to the real cutting edge.

Sergio Iglesias' Bialet Masse, un siglo despues (Bialet Masse, A Century Later) makes a more compelling case for the nobility of its nation-building hero, by turns doctor, lawyer, engineer and compiler of a landmark report on the condition of workers in early 20th-century Argentina. Using Masse's magnum opus as a guide, Iglesias undertakes his own present-day tour through the same areas, stopping off to quiz indigenous villagers and factory workers who have taken over the means of production in the wake of the country's economic collapse.

Bordertown directed by Gregory Nava

Nava says his inspiration for "Bordertown" draws from the work of Guatemalan writer Miguel Angel Asturias, the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the social dramas of Charles Dickens. It is also a return to the tradition of Nava's breakthrough movie, "El Norte," which was nominated in 1984 for an Academy Award for best original screenplay. In that film, most memorable for the scene of illegal immigrants crawling through a rat-infested sewer, he created a fictional story from scores of interviews. In "Bordertown" he took the same approach, trying to weave together the stories told by family members of the murdered young women into his "thriller-drama."

But while "Bordertown" will open in German theaters later this month, and other European theaters soon thereafter, it still does not have a US release date -- despite what Nava describes as widespread interest in the Latino community. It seems a long wait for a film whose mission, says Nava, is to take a "social injustice and compel people to do something about it." Especially so, since in Juarez the deaths continue and the murders remain solved.

Nava describes, in almost crusading terms, an "eight-year journey" to get the film made. "Hollywood is just not interested in movies about social drama and social situations," he says. "They are more interested in making movies about super heroes -- escapist entertainment. And so we had to do this independently and it's going to be distributed independently."

Winner of the Golden Globe for best dramatic picture, "Babel" is nominated for seven Academy Awards including best picture, screenplay and director for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu.

Gonzalez Inarritu, 43, is the first Mexican-born filmmaker to be nominated for a best director Oscar. He was also nominated for a Golden Globe and Directors Guild of America Award.

Shot in Africa, America and Japan in five different languages, the gritty drama revolves around the repercussions from the shooting of an American woman (Cate Blanchett) while vacationing with her husband (Brad Pitt) in Morocco.

The film marks the third collaboration between director and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga -- the two have since had a falling out -- which began seven years ago with the Oscar-nominated Mexican drama "Amores Perros."

They followed that up three years later with their first English-language production, "21 Grams," for which Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro received Oscar nominations

Gonzalez Inarritu began his professional career as a disc jockey at the top-rated Mexican station in 1984. By the end of the decade, he was composing music for features and short films.

In the 1990s, he was put in charge of production of a TV company and by 27 was one of its youngest directors. He segued into forming his company for producing advertising, short films and TV. Gonzales Inarritu made his first short feature, "Detras del Dinero" in 1995.

Nada by Carmen Laforet

This remarkable novel has a long history in Europe, Spain most particularly, but a very limited one here in the United States. A British translation from the Spanish was done almost half a century ago, and a little-known academic publisher issued one a decade and a half ago, but copies of both are limited and fairly hard to come by. So this new translation by the redoubtable Edith Grossman is especially welcome, as it makes available to readers here a coming-of-age novel that is far more mature and stylistically accomplished than the most famous American example of the genre, J.D. Salinger's vastly overrated The Catcher in the Rye.

Carmen Laforet was in her early 20s when she wrote Nada and 23 when it was published in her native Spain and became the first recipient of that country's celebrated Nadal Prize. Its frank, unsparing depiction of Barcelona in the aftermath of Spain's destructive 1936-39 Civil War caused a sensation, and its spare literary style -- impeccably rendered by Grossman -- had considerable influence on subsequent Spanish and European literature. "It has never been out of print," the Guardian reported when Laforet died three years ago, "and, even today, sells several thousand copies a year."

Dancing to “Almendra” by Mayra Montero

The late 50s in Cuba were so rich with glamour and conflict it’s a wonder more stories haven’t been set there. Such a time, such a place, and all these elements in a long, slow collision: the sordid glory of casino culture, the last crest of old-school Hollywood splendor, the vicious florescence of the Italian and Jewish mafias, the worldly style of the Cubans themselves and the gathering rumble of the Revolution, all playing out in a gorgeous city. Is there more in the way of material than this? A great narrative, an elegant and charismatic cast, a setting as alluring as any in the world; but we have little to show for it, in English anyway, aside from a slight Graham Greene novel and a few scenes in “The Godfather, Part II.” And here is Mayra Montero, a Cuban woman now living in Puerto Rico, and “Dancing to ‘Almendra,’ ” her ninth novel, lovingly translated by Edith Grossman: a flawless little book with a deceptively light touch, that covers exactly those years.

Montero’s novel is narrated by a man named Joaquín Porrata, a 22-year-old reporter living in Havana during the last days of Batista, who shows up for work one morning and finds he’s been assigned the story of a hippopotamus that has escaped from the zoo and been shot to death. As it happens, that same night the mafia capo Umberto Anastasia was murdered in a hotel barber’s shop in New York City, and from a rather strange little zookeeper named Juan Bulgado (or Johnny Angel, or Johnny Lamb: in Havana even a zookeeper can dream), Porrata discovers that the two killings are related. Rebuffed by his boss, who wants to keep him on the entertainment beat, he takes his notes to a rival paper, which sends him first through the Cuban underworld, then to New York and then to the upstate town of Apalachin, where a mob summit has been interrupted by the police, though not quickly enough to spare Anastasia a death sentence from his peers. Along the way Porrata encounters a woman named Yolanda, a small-town refugee who ran away with the circus, where she lost her arm serving as the model in a magician’s sword-through-a-box trick. She’s rumored to have a lover of her own, Santo Trafficante — himself a Mafia boss and a very scary man. Nevertheless Porrata pursues her as he pursues the story, and winds up getting them both, though not without being roughed up a few times along the way. In fact, between the animals in the zoo and the mobsters running the casinos, the book gets very bloody.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Del Toro Effect??

One of the holy grails at this year's Berlinale was buyers' search, in the wake of "Pan's Labyrinth," for the next Guillermo del Toro.

It gave an unexpected leg-up to Spanish pic sales.

Spain's hottest sales ticket, Jose Antonio Bayonas' ghost tale "The Orphanage," sold Stateside to Picturehouse by Wild Bunch, was co-produced by Del Toro, who waxes lyrical in a brochure about its merits.

By market end, "Santos," a super-hero spoof from Chile's Nicolas Lopez, also was sparking considerable major territory interest.

Del Toro hasn't anything to do with "Santos," but, budgeted at $6.4 million, it's one of the most ambitious movies to come out of Latin America this year. And its mix of auteur vision and U.S. pop culture sensibility recalls Del Toro's style.

Family Law directed by Daniel Burman

Uruguayan actor Daniel Hendler plays lawyer Ariel Perelman in "Family Law," Argentine writer-director Daniel Burman's third film about the relationships between fathers and sons. This is Hendler's third starring role in the Burman trilogy, featuring "Waiting for the Messiah" (2000) and "Lost Embrace" (2004).

The plot of "Family Law" seems to mirror elements of the 33-year-old filmmaker's life: Before studying film, he studied law; his father, mother and brother are all lawyers; and Burman became a father four years ago with the birth of his first son, Eloy, who plays Hendler's son in the film.

Can a low-key comedy be too low-key? Daniel Burman's "Family Law," set in contemporary Argentina, stars Daniel Hendler as Ariel Perelman, a law professor in his 30s who, upon getting married and having his first child, is reassessing his relationship with his father.

That imposing figure -- a charismatic lawyer who plies his trade with all the moxie and style the self-effacing Ariel lacks -- is named Bernardo (played with understated gusto by Arturo Goetz). Seen at a distance by Ariel, who narrates "Family Law" as if his life were a public television documentary, Bernardo emerges as a man whose paternal desires for his son have been continually thwarted by the less ambitious Ariel.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Book Review: Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcon

At first glance, Lost City Radio by Daniel Alarcón has the look of a political fable. It tells the story of an anonymous Latin American nation, first ravaged by a pointless war and now governed by a faceless totalitarian regime. The book's tone is chillingly Orwellian.
But politicians – either of the left or the right – are neither the real heroes or the villains in this haunting debut novel. "Lost City Radio" is indeed a wrenching commentary on the devastation war can inflict. But the mystery at the heart of this story is not political – it's a riddle of the human heart.

Summer Rain directed by Antonio Banderas at the Berlinale

Antonio Banderas returned to the southern Spain of his youth and found things much improved for "Summer Rain," his second film as a director.

"Summer Rain" is a coming-of-age tale set in Malaga in the late 1970s as Spain emerged from the decades-long dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco.

"The engine of what I have been for good or for bad in my life ... started there when I was 17, 18, 19," Banderas said Monday of his decision to return to Malaga for the Spanish-language movie, which was presented outside the main competition at the Berlin film festival.

The movie, based on a novel by his childhood friend Antonio Soler, follows the lives, loves and dreams of a group of teens growing up in the Mediterranean resort. Stars of the film include Maria Ruiz and Alberto Amarilla.