Tag Archives: Spain

Marshland

Marshland
Marshland

Format: Cinema

Release date: 7 August 2015

Distributor: Altitude Film Entertainment

Director: Alberto Rodríguez

Writers: Alberto Rodríguez, Rafael Cobos

Cast:Javier Gutiérrez, Raúl Arévalo, Mar Rodría Varod

Spain 2014

105 mins

Spain, 1980. When teenage sisters go missing in the remote and barren Andaluz wetlands, two detectives from Madrid are sent to investigate. It’s immediately clear to them that the locals, even the girls’ own father, are virtually indifferent to their disappearance, believing that the sisters, with their ‘loose’ morals, have either run away or brought their fate upon themselves. Although the town’s residents remain stubborn in their refusal to help, the detectives soon discover that the girls are not the first who have gone missing from the area, and that a serial killer (or killers) is sexually exploiting the women before callously disposing of their bodies.

Juan (the excellent Javier Gutiérrez) is the experienced detective with a murky past under the Franco regime. Pragmatic, wily, manipulative, he’s better at needling out information over a few drinks, or, if that doesn’t work, using his fists. His new partner is the idealistic rookie, his future already in jeopardy after publicly criticising Franco’s still-powerful generals. Played by Raúl Arévalo, Pedro is the more earnest, less charismatic of the two, his integrity at odds with the casual way business is done in the marshlands.

Director Alberto Rodríguez’s atmospheric Marshland, (which swept the Goya awards on its release last year) can feel at times like a by-the-numbers police procedural, but it’s saved by its backdrop of social upheaval and unrest. The murders are used as a foil to delve into the legacy left behind by Franco, revealing a country struggling to find its way forward. The climate of fear that existed under his regime still permeates the small, impoverished town, where the police don’t ask too many questions (turning a blind eye to the drug running in the region’s swampy rivers), and where powerful business owners are still untouchable. But things are slowly changing, as men strike for better working conditions, and women are lured away to places like the Costa del Sol with promises of hotel work. But as the women become more independent, more sexually liberated, they are shunned by the community, and left vulnerable to the town’s dangerous predators.

Parallels have been drawn between the film and True Detective, but it’s also reminiscent of Arthur Penn’s excellent Florida-set Night Moves. Marshland is a terrifically well-crafted sunshine noir, with the genre’s usual shadows replaced by the searing bright light and heat of southern Spain. Rodríguez is clearly inspired by the atmospheric, treacherous bayous of the deep American south; the marshes are like fetid pockets of water, where bodies and secrets can lurk unfound just below the surface. The flat, open spaces are stunningly captured by cinematographer Alex Catalan, with some remarkable, abstract aerial shots of the land below, the rivers and tributaries, forming resonant motifs.

Though the violence that the women are subjected to, and its casual dismissal, is deeply disturbing, the victims themselves are never really fleshed out by the filmmaker. It’s the relationship between Juan and Pedro, between the past and future, justice and abuse of power, that is the film’s beating heart. Though the crime is solved, Rodríguez refuses to indulge in a neat resolution, either for the murderer, or the two detectives.

Sarah Cronin

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Open Windows

Open Windows
Open Windows

Director: Nacho Vigalondo

Writer: Nacho Vigalondo

Cast: Elijah Wood, Sacha Grey, Neil Maskell

Spain, USA 2014

100 mins

Is there a regular pattern in the careers of post-Almodóvarian Spanish directors? It would seem that those who get famous enough to awaken interest in pan-European or Hollywood studios lose something when they open up their horizons to the English-speaking world. Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora is stripped of what made the strength of his Spanish films. Alex de la Iglesia’s Crimes in Oxford is his least eccentric and imaginative film. So has Nacho Vigalondo joined the club with Open Windows?

Looking at the plot you might well be tempted to answer that he has. Nick Chambers (Elijah Wood), a fan of the successful actress Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey), running a website devoted to her career, wins an invitation to spend an evening with her. But while he is awaiting the big event in his hotel room he is contacted on his computer and told that his rendezvous is cancelled. As compensation, the man on the phone offers him access to Goddard’s cell phone and much more of her privacy. By the time Nick realises that he is being manipulated by a dangerous psychopath into kidnapping the helpless star, it is too late. From there on Nick – and the viewer – are rushed through a ‘Russian dolls’ scenario, which, like the many computer windows that pop up on the screen, constantly reveals yet another ‘hidden’ reality behind appearances. This eventually becomes so unrealistic and unlikely that, unless you are gifted with a preternatural capacity for suspending your disbelief, you cannot help but lose interest in what is actually happening.

This high-concept film is a 2.0 version of the ‘found footage’ genre, where computer screens replace CCTV or amateur cameras. And Vigalondo sure knows how to exploit the genre’s constraints with creative efficiency, displaying impressive accuracy in directing hours and hours of footage that are then edited to be shown simultaneously on screen. The rhythm never slows down and his inventiveness in providing us with the unexpected is impressive and hardly troubled by realism. Witness, for instance, the spherical cameras in a bag which, assembled into a remote network, recreate the inside of the car boot where Goddard is locked. Yet, as many critics have already complained, in contrast to Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007) and Extraterrestre (2011), the constraints of the initial concept of Open Windows have failed to produce a masterpiece. The implausible plot, with a villain whose evil motivations one could not care less about, and the consensual and conventional criticism of the celebrity culture and the dubious role of information technology, leaves us under the impression that there is nothing new here. The easiest conclusion would be that Hollywood got the better (or in this case the worse) of Vigalondo, and we might even be tempted to blame it on Elijah Wood, since he also starred in Alex de la Iglesia’s flop Crimes in Oxford. Coincidence?

Yet there might be more to Open Windows than it may initially seem. If we trust Vigalondo with the talent he displayed previously, then the implausibility of the film’s twists and turns may be a signal rather than a flaw, as in Extraterrestre, where the alien plot was only a way of highlighting the characters’ self-fashioning. What if the director were planting false clues, offering a double discourse that would suit both Hollywood and his acute sense of humour? Open Windows is all about subversion – of identity, of reality, of information… Might not the spectator’s frustration be part of the subversion as well? Isn’t it quite subversive to cast an ex-porn star, to give Nick all the freedom to make her satisfy his wildest fantasies, and then leave the spectator with only one quick glance at her breast? And can it really be coincidental that the heroine’s name is Jill Goddard? J.L. Godard did you say? The Godard, who subversively sings the end of cinema every now and then? Might this be why the film makes us put up with a crew of silly French-speaking hackers (who are not even really French)? If we watch the film not as an umpteenth criticism of the media’s rape of privacy but as a spirited reflection on what cinema actually is, then the far-fetched plot can be seen as a statement about the pleasures of cinema with its problematic relation to reality. In that perspective, Open Windows may be seen as reconnecting with the old genre of tragicomedy where order is eventually restored thanks to a deus ex machina device. So there may still be hope for Nacho Vigalondo after all.

Pierre Kapitaniak

This review is part of our Etrange Festival 2014 coverage.

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