Chaotisch Ana

Many people said that "Caotica Ana" had sunk in its own chaos. Well, I don't demand from films a straightforward narrative, I think that the stream of consciousness, the poetic, the surrealistic can be much more powerful, emotional, than a story told in conventional fashion. I've liked a lot "Lucia y el sexo" - It was so beautiful that it took my breath away, and when I tried to write about it in IMDb I just couldn't.

Now, "Caotica Ana" .... as a whole it's a mess. In his homage to his sister Ana, Julio Medem invokes the sea, the sun, reincarnation, the tragedy of Western Sahara etc... Many different ingredients were put into this soup, but in what concerns the taste... Some scenes are beautiful and moving, but other scenes feel like nothing. The film is like a mind game (from reason, through reason, to Emotion) - many situations and elements seem to have been arbitrarily inserted.

I don't care so much for logic and I was expecting with "Caotica Ana" an audio-visual-emotional trip (the beautiful Ana in different times and places, the sea, the sky. What could possibly go wrong?), but I was disappointed in this regard. Anyway "Caotica Ana" is a very personal film. It's different from anything you may find in your local DVD rental store. Give it a try if you want.

I saw this last month at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. The premise of this film was done before back in 1968 in the film Candy. You take a lovely nymph-like girl with a lot of hair and a beautiful body and build a series of disjointed, ridiculous sketch-like stories around her with the help of a big name actor or two and pretend it's a comedy. This film does the same except it pretends to be a drama. The films title character Ana (Manuela Vellés) is a gifted young artist living with her father Klaus (Matthias Habich) in a cave near Ibiza, Spain. Yes, they live in a cave but it's quite nice and richly appointed for a cave dwelling. Newcomer Vellés almost didn't have the role as it was originally attached to actress María Valverde who wisely bowed out and you can only imagine if it was her refusal to do a certain scene in this film. One day a wealthy art patron from France named Justine (veteran international talent Charlotte Rampling) discovers the artistic potential in Ana and wants to cultivate her talent by setting her up in her exclusive art colony she runs in Madrid. Ana meets Linda (Bebe Rebulleto) who becomes her best friend and Said (Nicolas Cazalé) who becomes her boyfriend. Ana discovers the doors to past lives through regressive hypnotism by an young American hypnotist named Michael (Asier Newman). The movie has you hooked for a while and you wonder where it's going to go but once she heads for New York it rapidly falls apart as a film trying to hard to be an art film with a political and social message. The film looks great with art direction by Montse Sanz and cinematography by Mario Montero and direction from the talented and celebrated, international film festival award winning Julio Medem. The film is dedicated to Medem's sister Ana Medem whose actual artwork are featured through the film. Her Picassoesque style painting were to be shown at an exhibit in Valencia when on her way there she was tragically killed in a car accident. I hate to be critical of a film dedicated to someone who represents such a personal loss to it's director but the story written by director Medem is so bad that I can't help it. Watching this film you realize that this guy knows how to make a film but you wonder why he didn't make one this time. It features some nudity and some prolonged unnecessary violence and I would give this a 5.5 out of 10 and not recommend it to a general audience.

I have been lucky to see Julio Medem's films at several film festivals over the years and he always manages to captivate his audience. I was fortunate enough to attend the UK premiere of his new masterpiece Caotica Ana at the London Film Fstival recently. He is arguably one of Spain's all time most important film makers, for example Stanley Kubrick said that Medem's "The Red Squirrel" was one of his all time favourite films and Steven Spielberg offered Medem the chance to direct "Zorro", which he later turned down to spend more time developing his own movies.

Caotica Ana is one of Medem's best films to date, beautifully filmed, beautifully acted and with an intensely captivating story of reincarnation and never ending love. Manuela Velles as Ana is enchanting and lights up the screen, Charlotte Rampling turns in a good performance in her first ever Spanish speaking role, Bebe provides much laughter and Asier Newman is simply hypnotic, exuding vulnerability and charisma. Sequences are at times "Chaotic" as per the title but are necessary to build emotional attachment to the story. The change between chaos and calm being personified in many ways through Ana's final journey to New York by boat, travelling on stormy and more tranquil waters. Overall a must see movie, very different to anything you have ever seen before and a real homage to the importance of women in society throughout the ages.

This movie feels like a passionate dance, full of emotion, adventure, highs and lows, life and death, love and abandonment. It is about hypnosis and the past lives of the main character Ana. It is about the masculine and feminine. About war and violence, sexuality and love. A unique and artistic movie, I love it.

The last scene was a bit weird for me, but I think it is not a scene to take literally, but with a deeper, almost archetypical meaning.

Ana feels somewhat archetypical to me, like the sensual, passionate, free, open feminine. Really good actress, I love her facilial expressions, her deep emotions, the way she looks and how free-spirited she is.

If you don't know Medem - and it seems the history of film has largely bypassed him, much like Raoul Ruiz - he's magical, with stories about stories sliding into memory and yearning. Love is his theme. His camera paints with music. Fiery duende. He's a more deeply felt Ruiz in this way. He had made two more successful films leading up to this that you should absolutely see, then come to this.

It starts in a slightly clumsy way with a father and daughter living remotely in an island, then schematic in an artistic commune where she goes, but soon you see what he's capable of. From about when she meets the Berber boy until she arrives at New York he soars. This part incidentally mirrors his previous two.

It starts with the scene of their meeting in painting class; her painting clearly a sparrow in a corner of her painting that he painted elusively as just shape in his, his texture of the painting as primal as the desert he comes from, the inexplicable urge that takes over her, you can see Medem soar here. The whole is about tumultuous urges in the soul that rush to the surface, carrying with them memory, image, contact, consciousness of something larger. It is about having known him in a cosmic way, before this specific affair started, as having always suffered for him, this is how deeply Medem portrays.

And it always starts again from the middle, with him always already gone from her. Medem employed a similar device in Lucia. It's halfway in that we get this, the cinematic device that gives the story its specific shape of sliding visions. She's being hypnotized to remember. The thing to glean is that she's the one swimming into urges that heave around her, has been since the very first scene. We get the searching for him (he has mysteriously vanished) as searching across different lives, dying innumerable deaths. Selves within selves.

This has always been Medem's force; the ability to take love, make love so deep, it becomes what this life has always been about since the very start, meeting this person. Before and after blend. Urge rushes out both ways from a center in the middle. No one does deep love better, not even Malick.

But then something happens and it slips from him. You'll note quite clearly - we shift from this affair, from love shuffled by chance time, to broader elegy of womanhood. Fiery, quietly enduring the ills of mankind. Man is now more than this Berber boy she met one day, it's a child she had taken from her in the desert, a father who took off on a boat, an Indian chieftain who slayed her. That was also the time of the Iraq war so we get an angry vignette against the warmongers.

But now every new allusion jars, falls apart. It takes breath of life out and puts symbolic motif in - the woman as goddess and as mother of humanity. It does away with love we might have known and gives something broader but without anchor.

The film is dedicated to his sister Ana, then recently departed. The set of paintings we see throughout are hers, from an exhibition she was about to stage. It may be that he had already started work on this as one thing (or the story idea pre-existed) and it morphed to something else.