Chaotisch Ana

Having now seen all six of Medem's DVDs in his Spanish released "Collection", I was worried that this last one, would be rubbish. Other reviews and reviewers hint at such but I found it utterly intense and mesmerising.

Anyone having seen more than one of Julio's films knows that logic often disappears and an adult fantasy awaits. Beautiful sexuality, strange and exotic visuals, stunning landscapes and a chequerboard of interlocking story pieces that sometimes sort of connect. I loved not knowing what was going to happen next, or who Ana's next incarnation was going to be.

Instead of trying to make sense of it all, just light a candle of two, turn out the lights and let it overwhelm you. This is a director of immense imagination and he has the guts to follow them through and onto film. The ravishing paintings done by his late sister alone are worth seeing.

Here in the U.K., I've not seen any of the regular actors of Medem's in any other director's films. So, it was nice to see the reassuring maturity of Charlotte Rampling and her character as the Patron of the Arts that takes Ana under her wing perfect for her and she plays it superbly, of course.

Chaotic Ana isn't my favourite Medem flick, The Red Squirrel is. All his films are quite long and meandering and it is this unpredictability and superb visual tapestry that makes me rate him so highly.

Chaotic Ana is Julio Medem's ode to the female and the myths of the motherland. Despite some bloody and shocking scenes, is also an ode against male violence, wars, and those individuals who starts them; however, the film also shows a blind faith in the good of human kind, despite the tragedies and havoc that we create and surround us. Moreover, Chaotic Ana is both a reflection on death and the void left by the departed - Medem's tribute to his late sister Anne. The film is also an invitation to see Art as a form of individual expression, a timeless biography of the living, and a living legacy of the deceased.

In his odyssey of discovery of The Female, Medem takes us from the cave to the skyscraper, with the ocean as an element of continuity.

This is a very intimate, personal film that touches universal themes and myths(from Oedipus and Electra to primitive matriarchal mythologies) to share personal experiences, feelings and ideas that relate to Women and the Female.

The editing is complex and very dynamic. Every single small detail in the film has an intrinsic connection with the story, is part of it, not as an object, but as object that conveys meaning. I especially liked some of visual shows shown in the House of the Artists.

The film continuously unsettles the viewer. However, the violent, shocking and sex scenes have a purpose within the story.

The actors are all OK in the movie. But this is not a movie for the actors to shine, but a movie in which the script, the story, is what matters. The actors are here just as Medem's "mediums". In fact, Medem has curated this film to the smallest detail.

You cannot watch this movie as if you were watching a normal movie, not in the same mood, or with the same intention or attention. This film requires of you 1/ A willingness to let the odd, the chaos and surprise express themselves freely. 2/ To embrace Medem's personal story being shared with you. 3/ An attention to the detail. 4/ Have into account that this film is personal as it is related to the figure of Medem's late sister, who was also a remarkable painter, and that many of the references and scenes in the film are related to her.

Movies like this are a challenge for the viewer and are never popular or highly rated. But this is just a sign that most people don't watch movies, just see them.

Ana, (Manuela Velles), is a young hippie living in a cave in Ibiza with her father, painting pictures which she sells to tourists. One day Justine, (Charlotte Rampling), happens by and takes Ana off to her colony of artists in Madrid where she meets the handsome Berber Said, (Nicholas Cazale). Julio Medem's "Chaotic Ana" aims to be a kind of dark fairy-tale with a heroine whose life is more chaotic than it first appears. Under hypnosis it seems she lived several lives before this one.

The problem is Medem's film can't quite make up its mind what it wants to be; a psychological study of a young woman with multiple (past) personalities, a cool thriller about a kind of cult, a political movie about refugees and Middle-Eastern politics or a movie about performance art? As Ana, Velles is certainly a blank slate but it's a blankless lacking in personality and unfortunately Ana is actually quite boring and she's the film's dominant character, (Rampling flits in and out, saying and doing very little), and at around two hours it's very long. This is a film with too many ideas that never amount to anything and is ultimately a lost opportunity.

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.