Ramírez

Todd Brown from Twitch.com. October 7th.

Since seeing the very first stills from acclaimed short film director Albert Arizza's feature debut Ramirez early this year, we have been struck by obvious sense of style and skill for composition. Clearly Arizza can shoot quality film. Anticipation grew as footage appeared - and disappeared - on the web and now Ramirez has finally taken its first step into the public eye, screening as a work-in-progress here in Sitges.

A surprisingly poetic and gently rhythmic film, Ramirez is a study of young Sebastian Ramirez: aspiring photographer, low level drug dealer, and highly accomplished serial killer.

Sebastian Ramirez appears to have it all. He is young, attractive and - judging from his car and his clothes - reasonably wealthy. The only significant flaw in his life would appear to be his seriously ill mother, a woman Ramirez feels so little sympathy for - and for good reason - that he won't even visit her when back at the family home. Ramirez lives a fairly carefree life, drifting easily from day to day, doing what he wants when he wants with no need to worry about cost or consequence. Not so lucky are the young women Ramirez meets in bars or picks up along the road. No, they are not so lucky at all for while Ramirez may be charming and attractive he is also a smooth, lethal predator, one who has linked sex and death in his own mind - a combination that leads to a handful of missing person's reports in the few days covered by the film's chronology.

Yes, the serial killer film has been done before but it has seldom been attempted quite like this. Shot digitally on an impossibly small budget Ramirez the film takes on the sort of chill out jazz tone of the music preferred by Ramirez the character. Arizza offers neither excuse nor explanation for Ramirez's behavior, instead his camera simply observes, creating a quietly intimate portrayal of his character. Arizza has a stellar eye for composition and a rhythmic approach to editing - the multi tasking Arizza also wrote and co-produced the film - and draws an excellent performance out of lead actor Christian Magaloni, who has the potential to be a major star.

While most films of this genre go for the big shock, for the big kill scene, Ramirez takes the exact opposite approach. This is film as a form of portraiture and it is an intriguing little experiment by a very talented film maker.

I watched this in the Sitges festival, so i was able to be at a post screening in whitch the director was presented. When asked about his cinematic references, he indicated that Bresson's 'Pickpocket' was a sort of loose guide to this work. I believe him, i believe he was being honest and that felt the inclination to follow that work. But i don't think this film has so much to do with the kind of visual work Bresson did. This is nested in a kind of narrative that brings out daily apparently uninteresting actions, and tries to exploit a character and the subsequent dynamics of his behaviour from there. It has been done, in relatively recent years, by some directors. It probably had a seed in the work of Godard, in the 60', but back than he and his new wave friends were worried about other issues and didn't pay attention to that specific thread they were opening. To contemporary eyes, this kind of daily actions conducted narrative was probably best mastered by Pedro Costa, starting with his 'Ossos', who has since mastered that dark corner of a universe he created for himself. The danish Dogma had a word on this as well, but i think in the way they got lost in their own self-imposed rules. Curiously, so far the examples we have only contemplate stories centered around one character, who has to be weird or obsessed enough to make the thing work. That's the case here: sexually moved serial killer, also a drug dealer, disguised as an artist. Mother related unsolved issues. The action occurs between Madrid and Segovia, city-country opposition, i suppose, also the reason to place a sense of journey, endless path that involves most of the cinematic characterization of a serial killer. I was impressed to find out this was an independent production. I knew very little about the film before i watched it, and when i heard it was made under very strict budgets, i was deeply impressed. The artistic work is quite solid, sober in a way i really appreciate, and the use of the city (Madrid) was quite good. Concrete enough to allow us to recognize it, but abstract enough not to let us fall into clichés and deviate from what mattered. It's difficult to see that. What diminished the experience to me was what usually does it with Costa's films. I don't think a contemporary film, made today for today's publics has to obey to a classic story form of intro-development-climax-conclusion, but it should go somewhere. Not narratively, not that it had to happen something on the facts of the story, but on the visual side, or any other thing. It was safe to leave the film as it was, because it didn't imply taking the risk of making it something else. The answer for what i'm saying is, in quite different forms, can be found in Wenders, Antonioni, and in a different plan, in Herzog, a master in capturing madness, or better still, finding it in us, the viewers. The first two is/was masters in raising questions on us out of visual stillness, or visual succession, or visual twisting, framing... This are their abilities, they would produce films out of no logical, or at least interesting stories, but they would open our visual mind. If i refer them, is because i missed that subtlety here. The main actor as well wouldn't be enough to make the thing happen, without top class visual/mental manipulation. He is not untalented, but he probably was miscast. He cannot carry a character with as many characters on himself as this Ramirez. My opinion: 3/5 still worth it, despite the weaknesses.

karlovy Vary film fest EMPIRE MAGAZINE by Damon Wise From Spain comes Albert Arizza's Ramirez, a serial-killer thriller that looked quite ropey (it was a bad projection from a DVD, I think) but strangely held my attention. Ramirez himself is a drug dealer from Madrid who has a sideline in murder; one is a prostitute, another is a party girl trying to find a cab, another is a gay guy who picks him up in a bar... There's no logic, except that Ramirez does weird pop-art portraits of his victims, which he doesn't seem all that interested in either. On paper, it sounds like another naïve genre movie, but there are some excellent flourishes, particularly in the characters that Ramirez meets. It's also bold stylistically; Arizza plays games with sound and silence to very creepy effect. The final scene is one of the oddest and most disturbing I've seen for a while, even though I can't even begin to think why. It's all drawn from the same, dark Latin well that gave us Chile's Tony Manero, and it ultimately transcends its very low (50,000 euros) budget.