X

Luis Marias' director debut is a solid noir that demonstrates once more his ability as a writer to create charismatic characters and well plotted stories.

This is a classical noir story, intriguing until the last minute, precise, violent and complex: there's an alcoholic police detective (excellent Antonio Resines), the anguished anti-hero without memory who investigates a crime he may have committed after a monumental hangover; there's that femme fatale (Abascal, great actress) too, the victim's sister, hurt in her leg and in her past; a bag full of money stolen from an expeditive gang; a fallen-from-grace actress (recuperated Esperanza Roy, she may start a new career after her solid performance)that witnessed the crime and takes advantage from it to blackmail the troubled detective...

Sound familiar? Maybe, but Maria's update all this recurrent items and constructs a neo-noir thriller with its own personality, following the Spanish noir tradition that director Enrique Urbizu renewed in the eighties with "Todo por la pasta".

As far as the direction is concerned, Luis Marias puts together some good moments (the film start, so concise; the recurrent X motive - a reference to Hawks' "Scarface"? -, above all in that beautiful image of Resines and Abascal in a railway intersection; the desolating ending) and shows enough competence to keep up the tension along the film.

I'd say we can expect notable things from him in the future!

Someone remarked this was a film noir. Hello? The best of the genre were films that had an atmosphere and mystery around them. Most of the action in those films happened at night with water soaked streets, shadows, evil, bad people, valiant detectives, great private investigators, cigarette smoke, drinking, bad women, dives, etc.

Not so this one. I would call this and this genre "film blanc", or better, "film blah" since most of the action occurs during the daytime, or at least nothing of the above ever happens and it's just blah, blah, blah.

Director Marias has tried to make this story of a crime where a man is killed and all points to the wrong person: the police detective with the drinking problem.

As played by Antonio Resines, this man has serious problems. He has a wife to die for who wants out of the marriage for no apparent reasons, other than with his affection for the bottle. Maybe a little Viagra would have kept them together. Who knows?

The characters are paper thin. Anyone can figure out what is coming. Suffice it to say that the detective has enough smarts to figure out who did it, but was it necessary to have Resines in a polyester suit during the Madrid's heat wave? I guess it's an inside joke for the in crowd in Spain that must have thought this was a great film.

Resines as a character actor, yes, but Resines as a lead man, no way Jose!

A cop wakes up from a drunken stupor to find that all the clues to a murder point to him as the prime suspect. This is a fairly intriguing drama but it doesn't quite add up to a satisfying film. One of the problems is that the protagonist, a self-centered alcoholic brute, is not likable or sympathetic; it's hard to care whether he committed the murder or not. Having the grim-faced, balding Resines play the lead doesn't help matters. This is the first (and so far only) film directed by Marias, who also wrote the somewhat convoluted script. His inexperience manifests itself in some scenes that are over the top (such as the cop brutalizing the dog).