Il caos da Ana

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.

You know how sometimes a movie really reminds you of another movie you saw, not because of obvious reasons such as plot similarities, duplicated characters, suspiciously identical quotes etc. but because of another reason, a little less evident but existent nonetheless. I associate Chaotic Ana with "Stealing Beauty", a romantic drama by Bernardo Bertolucci that made Liv Tyler a household name. seemingly one has to be slightly hallucinated to associate Stealing Beauty with a fantasy/occult movie and like I said earlier, the reason is subtle but it still exists. Ana (the mind-blowingly beautiful Manuela Vellés in a good performance) is a painter who lives with her father in a cave (seriously, an actual cave) when one day, she is spotted by an artists' patron (Charlotte Rampling ) who immediately identifies her talent and asks her to join the artists greenhouse she runs in Madrid. Ana who is very close to her father is a little reluctant at first but ultimately decides to cultivate her passion for art, preferably in a modern day dwelling. Ana is acquainted with other artists that share her artistic vision and propensity to avoid coherent statements (I will elaborate about that later on) but one man draws her attention, Said (pronounced Sa-Id), an enigmatic painter who grew up in a rural area of a north African, trauma ridden, country. How he got from there to the artists' house is anyone's guess. Ana and Said fall in love and conduct a passionate and highly explicit romance. One day, though, Said disappears for no reason. At the same time, Ana discovers that her dreamless sleep and peculiar visions originate in a startling fact in her past. To avoid spoilers, I will not elaborate too much on that fact but like I stated earlier, this movie deals with the occult so if you hate the sixth sense because you're too old to believe in ghosts, this movie is probably not your cup of truffles-juice (no tea in this movie, it's way too normal to be consumed)

Ana, aided with the French patron and an American "occult professional" (Asier Newman Who unfortunately, struggled too much with his coarse Spanish to give a good performance), decides to search her destiny in light of these revelations. These revelations are abundant with cultural references, Flashbacks, scenery shots etc. but they all lack one crucial ingredient- sense.

Sense is usually a missing ingredient in the films that deal with the occult but the sense I refer to is not the fact oriented sense. It's the sense of the characters state of mind and disposition that makes them genuine. The endless theories about the nature of men and women might seem offensive to some or ridiculous to others but to me they seem the clear cut symptom of the film's artificiality. Hearing the characters lay out their philosophies, listening to them converse, and watching them react to certain situations, make you wonder in what bizarro world this code of conduct is considered common or even acceptable. And if that's not sufficient enough to depreciate the film's cinematic worth, the blunt and redundant sex scenes as well as the stereotypical background stories deteriorate the film to good guys/bad guys dichotomy usually common in Road runner cartoons. By "stereotypical stories" I mean the stories that are too clichéd and metaphorical to be authentic, for example: Said that was abducted from his family by soldiers, Ana's friend, Linda that was abandoned by her father, the encounter American official who "made" the war (no, I don't know what that means either) and the list goes on and on.

I feel a bit reluctant to criticize a film that was made from such a personal and painful viewpoint (the director made this movie in his deceased sister's memory and incorporated her paintings throughout the film). I can't think of a more difficult task to translate personal loss to the big screen. I have no knowledge or skill to determine whether the character of Ana is based on Hulio Medem's deceased sister but I can say with a great deal of confidence that the world depicted in this movie doesn't fit to the planet we all live in.

If you recall (which I doubt it), I mentioned that this film reminded me of Stealing beauty, Liv Tyler's big breakthrough. That film was highly acclaimed at the time so I rushed to see it and ended up bitterly disappointed. I believe that many critics who wrote in glowing terms of Stealing beauty's behalf, spent the movie mesmerized by Liv's infinite charm and sex appeal and overlooked the film's overall qualities. Manuela Vellés has the same undefinable quality and I can only assume her name will be known to many in the future.

Hopefully in more coherent films.

4 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter.

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.

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.

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.