webbobilbao

A circus attraction and a mysterious prince arrive very very (but very very!) slowly to a village where it is cold and the inhabitants are afraid of something. That's what you notice while you see how a very common sad guy commonly and sadly walks, commonly and sadly wanders, commonly and sadly eats, commonly and sadly works. He commonly and sadly looks after an old guy who is obsessed with the musical tempered systems that try to imitate the celestial harmonies: so hopefully, he says, all the tunings should be just, otherwise the Bach preludes sound badly, and blah, blah, blah....

That's the cultural stuff Bela Tarr found some day so he could use it in a new movie and look profound and exquisite. Because, if he finds that subject truly amazing, why does he use such an stupid piano new-age music for the first scene, that repulsive description of an eclipse with fake drunkards, so pedantic? Beeeeeeghhhhrpl.

Apart from that evident evidence, Tarr shows you everything very slowly (unbereable the scene when the truck crosses a big street, at 5km/h). But that slowness has no justification: it is the exact mirror of the stupid American action movies ("Gladiator", "Transporter"...) that show you everything very very fast so you can have the feeling of "frenetic action", which is what it's "really cool", oh yeah! These slow movies are also done to make the director and the believers feel that same feeling: "we are slow, we are really cool!, oh yeah!, amen!". Because in this movie there is no reason for slowness: there are no details, the story doesn't change, the characters are uninteresting and are never seen in a different way during the film, there is no sense of humour... "I'm slow, so I'm special", that's all.

It's in b/w and some people say it has a dream-like atmosphere. I think that in dreams the events don't happen so slowly, we don't need to dream every second that we are eating in the dream, or walking, and there is a kind of brutal presence of the unexpected, of elements that break the "artistic direction" of the dream, something that Mr.Tarr will surely not find "cool" enough.

I didn't like it very much.

This stupid mixture of thriller and biopic is extremely ridiculous, dramatically cloying, from Andy Garcia playing a kind of Super-Lorca, to the costumes or the cheap touristic Spanish setting. The music is horribly cheesy, Franco's fascists appear as the bad guys of a bad thriller (they were actually more rude than that, and more dangerous). And there was nothing about homosexuality, SuperLorca should be a hero for all the audiences and Andy García has a Latin lover image to be protected. Don't play Lorca then! I don't know if it was less the time spent in investigating Lorca's real background during the civil war or the shame of the crew making such a horrible movie, in which I'm sure nobody believed. And what an ending...!

If you are interested in Lorca and know nothing previously about him, stay away from this thing. It deserves truly a 1, because no movie can be worse than this one. I don't know how his biographer (Ian Gibson) took some part, I suppose he regrets doing it, or maybe he needed some money.

This movie is terribly bad. I don't know how this ¿script? passed any kind of selection. I must say that it is under the level of the actors in the movie, and, believe me, that's not easy. It's really sad to see that not one, but ¡three! directors, with all their talent together, are unable to overcome the level of shame.

In the beginning, Nancho Novo's faces, remembering some sexual-criminal scene, already promises the absurd and bad-done development of the rest of the movie. The mixture of Madrid's "movida" and the deep feelings and the thriller atmosphere is really pathetic. The personal stories of the characters have been seen thousand times before, although the directors show them as very interesting and full of deep passion. The violent ending adds more absurd stupidity to the plot.

Anyway, it's not a surprise to see how bad this film is. It is part of a sort of genre of Spanish bad movies, trying to imitate Almodovar's model, believing that filming sex, gay ambient, drugs and frenetic passions makes a movie a good movie. Unfortunately for these three directors, if you have a stupid story nothing works. And I guess that's what they will always have in their (I hope short) careers.