Dispara!

It's hard to catch the nuances (that I hope are there) in a subtitled film. Francesca Neri is the star of this film, even though Antonio Banderas is featured on the U. S. release. It has an exotic (to me) location, a circus in Madrid. Neri's character suffers a brutal rape (Not an easy scene to watch) and the rest of the film deals with her method of dealing with the wrong done her, and its unintended consequences.

This is definitely a drama, downbeat, depressing, gloomy poignant drama, and not a thriller nor a crime action flick. It is not a Spanish MS .45; remember, the Abel Ferrarra's movie from the early eighties, describing a young woman, raped by hoodlums, who then begins a bloody rampage spree. Here, OK, the basic plot looks very like it, but only the scheme, not the development. It is impossible to stay iced, cold blooded, in front such a story. It is painful for anyone deeply focused on it. Superb directing, cast, acting.... Anyway, director Carlos Saura has nothing to prove. Excellent Spanish drama.

A young man, a journalist, interviews a talented performer at the circus in Madrid. Her speciality, marksmanship on horseback. The two people feel a mutual attraction and things move fast. He leaves for another assignment, just overnight. Alas, things can change in a person's life in just a day. New faces in the audience the next night, and it's not her horseback riding that is being admired. Blossoming joy turns to acrid despair, and worse is to come.

Outrage in the English dub, Dispara (Shoot!) in the original. Bad decisions, impulsive actions, the cruel smile of Fate. This is a movie that invites us to ask ourselves, would we really have done things differently had it been us? We think that we would, make more sensible decisions, but then again we're sitting comfortably merely watching a movie, and everyone is different, let's face it.

Marcos didn't want to go to Barcelona, and what if he hadn't? Ana shouldn't have shot at that beer can, right? Why did the policeman needlessly insist on inspecting her handbag? Did Mario really need to use that wine bottle the way he did? If only the doctor had respected her wishes, yes? The wheel of fortune turns, the thread of existence snags on a sharp stone, and things happen. The show must go on, but the circus is a dying institution.

Some nice landscape photography and beautiful scoring by Alberto Iglesias. This is a revenge tragedy, not a revenge exploitation movie.

This film is a fine drama about a woman who gets raped by three men then hunts then down one by one with a cold determination of a professional assassin. After years of being an equestrian circus performer, Francesca Neri meets Antonio Banderas, a journalist, and romance seems to be in the offing but fate is unkind to them and sets in motion the tragic events of the story. The pursuit and revenge plot is straightforward with no surprises but the drama really builds when Neri herself becomes the hunted when an all-points alert is issued by Spanish police. Neri's role of a woman who takes the law into her own hands is one-dimensional but she sells her character well and manages to generate sympathy because of what happened to her. Neri and Banderas do have a certain chemistry between them and they make the premise work in spite of the unpleasant subject matter.

Utter nonsense, absolutely worthless based on a stupid scenario