Arrebato

Arrebato by Ivan Zulueta is a wonderful, strange movie. The desire and the magic of cinema full the screen. This extremely beautiful film describes clearly the darkness state of things, the joy and pain of living, taking drugs, being and loving the cinema. A little big jewel to feel.

José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela) is a frustrated horror film director of short budget stories and heroin addict in a thunderous relationship with Ana Turner (Cecilia Roth) . The cousin of his ex-girlfriend Marta (Marta Fernandez Muro) , outcast Pedro (Will More) , sends him a reel of film , an audio cassette, and the key to his apartment despite the fact that the two have only met twice. As José and Ana listen , the audio cassette narrates the two occasions when the two men met . The strange Pedro, who is an obsessive maker of homemade films , snorts heroin with José and asks if he knows how to film time-lapse photography. Pedro shows José his home movie s, which he has never shown to anyone . Later on , José , mails Pedro an interval timer that would control his camera's shutter, shooting at specified intervals . Shortly after , the rare and offbeat Pedro is suddenly missing . As the druggie filmmaker will investigate what happened with the author while shooting his brief consciousness during drug abuse which subsequently disappeared. The research will lead the characters to fall deeper in drugs addiction.

A plain and simple plot dealing with a short budget horror filmmaker gets in touch with an eccentric young who is attempting to shoot weird movies becomes into a confuse yarn in David Lynch style resulting in a quasi-lysergic experience for the spectators . This is a ¨cult movie¨ deemed to be the fundamental and essential film of the ¨Spanish Movida¨ of the late 70s and early 80s that took place mainly in Madrid , and away from the thematic and technical assumptions of conventional cinema . The picture chooses to play freely with the elements of audiovisual language with a claustrophobic examination of the secret potency of shoot itself with astonishing time-lapse frames . It results to be a challenge for movie exegesis , that's why some reviewers panned extremely the film because of it contains uncompelling characters and "inscrutable" screenplay . Trio starring : Eusebio Poncela , Will More , Cecilia Roth , giving nice acting . They are accompanied by brief appearances and cameos from Elena Fernán Gómez , Luis Ciges , Alaska , Pedro Almodovar , some of the uncredited. Special mention for the film's cinematography by Angel Luis Fernández , mood , strange musical score and director Zulueta's building of tension . It packs an atmospheric and eerie soundtrack by Negativo and Iván Zulueta himself but uncredited , adding fragments from Siegfried's Funeral March written by Richard Wagner and a song : I Want You, I Need You, I Love You written by Ira Kosloff and performed by Cecilia Roth .

The picture was original but rarely directed by Iván Zulueta . Iván was born in 1943 and died 2009 in Donostia-San Sebastián, Guipúzcoa, País Vasco, Spain . He was a director and writer, especially known for this Arrebato (1979) , Un, dos, tres... al escondite inglés (1970) and a lot of shorts as A mal gam (1976) Frank Stein , Masaje , Kinkón, among others . Zulueta with Arrebato won several nominations and prizes as Chicago International Film Festival 1980 Nominee Gold Hugo Best Feature Iván Zulueta ; Fantasporto 1982 Winner Critics' Award Iván Zulueta Winner International Fantasy Film Award Best Screenplay Iván Zulueta Best Actor Eusebio Poncela ; Nominee International Fantasy Film Award Best Film Iván Zulueta and Mystfest 1980 Nominee Best Film Iván Zulueta. Rating : 6.5/10 . The flick will appeal to ¨Cult Movies¨fans. .

Jose, a director of schlock horror films, is a high-functioning heroin addict who's experiencing a burnout phase in his career, and frustration over a rocky, on-again/off-again relationship he can't seem to terminate. He receives an unexpected parcel from a fleeting acquaintance named Pedro, a cousin of an old flame, who makes raw naturalistic films variably similar to the works of STAN BRAKHAGE. The parcel contains a filmreel, Pedro's housekey, and a cassette tape on which he's recorded himself expounding a bizarre personal odyssey which initialized at a time when Jose had assisted him in matters of interval time filming. The fervid, gravelly-voiced storytelling spans the film's remaining duration, cryptically implying that Pedro's Super8 camera has taken on a predatory sentience vaguely vampiric in nature...by sucking people away from the Earthly plane, and into the cinematic one(a metamorphosis which Pedro insists is sublimely blissful). This outlandish disclosure is confirmed when Jose watches the filmreel, at which point he realizes why Pedro had sent him the key to his apartment. It is there that Jose will face his ordained destiny under the officious eye of Pedro's camera.

That ARREBATO comes from a director with such a minimal body of work is surprising...it's a professionally appointed abstraction which is comparable to little else, though touches of LYNCH, CRONENBERG, and ECKHART SCHMIDT are sometimes evident. It's a cynical, allegorical, and occasionally plaintive excursion into a dreary alternate reality, underscored with notes of homoerotic suggestion, heroin chic, and pointed political commentary.

There's an intriguing mystery in Pedro's prolonged tape-recorded anecdotes...it's an abstruse and strangely tantalizing expository device which juxtaposes the film's deliberately dallying visual tedium. Narcotics are a preponderance of the proceedings, chiefly regarding their potency to electrify creative vitality while simultaneously draining it dry. I might argue that the "vampire" of the story isn't the actual, tangible camera...rather, it is cinema itself. More specifically, it's the ART of cinema, which, like a god, casts judgment in accordance with one's personal filmic refinements (**spoiler**) It would seem that Pedro has been raptured to a higher plane of existence, owing to his impassioned visionary buoyancy. Jose, conversely, has lost that creative brio, and is thus rendered unworthy or ineligible for ascension. He is denied passage, and promptly exterminated.

As extravagantly outré as it is, ARREBATO is handled quite confidently, and the key players vitalize their characters with moxie. Sure, it's blemished, and certainly not for all tastes, but it's audaciously and undeniably sui generis. That's mighty refreshing in a time when remakes of remakes are the order of the day.

7/10...a worthy legacy for its late director, whose too-brief life is said to have had many unfortunate parallels with this film.

Obviously, you will receive a surprise from this enrapturing film due to strange denounement and secondary characters. Slowly in the begining, it justifies that scenes during the film while you get catch for the story unconciously. Special mention to the work of Will More, a curious actor who didn´t work in cinema never more, only little appearances on TV series. Correct performance of Eusebio Poncela but he is better actor now, the same to a young and inexpert Cecilia Roth. Definitely you have to see this movie and think about it during hours before you beat the insomnia that the film could produce. Very disturbing.

From initial ridicule (despite the official recommendation as a quality feature) to flat-out praise, it took more than twenty years to realize the seminal influence of this film on Spanish production, from Almodovar onwards. It draws many influences from the Warhol-esque New York underground scene but has tremendous scenes.

Whoever wants to understand what Betty Boop was all about, must see Cecilia Roth dance scene, it is fabulous.

Contains a lot of drug addiction references, which should be seen as an analogy to the addiction to capturing moving pictures and watching them. The only way for a film director to get rid of the latter is to dissolve into the industry.