10/10/2024 - Enrique Buleo offers an interesting first work full of black humour and costumbrismo about the ghosts that inhabit us

A dead father reappears on Halloween. A dying man finds a way to come back as a ghost. A priest who is about to leave the priesthood because he has lost faith time ago. Another older woman waits for love to appear among the dead. A couple in financial difficulty tries to pretend to have paranormal appearances. These are the five stories in Still Life with Ghosts [+see also:
trailer
interview: Enrique Buleo
film profile], Enrique Buleo’s debut feature film, starring actors who are often supporting, Consuelo Trujillo, Fernando Sansegundo, Enric Benavent, Nuria Mencía and Pilar Matas, and which is being screened at Sitges Film Festival.

From rural tragicomedy (the whole film takes place in a small village in La Mancha) and costumbrismo, Still Life with Ghosts tells the stories of a generation and of a world that is disappearing or whose people could not live as they would have wished. The film features the elderly, through black and absurd humour, surrealism mixed with a certain hyperrealism, a fantasy and Manchegan folklore. It discusses very current issues such as conflicts related to intimate and collective identity, gender, how we have changed (although not that much) with regard to these issues, the (non)sense of faith, widowhood of the women of that generation as a taboo (and the absence of love and desire in the film), the precariousness of another generation, the outbreak of the terrifying and supernatural in reality, and the desire to escape this world.

Although at times it feels as if we have already seen this film so many times before, with a humour reminiscent of other Spanish genre films (clearly inspired by filmmakers such as José Luis Cuerda, Luis García Berlanga and more recently Chema García Ibarra and Juan Cavestany himself, one of the film's producers), Enrique Buleo also achieves a certain originality and ability to surprise. One of the great virtues of the film lies precisely in this mixture of tones, in the irony, imagination and lightness with which it tackles questions that in reality would be serious and transcendental (many of them still taboo). It manages to make us laugh with it and captures the inopportunity with which the apparently absurd and trivial often bursts into the important things in life, and how the fantastic intersects with the real. Also in the humanity, grace and tenderness with which his characters are narrated, their customs and beliefs, the idiosyncrasy of a place and its people, with dialogues as funny as they are strange, such as when a woman invokes a dead man she believes to be her last chance to find love, “If you're in, make him feel something”.

Still Life with Ghosts is a film full of humour, an irregular film, at times bold and captivating, and at others too hackneyed. A black comedy about the presence of death in life, about the ghosts that inhabit us; a film that knows how to play with wit and a certain magic with the symbolism of fantasy, making the figure of the ghost a metaphor of a spectral world that disappears or could not exist.

Still Life with Ghosts is produced by Quatre Films (Spain) in co-production with the companies Cuidado con el perro (Spain), Sideral (Spain) and This and That (Serbia).

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)