The most beautiful breakthrough is that in these five recent Spanish films women have not been chosen as the main protagonists in order to prove some feminist thesis but are simply central characters that advance the drama



Spanish cinema is lucky that its unavoidable leader Pedro Almodovar is in love with melodrama and female protagonists: his deep interest in women outside and ahead of his time is comparable to Woody Allen or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s. While Croatian film, with rare exceptions, never treats women as heroines who advance the story, Spanish film does exactly the opposite, not only through Almodovar, but also Carlos Saura, Alejandro Amenabar, Julio Medem and many others. Moreover, there have emerged some interesting female directors, such as the excellent Iciar Bollain, whose film is included in this program. The most beautiful breakthrough is that in these five recent Spanish films women have not been chosen as the main protagonists in order to prove some feminist thesis but are simply central characters that advance the drama. It is quite certain that such an approach is possible because our society has changed and because women today participate equally in what is our common drama; therefore men’s, (as well as female authors, screenwriters and directors’) perception of the female role in reality and art has changed.

Ricardo Franco (1949) won many awards, including the main Spanish national film award Goya, for his film La buena estrella (1997), the oldest film in this program. Unfortunately, Franco died of a heart attack after this great success, which viewers celebrated as “one of the sweetest and most touching films ever made”. Marina (Maribel Verdu) was in an accident as a child and lost her eye, so she is nicknamed “one-eyed” because of her glass eye. Now she is a prostitute who is saved by Rafael (Antonio Resines), a kind-hearted butcher, from her pimp Daniel’s (Jordi Molla) attack. He takes Marina home and starts taking care of her. Soon, Rafael and Marina fall in love and have a physical relationship, although Rafael lost his testicles in a car accident. Without any question, this film follows the traditional Spanish “esthetics of ugly”, known from the classic paintings (Zurbaran) in which the characters shown are often physically handicapped, which hyperbolically stresses their emotional fragility. Marina gives birth to a girl whose father is Daniel, but Rafael takes care of her as if she was his own. Marina warns Rafaela that the violent Daniel will certainly return, which comes true after a few years. Daniel comes out of prison and Rafael, like a saint, welcomes him to his house for a few days. However, the initially planned short visit becomes months-long and there develops a gloomy 'menage a trois', in which all three characters are united by their love towards Marina’s beautiful daughter. Perfect acting by the three heroes partly saves the film from too much pathos, but unfortunately La buena estrella failed to become a fierce melodrama about a one-eyed whore torn between a castrated saint and a predatory stallion, instead giving into weepiness in the last third of the film when Daniel gets diagnosed with AIDS after having been raped in prison.

Reputable director Julio Medem is represented with two films in this program: Lucia y el sexo from 2001 and Caotica Ana from 2007. Medem is the author of another excellent film Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Los amantes del Círculo Polar, 1998), which both audiences and critics loved – in Spain alone it was seen by more than a million people. Lovers is a story that begins at both ends and meets in the middle – therefore the heroes are adequately named Ana and Otto. In other words, Medem loves to play with his audience’s mind and he is great at it, which is obvious more or less in all of his films. The heroine in Lucia y el sexo is a waitress named Lucia (Paz Vega) who gets a phone call from which she discovers that her partner and lover Lorenzo (Tristan Ulloa), a writer, has died in a car accident. Devastated, Lucia goes to a deserted island that Lorenzo often talked about and meets Carlosa (Daniel Freire), a diver who takes her to a boarding house. There she meets Elena (Najwa Nimri), about whom we learn in the prologue that she is the mother of Lorenzo’s daughter conceived six years ago during a crazy night of love on the island when Lorenzo and Elena did not even exchange names. Simultaneously in a flashback, we see Lucia and Lorenzo on their first date when she says how much she loves his novel and that she is in love with him. They become lovers but he starts to cool off as he starts to work on his second novel, which is in fact a story about Elena and a night of nameless love and a child that is about to be born that he is going to visit… The screenwriting tradition of a labyrinth continues in this film; after all, the author confessed that he first wrote the screenplay, then the novel, only to return to the screenplay… But what is the real goal of such a cut-out story? We meet characters, which appear in different incarnations, because our own natures are instable, and Medem describes them as separate, just as we are not aware of our other faces. Even though in this case the unity of the story “suffers”, the persuasiveness of characters, moments and scenes are very impressive and emotionally convincing. Just like the second part of the film’s title – sex, which is spontaneous and convincing, erotic and sad at the same time? For her role of Lucia Paz Vega was awarded with Goya as Best New Actress.

Young wannabe painter Ana (Manuela Velles) lives in a picturesque cave adapted into comfortable living quarters on Ibiza with her German father Klaus. She meets a middle-aged woman Justine (Charlotte Rampling), who invites Ana to move to Madrid and offers her education and financial help. At first, Ana likes living in the big city in an old house with other artists. Her only duty is to devote herself to learning and education. She becomes friends with her roommate, militant feminist video artist Linda, and falls in love with the problematic Said, with whom she has her first sexual experience. After Said leaves her, she starts spending time with an American hypnotist Anglo, who wants to study her because he claims that she “has memories from previous lives”, and wants her to find out more about her other lives and deaths. The phantasmagoric part of the story of chaos is a far stretch; namely, we find out that Ana’s life is the continuation of other young women’s lives who died under tragic circumstances at the age of 22 and that live in the depths of her subconscious. This is the only film in this program that toys with a feminist interpretation that would explain how Ana’s subconscious hides its chaos: at the same time she is the princess and the monster of a feminist fairytale about the tyranny of a white man. Instead of a story that would engage us with its authenticity, in this intense but slightly unfocused and abstract film, Medem’s characters express his own thesis and obsessions instead of living their own lives in dialogues.

It is hard not to agree with a reviewer from Variety who said that it is almost impossible to imagine a theme richer with drama than the true story about thirteen young women who were imprisoned, sentenced and executed by Franco’s nationalist forces after the Civil War. It is thus even more disappointing that the ambitious film Las 13 rosas failed in almost every aspect. The director Emilio Martinez-Lazaro decided on a precarious approach that is not convincing in either the dramatic or historic senses. This high budget film is visually beautiful, with solid acting, but psychologically barely scrapes the surface. Thirteen women-roses are presented merely as sketches and remind us more of lost young girls who, looking at the whole, have no real idea about the politics that will lead them to their deaths. Apart from several strong introductory notes about offering help to a Communist friend, the scattering of several pamphlets around the street and refusing to salute and sing the fascist hymn, the characters, and the film itself, remain almost apolitical.

Taking into account that the heroines of the film Mataharis (2007) are private detectives, the director Iciar Bollain really chose a funny title alluding to the legendary spy Mata Hari. Iciar Bollain is the only female author in this program. In 2003 her film Te doy mis ojos (Take my eyes) won seven Goya film awards, and she managed to achieve quite a strong international reputation for herself. At their job, Ines, Eva and Carmen often intrude on someone else’s privacy but are completely helpless in coping with their own secrets. However, at one point they will each have to cross the line that separates the public and the private in their attempt to solve cases that become more than an ordinary professional challenge. Eva (Najwa Nimri), happy to be back to work after her having second child, accidentally finds out that her husband has a parallel life that he hides from her. Ines (Maria Vazquez), a girl from the provinces, is thrilled with her new job and the opportunity to infiltrate a corporation troubled by large thefts, which she thinks will be her big break. But soon Ines discovers that a labor official whom the management wants to accuse of the thefts is actually innocent. This is when problems arise. Carmen (Nuria Gonzalez), the oldest of the three heroines, lives in a completely estranged marriage, which she realizes only when she starts to have feelings for a client whose wife is cheating on him… Considering the success of her previous film Take My Eyes, the general impression is that Iciar Bollain did not fulfill high expectations with Mataharis: the three stories are a fine lace revealing female identities, but none of them manages to stand out as especially emotionally strong. (Alemka Lisinski)