White Elephant Blogathon: Promedio Rojo

My (very unfortunate) contribution to the White Elephant Blogathon, as run by Paul Clark. 

            Exploring foreign cinemas can be a delightful insight into cultures we’ve never been able to visit--Except when you realize there’s a reason you only see films from Michael Haneke, Pedro Costa, or Hou Hsiao-Hsien. I remember an episode of Siskel & Ebert back in the day when they were forced to review a dreadful French sex comedy, and Ebert explained that the reason we all think foreign language movies are so much better is because we don’t see the stuff that doesn’t get exported. And boy, is there a lot of dreck out there.

            For all of those who think Chile is a land of beautiful landscapes and fascinating culture, guess again! Chile’s youth are just as sex-driven, misogynist, racist, and the scum of the Earth as any other teenage culture existent today, which makes you feel better about American kids if not worse about the world. There’s no better example this than 2004’s Promedio Rojo, a box office hit in Chile from director Nicolas Lopez. Think Superbad and Scott Pilgrim combined, but take out all of the charm and what you’re left with is a film where the best thing I can say about the main character is he’s not a rapist, because standards.

Post Mortem: Living Among the Dead

Post Mortem

Written Directed By: Pablo Larraín

Starring: Alfredo Castro, Antonia Zegers, Amparo Noguera, and Jaime Vadell

Director of Photography: Sergio Armstrong, Editor: Andrea Chingnoli, Production Designer: Polin Garbizu, Original Music: Joan Cristobal Meza

            The first few sequences of Post Mortem from Chilean director Pablo Larraín immediately invite us into a cryptic world that controls us from the opening shot. We follow Mario, a middle-aged, very quiet and very repressed man, as he stands inside his home. Looking out his window, he spies on his neighbor, a beautiful woman with a boisterous and revealing posture. He follows her to a burlesque show, and then down into the lair underneath the stage to where she lays, where he overhears some dialogue that suggests she may also be a prostitute. He asks if he can drive her home, which she accepts. Why does he do this? Larraín’s camera remains almost still, with composed and exacting shots that keep us focused without revealing any sort of inner detail.

            In many ways, I wished that the rest of Post Mortem would then fill in those details, which ends up being a very puzzling film that mixes the psychological and political. I missed Larraín’s first film, Tony Manero, which followed a killer who dressed up as the Travolta character from Saturday Night Fever. And Post Mortem has a lot to say about Chilean psychology and history, though perhaps it is more aimed at audiences who know more about the uprising that led to Pinochet’s violent and brutal dictatorship. But for audiences (like myself) who go in blind, Larraín certainly has a very unique voice that makes Post Mortem still an interesting look into this confusing and devastating world.

Mysteries of Lisbon - Land of Stories Upon Stories

Mysteries of Lisbon

Directed By: Raúl Ruiz

Written By: Carlos Saboga, from the novel by Camilo Castelo Branco

Starring: Adriano Luz, Maria Joao Bastos, Ricardo Pererira, Clotilde Hesme, Joao Arrais, and Jose Afonso Pimentel.

Director of Photography: Andre Szankowski, Editors: Carlos Madaleno and Valeria Sarmiento, Art Director: Paula Szabo, Original Music: Jorge Arriagada

Rated: Unrated, but sex, death, love, war, and all the matters of what we called life.

            There was a moment in Raúl Ruiz’s epic drama Mysteries of Lisbon where the audience I was viewing the film with couldn’t help but unintentionally laugh. Father Dinis is meeting with a peripheral character, who has had no impact on the story. The old monk tells him, “I have a long story to tell you. It may seem pointless, but all will reveal itself at the end.” This comes at the two and a half hour mark of this four and a half hour film, and at this point, the audience finally gets it, as almost every character we have run into has a story to tell that seems to diverge wildly from the main narrative. Story defines us, gives us existence, and reveals the inner truth of our lives, with each story filling the details of another.

            And it’s this Russian doll structured narrative, along with Ruiz’s brilliant and fascinating direction, that make Mysteries of Lisbon the type of film you could sit in for hours upon hours. Ruiz, a Chilean exile who passed away just last week after spending most of his life in Paris, made over 100 films in his life (a final film was shot though its current state is unknown), and you can tell this is the type of unique cinematic precision he enjoyed. Mysteries of Lisbon, adapted from Camilo Castelo Branco’s epic Portuguese novel (never translated into English), covers so many themes and ideas, but none are lost in translation. This is a gargantuan film of cinematic proportions that could have been the stuff of shlock and silly melodrama. But Ruiz doesn’t allow such tone to take over, he embraces it with a unique, slightly distanced eye that favors ideas over emotions; this is the thinking man’s Visconti.

            Mysteries of Lisbon runs at a languid pace, which may frustrate people who were able to survive the frenetic energy of the equally long and excellent Carlos from Ruiz’s contemporary Olivier Assayas. But Ruiz has his own style that fits his narrative, which begins with the young João, a young orphan living in a Catholic school under the tutelage of Father Dinis (Adriano Luz). We’re set in the Napoleonic era of Portugal, under France’s rule and set around the aristocracy, whose problems are so silly, yet make for great cinema nonetheless. João wants to discover the truth behind his parents, but Dinis is resistant, as the story is a very long one. But when his mother finally leaves her cruel husband and returns to João, the story is revealed.