Old Yorker

  • Blancanieves

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Snow White

    Pablo Berger (2012)

    According to Mar Diestro-Dópido in Sight & Sound (August 2013), the writer-director Pablo Berger’s aim in Blancanieves is clear.  Berger relocates the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White story to Andalucía in the 1920s and intends:

    ‘… to examine the more populist elements of Spanish film history from the perspective of the present; and to reflect, in a personal and refreshingly nostalgia-free manner, on the country [of Spain], its history and its traditions through the prism of international film history.’

    Blancanieves may give pleasure to audiences who enjoy watching bullfighting, as well as to film scholars or, at least, to spot-the-auteur-reference moviegoers.  Diestro-Dópido again:

    ‘There’s German expressionism in the angular shapes of the long, shadowy corridors in the family’s lusciously gothic home; Eisenstein in the extreme close-ups on the contorted expressions of secondary characters; von Stroheim in the passion and determination of the female protagonist.  Throw in the names of Lang, Tournier, Duvivier and L’Herbier too, and Blancanieves feels like a film revelling brilliantly in the heterogeneity of its multiple influences.’

    This black-and-white silent-movie take on Snow White appeared in 2012 and was therefore also a timely arthouse stick with which to beat the more popular The Artist and that year’s brace of Hollywood Snow Whites (Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman).

    These factors combined to ensure that Blancanieves really got on my nerves – and the bullfighting did worse than that.  I’d been attracted to the idea of a primeval form of cinema narrative being used to tell a correspondingly original story (by original, I mean a story that goes back a long way, to one’s childhood world).   But the silent-cinema qualities of Blancanieves are no more than artfully cosmetic and the acting seems, for the most part, not so much stylised as monotonously overdone.  The film comes across as fancy melodrama with the sound turned off and intertitles in its place.  Those intertitles – the English ones anyway – sometimes appear in capital letters, for emphasis, and always refer to the heroine as ‘Snowhite’, making her sound like a cleaning product.  I found both these things irritating and kept wanting to shout at the screen IT’S SNOW WHITE!

    The story of Blancanieves is more or less as follows.  Antonio Villalta (Daniel Giménez Cacho) is a renowned bullfighter.   When he’s gored (and serves him right), his traumatised pregnant wife goes into premature labour.  Antonio survives but his wife dies and he shuns the baby girl to whom she gave birth.  Carmencita (Sofía Oria), as she’s known, is brought up by her grandmother (Ángela Molina) – then the old woman dies and the girl is sent to live with Antonio and Encarna (Maríbel Verdú), the nasty nurse who looked after Antonio in hospital and, as soon as his wife died, determined to snare him in marriage.   Antonio, wheelchair-bound as a result of his serious injuries, wasn’t well placed to argue.  The socially ambitious Encarna rules the domestic roost and Carmencita becomes a Cinderella-esque drudge in the household; her father, who’s now forgiven his daughter, reads Red Riding Hood with her, as Blancanieves revels brilliantly in the heterogeneity of its fairytale references.  When Antonio dies, Encarna gets a foolish acolyte to finish off Carmencita (now grown up into Macarena García).  He fails and she’s taken in by a troupe of bullfighting dwarves:  they pit themselves, as a comedy warm-up to the main event, against a calf (bloodlessly – for them and it).   During the time she spent with her father, Carmencita learned from Antonio the matador’s art.  She now becomes the main attraction in the dwarves’ troupe and a serious fighter in her own right.

    The dwarves give Carmencita the name of Blancanieves – ‘like the girl in the story’.   So how come, in spite of this explicit awareness of their source material, the heroine’s team falls for the old poisoned apple trick?   Encarna, whose social climbing and scheming becomes exceedingly tiresome, gets a lifestyle magazine to take photographs of her swanky home.  She expects to see these on the front cover of the magazine and is horrified to find instead that Carmencita, now a bullfighting star, is the cover girl.  Vengeful Encarna turns up at the corrida brandishing a piece of fruit – just what you’d expect of a would-be socialite in the 1920s.  Her first attempt to get her stepdaughter to eat it fails but a second attempt succeeds:  the apple passes into the hands of one of the dwarves and Carmencita bites into it.  You’d think all concerned would know to steer clear of apples at important moments.  Although Pablo Berger can’t be bothered to update the Wicked Queen’s lethal weapon, his modernisation of the story means that the heroine not only dies but can’t be magically revived.

    One of the seven dwarves is jealous of Carmencita; another is female (or wears a dress anyway); four of the others are disappointingly undifferentiated personalities.  The remaining dwarf, Rafita (Sergio Dorado), is facially different from, and conventionally good-looking compared with, the other six; and he is in love with Carmencita.   He naturally brings to mind Hans, the lovelorn midget ringmaster in Tod Browning’s Freaks (albeit that Hans’ adored, statuesque Cleopatra is – unlike Carmencita – unworthy of devoted love).  In the absence of a handsome prince of normal dimensions, can Rafita somehow fit the bill?  The answer involves the only interesting element of Blancanieves, although it’s queasy too.   Blancanieves becomes part of a freak show posthumously.  Punters are invited to kiss her cold lips in an attempt to revive her; a mechanical device is used every so often to create the momentary, scary illusion that the corpse has come back to life.  When the freak show has closed for the night, Rafita sleeps beside the dead body of his beloved.  We see him kiss her and a mystifying teardrop falls from her eye (which Rafita doesn’t see).  The image feels like a pinch from The Innocents but the effect of this closing scene – literally a tearjerker, of a quasi-necrophiliac kind – is strongly uncomfortable, as nothing else in the film is.

    The lively, agreeable score by Alfonso de Villalonga is Nino Rota-inspired, to put it mildly.  (The martial music played at the bullfights is strongly reminiscent of the ‘Marcia stilo italiano’ in The Godfather: Part II; other phrases echo Rota’s compositions for Fellini movies.)   I can’t think of much to say about the cast, except that Sofía Oria, as the child Carmencita, is more distinctive and appealing than Macarena García’s adult version, and that Sergio Dorado is touching as Rafita.  One of Encarna’s early victims is Carmencita’s pet cockerel.  This bird gives a performance that’s arguably more nuanced than most of the human ones, although, when its image is superimposed on the screen in Carmencita’s memory, it inevitably brings to mind the Pathé News cockerel.  Maybe it doesn’t, though, if you’re not British – and I should confess that some of the Spanish cultural references mentioned in Mar Diestro-Dópido’s S&S review passed over my head with most of the movie ones.  Blancanieves was showing at BFI as part of a programme supplementary to this month’s Pedro Almodóvar retrospective – the adjunct group of movies is a diverse collection chosen by Almodóvar himself.  I’d forgotten, until one of the friends I saw Blancanieves with reminded me as we came out of BFI, that Talk to Her included not just a lifeless heroine but also a black-and-white silent movie sequence.  My friend also remarked – not unreasonably – that Pablo Berger’s film made you wonder if Almodóvar had chosen as his particular favourites movies that included nods to his own.

    5 August 2016

  • Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Average Girls

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón

    Pedro Almodóvar (1980)

    When Pepi (Carmen Maura) receives a visit from a menacing policeman (Félix Rotaeta), she offers him oral sex in the hope that’ll keep him quiet about the marijuana plants he spotted on the balcony of her Madrid apartment.  He declines the offer and rapes her instead.  This annoys Pepi, who was hoping to sell her virginity for a decent price when the right opportunity arose.  She decides to get her revenge with the help of her friend Bom (Olvido Gara, aka Alaska), who’s a punk singer, and the two boys in Bom’s band.  Late one evening, wearing operetta-ish costumes and singing a zarzuela, they confront and beat up a man.  He turns out to be not the policeman but his innocuous, identical twin brother.  Pepi then plans a different, more complex way of getting her own back.   She befriends the policeman’s submissive homebody wife, Luci (Eva Siva), on the pretext of wanting knitting lessons from her but actually with a view to corrupting Luci.  During the first knitting lesson, Bom turns up, needing a pee.  Pepi suggests that, since Luci is feeling hot, Bom should urinate on her.  The masochistic Luci finds the golden shower not just refreshing but exciting.  She and Bom become lesbian lovers.

    This is the start of Pepi, Luci, Bom …  It’s a foreshadowing not just of the rest of Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature but also of motifs and preoccupations in other films he’s made:  businesslike carnality; sexual abuse and ambiguity; song and dance; disguises and doppelgängers; the comedy of excretion.  That sequence in which Bom et al set upon the hapless twin brother in particular epitomises the surreally casual, one-thing-leads-to-another quality of early Almodóvar.  As the story continues, Pepi embarks on a screenplay called ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom’; this gives the ‘outer’ film a light-hearted post-modernist flavour.  It’s clear from an interview with Almodóvar used for the BFI programme note[1] that this self-referential element and the spirit of improvisation had a very real meaning in the creation of Pepi, Luci, Bom …:

    ‘The first script was shorter than the film turned out to be.  I didn’t know at that time how to measure what was needed for a feature film.  So, seeing that it wouldn’t work in the marketplace, I converted it into a feature film.  To get to that point was a very tortuous, very long way because the money ran out before I’d even finished the first script.  People were giving us small contributions like 50,000 pesetas.  So from June 1979 until December 1979, we continued shooting whenever we had money – never straight through but over a weekend, two or three days consecutively.  During those months I was adapting the story to the people with whom I could continue filming. …’

    Almodóvar’s debut feature obviously introduces too his abiding preference for women principals (and for certain actresses, not least Carmen Maura).  It was sometimes said of dramatists like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan that, as homosexual men writing at a time when it was hard to be gay, they used female protagonists as a form of coded self-expression.  Perhaps there’s an element of that in Almodóvar too (he was born in 1949) but he conveys a more vigorous sympathy with women.  It’s the thwarted, suffering heroines in Coward and Rattigan – Laura in Brief Encounter, Hester in The Deep Blue Sea, and so on – who are usually mentioned as their gay proxies, whereas Pepi is the first in a line of strong, comic female avengers in Almodóvar.  He has, of course, been making art in a different place and time:  Pepi, Luci, Bom … is very definitely a product and an expression of the various, overlapping kinds of freedom – musical, sartorial, social, sexual – that were becoming available to Almodóvar’s generation in post-Franco Spain.  The exultant vivid colouring and eccentric combinations of clothes and décor, the dynamic pop and punk on the soundtrack, the bold, funny opening titles by the illustrator Cespe (the film is worth seeing just for these) – all combine to give euphoric texture to the slender movie, which is now recognised as part of ‘La Movida Madrileña’[2].  The strength of countercultural momentum in late 1970s Spain was such that Pepi, Luci, Bom … was already making fun of the conservative backlash against it.

    Much of the movie comes across as a succession of sketches – some work better than others.  Its structure is simple, not to say flimsy.  Yet these qualities and the happy, sophomoric vulgarity overlay insights that are often sharp and occasionally shocking.  A penis-measuring contest in a club – Almodóvar himself has a cameo as, appropriately, the master of ceremonies – is entitled ‘General Erections’:  the name is a neat fusion of Spain’s new-found political and sexual freedoms.   The vile policeman pretends to be his twin in order to sexually assault a woman (Concha Grégori) who is the brother’s admiring neighbour.  (The fumbling aggression in this episode anticipates the odd, upsetting scene in the showers at the start of What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Almodóvar’s fourth feature.)  By the end of the film, Luci is liberated to such an extent that she eventually returns to married life with the policeman.  Having spread her wings as a sexual masochist, she realises that Bom can never satisfy her gluttony for punishment in the way her physically abusive and tyrannical husband can.  The conclusion is all the more startling because Almodóvar maintains his light, antic tone.

    3 August 2016

    [1] The interview forms part of My First Movie (Faber and Faber, 2000), edited by Stephen Lowenstein.

    [2] Wikipedia defines this as the ‘countercultural movement that took place mainly in Madrid during the Spanish transition after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975’.

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