La isla mínima
Alberto Rodriguez (2014)
The time and place are specific: the action begins on 20 September 1980, with the arrival in a small town on the Guadalquivir Marshes of Andalusia of two detectives from Madrid. Juan Robles (Javier Gutiérrez) and Pedro Suárez (Raúl Arévalo) have come to investigate the disappearance of two local teenage girls, who may be (and are) the latest victims of a serial rapist and killer at work in the area. Robles and Suárez have recently been in trouble with their bosses; this assignment in the back of beyond is their reward. The larger historical context of Marshland – the transitional period between the end of the Franco regime and renascent Spanish democracy coming to fruition – is salient. Robles and Suárez displeased their superiors in the Madrid police for different reasons and the two men hold diametrically opposed political views. Robles regrets the end of Franco; Suárez welcomes the new democratic order. (He got into hot water by writing to newspapers about corruption and the persistence of Francoism at senior levels of the police.) Alberto Rodriguez and his co-writer Rafael Cobos push the political aspect a bit hard: it’s too neatly symbolic that the older, retrospective, right-wing Robles turns out to be terminally ill while the younger, forward-looking, liberal Suárez is about to become a father for the first time. (Suárez is hardly an uncommon Spanish surname but you can’t help but notice that Pedro shares it with Spain’s first democratically elected prime minister in the post-Franco era, who was in office in 1980.) Marshland is, nevertheless, a solid and absorbing crime thriller – even if its ten Goya awards last year point to a decline in the strength in depth of Spanish cinema.
Robles is a meatier part than Suárez and that’s reflected in the two lead performances. Javier Gutiérrez’s Robles is a dour professional but there are hints from the starts of a more pleasure-seeking side to his nature. He enjoys his food and drink: once we know that Robles is ill, we realise he wants to enjoy himself while he can. Robles is revealed to have been a notorious member of Franco’s Political-Social Brigade but Gutiérrez doesn’t signal his murky history through looking shifty or remorseful: his past is buried yet present in him. In the course of the investigation, Robles has two unnerving encounters with a woman who claims to be psychic. On the first encounter, he tries and fails to hold her silent gaze; on the second, she speaks and tells him the dead are waiting for him. Javier Gutiérrez’s transitions in these moments, from detective alertness to mortal fear, are impressive. The relationship between the two detectives – business only, verging on dislike – is essentially credible but Raul Arévalo gives an unsatisfying performance as Suárez. I’d seen Arévalo only once before (I’d never seen Gutiérrez), as one of the gay flight attendants, in Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited!; I obviously didn’t expect a repetition of his camp bravura in that role but he goes too far the other way in Marshland. He wears a settled scowl and there’s no variety in Suárez’s dealings with different people. Arévalo’s resemblance to Sean Penn made his turn in I’m So Excited! all the more amusing; there are times here when he seems to be mimicking Penn’s occasional tendency to unrelieved glumness. Arévalo gets better in the later stages, though: in a scary car chase that shows Suárez’s strong nerve in extremis, and in getting across more of his character’s relative youth.
The car chase is one of two particularly exciting action sequences, expertly edited by José M G Moyano. The other is a climactic confrontation – in deep mud, in pouring rain – between the two detectives and the rapist-murderer. Although it’s pat that the cereal harvest, crucial to the local economy, can proceed only once the serial killer has been tracked down, Alberto Rodriguez and his DoP Álex Catalán make the geography and ecology of the region intriguing. There are repeated overhead shots of the landscape that express its mystery; and the outbursts of violence from suspicious locals and/or guilty parties are startling, even when they’re no longer unexpected. The Guadalquivir birds are the most compelling wildlife in evidence: flights of geese; a flamingo the colouring of which seems, in a remarkable pattern of images, like the product of a beautiful sunset over the marshes and the alarming bloody urine in the toilet bowl of Robles’s hotel room; a small, blue, whirring bird (that Robles imagines to be?) trapped in his room shortly before he passes out. The locale is also what helps the killer lure his victims, who are desperate to get out of life in a backwater. The literal translation of the Spanish title would be ‘Minimum Island’ (which I understand to be an actual Guadalquivir location). Marshland works well, though, as an expression of the film’s physical and historical setting – a terrain in which it’s hard to get your bearings and keep your footing.
There’s an admirable sequence near the end of the film, when the crimes have been solved, Suárez’s wife (whom we never see) has given birth to a son, and her husband’s name is back in the newspapers, in reports praising his heroism. The sequence takes place in a disco – Baccara’s ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’ is playing. It might not seem a superannuated fascist’s idea of a good time but Robles has been drinking and is dancing with a couple of girls, and encourages Suárez to join him. Suárez amiably declines. He has other responsibilities and prospects; he doesn’t, unlike Robles, have to grab immediate pleasures. Instead, Suárez sits and has a drink with a photo-journalist, who tells him more about Robles’s past. How Suárez chooses to react to this new information is intelligently handled by Alberto Rodriguez and Raul Arévalo’s reserve helps at this point. The result is an ending to the film that’s stronger than much of what’s gone before. The supporting cast includes Adelfa Calvo (the psychic), Manuel Solo (the photo-journalist) and Antonio de la Torre (the father of the missing girls). Mercedes León is excellent as the housekeeper at the hunting lodge that turns out to be a key location in the story.
10 August 2015
