Celda 211

Daniel Monzón (2009)

The unbelievable really can happen when you begin a new job:  think of Ben Sliney, who took up his appointment as National Operations Manager for US Federal Aviation Administration on 11^th September 2001.  In Daniel Monzón’s Cell 211, Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) is keen to make a good impression at the Spanish jail where he’s about to start work as a prison guard.  He goes there the day before his employment starts and is given a tour, during which a disturbance overhead brings down debris.  A piece of it hits and injures Juan, who passes out.  His colleagues place him in the vacant cell 211 while they go to call an ambulance.  By the time Juan comes to, a riot is underway, prisoners are in control of a large area of the jail and his fellow officers have hurriedly escaped, leaving him in the cell.  Juan works out what’s happening.  He decides to pretend to the rioters – led by the brutally charismatic Malamadre (Luis Tosar) – that he’s not a new guard but a newly arrived prisoner.

Juan’s colleague, giving evidence to a committee of inquiry that Daniel Monzón uses to frame the account of what happened in the prison, confesses he’ll never know what made him and another officer decide to leave Juan in the cell instead of getting him away from where he’d collapsed.  The admission has an uneasy ring beyond the colleague’s guilty conscience.  It’s as if Monzón and his co-scenarist Jorge Guerricaechevarría hope, by acknowledging the improbability of the story’s premise, to transcend it.  The audience has to accept the premise in any case, recognising there’s no film without it.   We’ve also taken the hint – from a prologue in which the previous occupant of the title location gorily commits suicide – that Cell 211 is not a place where good things happen.

Malamadre (‘bad mother’) and the others at the forefront of the riot are part of a ‘DSS’ programme – inmates under special surveillance, regularly on the receiving end of violent treatment by staff and who are protesting to draw attention to the conditions of their imprisonment.  When Malamadre learns that Basque separatist terrorists are also being held in the jail, he plans to use this ETA contingent as a bargaining tool.  The riot quickly becomes national news and triggers disturbances in other prisons.  As the government becomes involved and the situation increasingly politicised, Juan’s nightmare isolation intensifies.  Although its source is a work of fiction by Francisco Pérez Gandul, Cell 211 highlights what presumably are or were urgent causes for concern in the actual Spanish prison system.

It was no surprise, however, to hear Daniel Monzón, introducing this multi-award-winning film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival (where it screened as part of the ‘Once Upon a Time in Spain’ retrospective), talk about Hollywood’s keen interest in an American remake of the movie – even though this hasn’t materialised.  In several respects, Cell 211 already feels like a standard Hollywood suspense thriller – with its nearly relentless action, its pounding, percussive score (by Roque Baños) and its melodramatic mechanics.  The dramatisation of tensions between the prison and government powers-that-be and among the prisoners are pretty routine – so too the repeated shifts in the balance of power within and between the two groups.

The extra grimness and mayhem are what make the film distinctive.  Juan has a beautiful, pregnant wife at home:  instead of suffering in loving silence there, as such wives usually do, Elena (Marta Etura) hotfoots it to the prison gates.  Caught up in the heaving crowd, she’s beaten to death by a prison guard.  Monzón shows Juan compelled to carry out increasingly vicious and entirely uncharacteristic acts, cutting off the ear of an ETA prisoner, slitting the throat of the vicious guard (Antonio Resines) who not only proclaims to Malamadre et al Juan’s true identity but also brought about Elena’s death.  There’s no happy ending for Juan either – a device that often comes in useful as a means of persuading a film audience that they’ve been watching something honest.  The closing line goes to a prison official who asks the committee of inquiry, ‘Any more questions?’  These ironic last words are a nifty way of sending us out with a renewed sense that the film has been raising issues that the Spanish authorities are failing to answer.

A further generic requirement is for the two main characters to move from outright mutual antipathy to a sort of kinship.  At the start, Malamadre makes Juan strip naked for the amusement and/or delectation of the assembled rioters.  By the final shootout, they are, to put it simply, in it together.  That’s putting it too simply, though.  The development of this relationship is one of the film’s more nuanced elements and the two men are never less than wary of each other.

A role like this, one that stresses his physically formidable quality, doesn’t allow Luis Tosar the contrapuntal scope he had in Flowers from Another World, which I saw in Edinburgh twenty-four hours before Cell 211.  He’s impressive, nevertheless.  Malamadre’s raw, deep voice is a remarkable invention.  As well as embodying the character’s intimidating aspect with ease, Tosar captures his watchfulness and the anxiety in his determination to remain top dog.  Pleasant, handsome Alberto Ammann, in his cinema debut, certainly complements Tosar but you never quite believe in Juan as a prison guard, let alone as a man pretending to be starting a sentence for homicide.  He suggests the deputy head of a primary school who’s probably a lay reader at his local church.  Ammann is good in the occasional flashbacks to Juan’s happy home and sex life with Elena but, though he tries hard, you seldom feel the spiritual distance travelled by Juan from the bedroom to his doomed battle for survival within the jail.

23 June 2019