Relatos salvajes

Damián Szifrón (2014)

The trailer for Wild Tales in Curzon cinemas last month was unusual, and unusually long.  With a ‘Pedro Almodóvar presents’ heading (he and his brother Agustín are among the several producers), the trailer comprised what appeared to be a virtually complete short film.  The passengers on an aeroplane discover that they all have connections to a man called Gabriel Pasternak.  From Pasternak’s point of view, each of the passengers has done him wrong.  They learn to their horror that he is piloting the plane and the trailer ends as it swoops down to crash into a suburban garden and the elderly couple seated there.  We assume they are Pasternak’s parents; his analyst, who has tried unavailingly to dissuade Pasternak from his act of kamikaze-mass murder, has told him that it’s his mother and father, rather than any of the passengers on the plane, whom Pasternak really has to blame.  (The passengers are played by, among others, Darío Grandinetti and María Marull.)  By the time the Argentinian writer-director Damián Szifrón’s film opened in Britain, truth had proved more horrifying than fiction.  Wild Tales was released in London three days after the crash in the French Alps of the Germanwings plane that killed all 150 people on board, and that black box evidence indicates was a deliberate act on the part of the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz.   There are warnings to filmgoers in Curzon foyers that ‘Following the Germanwings flight incident on Tuesday 24th March, please be aware that Wild Tales features a sequence that some customers might find disturbing’.

Although I’d seen the distinctive trailer at least twice, it was still a shock to be reminded quite how specifically it resonates with the Germanwings crash, especially the moment when the analyst is banging on the door of the cabin, in which Pasternak has locked himself.  Wild Tales is a portmanteau film and each of the six tales that Szifrón tells has a theme of vengeance.  ‘Pasternak’ is the first of these tales and the trailer was close to being the whole story, which precedes the opening titles of Wild Tales.  These are shown against still photographs of various wild animals – images that are meant to presage the violently aggressive behaviour of human beings that Szifrón describes throughout the six stories – and accompanied by Gustavo Santoalalla’s jauntily sinister music, which supplies an amusing contrast.  It will be difficult, in the immediate future anyway, to dissociate ‘Pasternak’ from Andreas Lubitz; because this is the curtain-raiser to Wild Tales, it may well, for many viewers, colour the whole of what follows. This is tough on Damián Szifrón but I don’t think I would have liked his movie even without what BFI, in its disclaimer, terms the ‘unintentional and regrettable coincidence’ of the Germanwings disaster.  (Come across any intentional coincidences lately?)  I understand why the flashy Wild Tales, nominated for Best Foreign Language film at this year’s Oscars, has been an international hit but I found it garishly unimaginative.

The film’s faults are epitomised by the second of the six tales, The Rats.  A late middle-aged man (César Bordón) comes into a poky roadside restaurant.  ‘Table for one?’ asks the waitress (Julieta Zylberberg).  ‘I can see your arithmetic’s good’, he replies, and the sarcasm is just the beginning of his obnoxious rudeness towards her.  In the restaurant kitchen, the waitress reveals to the cook (Rita Cortese) that she recognises the customer as the man who was responsible for her father’s death and who then kept trying to seduce her mother, causing the family to up sticks and move to another town.  (It’s not made clear how long ago this happened but the man doesn’t appear to recognise the thirty-something waitress.)  ‘I’ve often imagined what I would say to him if I saw him again’, the waitress says.  The cook suggests that actions speak louder than words and that the waitress should avenge her family by putting rat poison in the meal the man has ordered.  (The restaurant has a problem with rats in the kitchen.)  ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ asks the cook, who’s been in prison before and thinks there’s something to be said for it – a roof over your head, the security of knowing where your next meal is coming from.  She thinks her present life, in comparison, ‘is shit’.  The waitress can’t bring herself to agree with her colleague’s proposal but the cook poisons the food anyway.

The customer – a loan shark who is also standing for election to political office – is too big a rat to succumb to the poison but, when his son joins him in the restaurant and has a nibble of his father’s meal, the youngster starts to cough and vomit.  The waitress makes desperate attempts to get the food off the table, infuriating the older man, who sets about her physically.  The cook then appears and stabs him to death with a kitchen knife.  The story ends with her being driven away in a police car, presumably looking forward to a better life in jail. ‘The Rats’ foreshadows the penchant for gore and excretion that Damián Szifrón expresses wherever possible throughout Wild Tales and the death by stabbing is something of a disappointment in itself:  whereas the need for rat poison tells us something about the kind of eatery this is, the murder weapon would be available in even the best-appointed restaurant kitchen.  Worse, there’s no twist in the tale.  I was hoping the waitress might admit to the cook, too late, that her account of what the customer did to her parents was an invention – that she’d wanted to get her own back simply because her professional self-esteem had been injured by the man’s snide remarks and arrogant behaviour.

The third and fourth stories, ‘The Strongest’ and ‘Little Bomb’ respectively, are, conceptually at least, rather more satisfying.  Each is a bizarre exaggeration of a familiar form or cause of anger in modern life:  road rage in ‘The Strongest’, the towing away of cars by municipal authorities in ‘Little Bomb’.  In ‘The Strongest’, each of the two protagonists – one (Leonardo Sbaraglia) driving a fast, expensive new car and the other (Walter Donado) a slower, very used vehicle – avenges himself on the other.  Their violent confrontation is gruesomely extended.   ‘Little Bomb’ has a lighter tone and a more satisfying structure.  We know from the start that the main character, Simón (Ricardo Darín), is a building demolition expert.  Driven crazy by what he sees as persecution by the petty bureaucracy that keeps depriving him of his car and the unravelling of his professional and personal life that ensues, he becomes a terrorist – filling his car with explosives and detonating them as it’s once more pulled away.  No one gets hurt and, although Simón goes to jail, he becomes an urban hero – to fellow inmates and the prison staff, his young daughter and even his wife, who walked out on ‘Dynamite’, as he’s now known, before he got his revenge.

In the fifth story, ‘The Proposal’, the son of a rich man kills a pregnant woman in a hit and run accident.  The father (Oscar Martínez), with his lawyer (Osmar Núñez), devises a plan to pin the crime on his gardener, who’ll be well paid for his trouble and time in prison.  This piece has an effectively abrupt albeit obvious ending, when the gardener emerges from the house with his face covered and the dead woman’s husband (Ramiro Vayo), who, in a tearful television interview, has sworn vengeance on the car driver, attacks him with hammer blows to the head.   The last tale, ‘Until Death Us Do Part’, is much too long:  at a Jewish wedding reception, the bride (Erica Rivas) realises her new husband (Diego Gentile) has been cheating on her, with another of the female guests.   The bride first contemplates suicide and then, after being dissuaded by a kindly hotel kitchen worker (Marcelo Pozzi), has sex with him on the roof from which she’d been about to jump.  She announces to the groom that she’ll sleep with any other man who offers and will take her husband for all he’s worth if he tries to divorce her.  After several outbursts of mayhem, with Szifrón’s now trademark emphasis on blood and vomit, the newlyweds decide they’re better off with each other and start to have tabletop sex beside their wedding cake, as their remaining guests drift away.

Wild Tales has a superficial political slant – against the powerful (the city authorities in ‘Little Bomb’), the moneyed-and-corrupt (the murderee in ‘The Rats’, the would-be perverters of the course of justice in ‘The Proposal’), the pampered (the man with the flash car in ‘The Strongest’, the bride in ‘Until Death Us Do Part’).   It scarcely seems worth remarking on this ‘anti-capitalist’ position:  the film would be much more daring (even if more dislikeable too) if it had good things to say about the privileged.  Yet Mar Diestro-Dópido, for example, in Sight & Sound, commends Szifrón’s ‘potent political anger directed against inequality and abuse, be it emotional, physical or economic’.  What’s more striking about the enthusiasm for Wild Tales is how easily enjoyable people find it – illustrated by the ‘critics’ consensus’ note on Rotten Tomatoes (‘Wickedly hilarious and delightfully deranged …’) and by the reactions of the two women sitting just behind me at Curzon Richmond.  Until halfway through ‘The Strongest’, when the man driving the beat-out car shat and pissed on the bonnet of the smooth man’s motor, my neighbours laughed pretty continuously.  They voiced disgust at the defecation, as if Szifrón had spoiled everything, but laughed again with relief when, at the end of ‘The Strongest’, the film recovered what they clearly regarded as its witty poise.  (The police discover the two drivers’ skulls – all that remains of their incinerated bodies – in the wreckage of their cars.  One cop says to another, ‘Crime of passion, do you think?’)  Although several of the situations in the film are essentially recognisable rather than ‘surreal’, those who enjoy the outrageousness of the behaviour in Szifrón’s stories must surely do so because they feel superior to the people on screen – they’re not recognising themselves in what goes on.  It’s not only because ‘Pasternak’ has turned out to be much less far-fetched than anyone would have believed that I find this depressing and a bit scary.

1 April 2015