“I can not even insinuate what it was like, because it was a compound of everything that is impure, dreadful, unwanted, abnormal and detestable.”
The phrase is from lovecraft in ‘the stranger’ and, with all the prevention you want, just illustrate the problem of how to give with a just representation of the ineffable.
Claude Lanzmann, for example, refused to include any image of the Holocaust in his monumental ‘Shoa’ convinced that any illustration was equivalent to less than a banalization.
When Laszlo Nemes rolled ‘the son of Saul’ the scenes of the gas chambers barely appear out of focus on a narrative that aims to be the prisoner’s point of view in charge of cleaning hell himself.
‘Maixabel’, the film of Icíar Bollaín who relates the meeting between Juan Mari Jáuregui’s widow with the Etarra who murdered her husband, lives all of her in this same contradiction, but never to do it explicit or embrace her;
more slope of the chronicle than of reflection;
Happy is the provocative simplicity of her.
How to be able to tell what by definition does not admit definition?
How to describe the forgiveness of an unforgivable act?
How to imagine a healing process in what does not have a cure?
Let’s say, and no mood of trivizing, that the questions arise spontaneous before the mere exposure of the approach.
The choice of the director seems as correct and meticulous as scared perhaps the path that goes through.
Both the script signed with Isa fields and the photograph of Javier Agirre without forgetting the calculated (and much less provocative than on other occasions) music by Alberto Iglesias, everything obeys the explicit will to record, to raise the debate, to illustrate the
Reality with the reality.
Even the modélicas and wounded interpretations of Blanca Portillo and Luis Tosar respond to the urgency of being perhaps breaking a taboo.
And that is there, in his undeniable opportunity, where the tape looks at the same time his greatest virtue and his doubts, his sin and his penance at a time.
The strategy of the film is always to stay faithful, do not break at any time, the commitment of fidelity that seals with the viewer when he announces that what happens there on the screen is real, that fiction is banished.
And from this point of view, Bollaín’s work is sewn with that of previous movies as ‘I give you my eyes’.
And he is often appreciated that covenant of verisimilitude that, in reality, is true.
The emotion that empapa each frame is a direct consequence of it.
The problem lies in the same way in that iron notarial will that, directly, rule out the most serious issues that, from another point of view, laundemn or nemes.
The film thus renounces to get closer to what paragraphs up we called ineffable.
The formalistic and orthodox structure guided by an excessive precavid staging leaves completely intact and without formulating the most tremendous questions, the deepest doubts, the purest terror.
All the conflict is resolved in the gesture of man or woman who cry, in the rage of repentance or in the illuminated grace of sacrifice.
But everything is shown with fear.
The fear of making mistakes weighs more than the risk to get too deep.
It’s as if the monster slept just from the other side of the screen.
Either as it is, what remains is a film that appeals, visceral and politically timely;
A proposal, no doubt, to discuss with her.
That and, do not doubt it, the infinite emotion of the simple.
And true.
The Official Section was completed with ‘Benediction’, a unobscured as a wounded work by Terence Davies that maybe can ambition and, unlike the Bollaín film, the risk.
The director of ‘distant voices’ now has a fractured ‘biopic’ format the life of the poet Siegfried Sassoon.
The existential path of him is narrated from the horror of great war to the contradictory and always conflictive acceptance of the homosexuality of him.
The twentieth century is directly open in Canal before the eyes of the viewer in an elaborate work where the fragments of the writer’s memory are recombined on the screen with the echo of a poisoned poetry of the most intimate pain of him.
Davies wants everything.
The film advances at the same rhythm of each of the verses of the poet while vintage images are mixed with the perfect dramatization of an anguished life in each of its contradictions.
The tape suffers in its excessive effort to match two arguments that, despite the director’s effort, far from embracing ends up completing two different films.
Much brighter the part that has to do with the search for the salvation of a man who gets up from the horror of his time that deals with the melodrama between a man’s sheets that he doubts between obeying the passion or letting himself be dragged by obedience
Social.
In any case, and at times, ‘Benediction’ advances through the screen as a lucid and illuminated dream that the same calls the exaltation than to the dreadful.
And in the background, always, the ineffable.
