Top Films 2013

The best films of 2013 (or those I haven't been able to see before 2013), in no particular order.

Hard to Be a God (Aleksei German)

More than cinema; a Boschian fresco of the Middle Ages like you've never seen them before.

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming Liang)

The last Tsai's film sees the ultimate deconstruction of the world and the ultimate dehumanisation of the perennial Lee Kang Shen. In the course of the two-odd hours he is turning into a ghost.

To the Wonder (Terrence Malick)

God exists.

Lightning: A Legend in Four Seasons (Manuela Morgaine)
Belleville Baby (Mia Engberg)

Documentary is the new fiction. Two post-doc film essays that mingle the real with the imaginary - one to create a mythology around the titular natural phenomenon, another to (re)construct a personal memory.

Concrete Night (Pirjo Honkasalo)

A coming-of-age story on the edge of the Apocalypse.

Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón)

Contrary to what IMDb is saying, it isn't a sci-fi - it's a space procedural. The space is not something from the future anymore, but still is scary and beautiful.

Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel)

Nature is Satan's church, indeed.

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet (Alain Resnais)
The Night Across the Street (Raúl Ruiz)


Testament of Orpheus as told by two classics. Mazes of reflections, labyrinths of time and space.

Emperor Visits the Hell (Luo Li)

The hell is across the bridge from a shopping center; petty gangsters and small bureaucrats solemnly recite the lines from a 16th century's novel. This weird device of estrangement works better than the gore of Jia Zhangke's latest A Touch of Sin.

Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine)

Look at my shit, ye Mighty, and despair.

Special mentions (alphabetical order): Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach), I'm the Same I'm an Other (Caroline Strubbe), Me and You (Bernardo Bertolucci), Nobody's Daughter Haewon (Hong Sang-Soo), Only God Forgives (Nicholas Winding Refn)

Interiors: Notes on Pedro Costa and Chantal Akerman

1. Both Pedro Costa and Chantal Akerman deal with political issues without becoming political filmmakers, even if some label Akerman as a feminist director or Costa, as a lefty. Not that such designations are ungrounded - Akerman is, indeed, a feminist, Costa is hardly an Ayne Rand's proponent - but classifying these directors into ghettoes of niche cinema is an unfair and narrow view of their work. Defining mode of a political movie would be either meditation (why things are this way), or action (what should we do about it); films of Akerman and Costa employ neither - they focus on contemplation. Consequently, they either abandon the Aristotlean cause-and-effect, conflict-driven dramaturgy altogether, or relegate it to the second place, in what seems a compromise with more traditional narrative filmmaking (Akerman does that in Jeanne Dielman, Costa, in Bones). Politics, of course, is all about causes and effects, and conflicts - it's always a drama.

Jeanne drops a spoon (Jeanne Dielman)

2. If an event is crossing a boundary of one's semantic field (as defined by Russian semiologist Yuri Lotman), then lack of events means the boundaries are too solid to overcome. At the same time they are very narrow: Jeanne Dielman offers what is perhaps the subtlest story development in cinema's history - Jeanne's life is so monotonous and ritualized that when she drops a spoon, this minor deviation from the regular routine is an event, if not a turning point of the narrative. The lives of Costa's and Akerman's characters are determined by a certain coordinate system, one that's not to be reconsidered or shifted. In the work of both directors, these coordinates are metaphorically signified by the basic determinators of the material world, time and space.

3. The characteristic long, static shots of routine activities in real time emphasize the temporal aspect. This is especially true with Jeanne Dielman and Costa's In Vanda's Room - the monotoneity of Jeanne's and Duarte sisters' everyday experiences sets the impaired rhythm of these two pictures, allowing critics to categorize them as "slow cinema". But, however slow-paced these films are, they are neatly organized in a progression of intervals, which accounts for their peculiar hypnotic rhythm. Akerman reportedly directed Jeanne Dielman with a timer in her hand to achieve a balanced composition - indeed, the film is remarkably easy to watch for a 200 minutes long picture where few things happen. The excessive running time of this film, as well as 180 min of In Vanda's Room and 155 min of Colossal Youth, is, of course, another device of making the time palpable. (Not a compulsory one: Akerman's Hotel Monterey and Je tu il elle are much shorter - roughly an hour each - but as slow.)

Streets of Fontainhas (Colossal Youth)

4. The characters are determined by the space, up to the point that their place of habitat becomes a part of their identity. Costa's characters are all residents of Fontainhas, the Lisbon's poorest slum, and the demolition of this deteriorated neighborhood (showcased in Vanda's Room) is a tragedy for them; their new sterile apartments in a social housing project look uninhabitable in Colossal Youth. In Bones, Nuno Vaz's character feels like an alien in unfamiliar environments, the hospital and the apartment of Isabelle Ruth's Eduarda. For Jeanne Dielman her place of residence is an extention of her name - the full title is Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles.

5. Of four Akerman's pictures before Jeanne Dielman, two feature their setting in their titles - La Chambre and Hotel Monterey. Indeed, both consist of shots of respective environments and nothing more, but even the other two, even if they do have a plot, carry the sense of claustrophobia much in the same fashion as does Jeanne Dielman. Saute ma ville is a short sketch antecendant to Jeanne Dielman, and is set entirely in a kitchen. Je tu il elle is divided into three parts, each taking place in a locked space - the studio where Julie the protagonist lives, a car, the apartment of Julie's ex-girlfriend. Of Costa's Fontainhas films, the most conspicuous example is In Vanda's Room - again, a telling title - three hours of two sisters sitting in a dark chamber with occasional forays outside - and outside isn't any different: other rooms, or narrow, cramped streets of the slum.

Zita Duarte caught into imaginary boundaries (Bones)

6. The word cramped is perhaps the best description of Costa's world. These rundown houses are cluttered up with furniture and all sorts of lumber and clobber, the walls of Fontainhas seemingly try to squeeze people padding over the streets. "It's too small" are the first words of Colossal Youth's Ventura when he enters his new welfare apartment (even though it's empty and clean, unlike the messy and littered Fontainhas rooms). When he visits Vanda, she tells him about her claustrophobic experience in a maternity ward, where she was put into a room with no windows, and her baby, into a glass incubator. Costa narrows the space at almost every shot - he constantly employs double framing, placing his characters into doorways, windows, mirrors, or otherwise confining them into visible boundaries through the use of vertical lines that dissect shots. In a typical dialogue sequence two persons engaged in conversation will sit in a corner that splits the frame, leaving each character only a half of it. In a scene from Bones, the character of Zita Duarte paces nervously up and down the street, waiting for her friend. The shot is composed in such a way that she, in her seemingly chaotic motion, never steps beyond two limits, marked by two corners of a house. After Bones, there're no closeups, and aspect ratio is the obsolete 4:3, the narrowest possible. Other technique is overshadowing the background using the natural light coming from a window, and a reflector, making a shot look like a Rembrandt's painting. This is how Costa shoots the scenes in Vanda's room in the eponymous film, as well as several sequences of Colossal Youth.

Narrowing the space in Bones

Two examples of virtuoso framing (In Vanda's Room, Bones)

Colossal Youth: Ventura in the welfare apartment (left);
Vanda tells Ventura how she first saw her newborn daughter

Jeanne Dielman in the hallway

7. Akerman's mise en scène, in turn, evokes Vermeer's genre paintings. Interiors are not merely a background, quite the opposite - Babette Mangolte's camera makes Jeanne Dielman an extension of her kitchen, and vice versa (remember the title). As for claustrophobia, Akerman's characters don't speak of it, yet the sensation of being confined is maintained throughout her films. Three of them feature an elevator - an epitome of claustrophobic space - specifically, Delphine Seyrig's character in a recurring scene from Jeanne Dielman is seen entering a hallway, passing a door, then getting into an elevator, locking another two gates behind her; three doors in a one continuous shot. In the first twenty minutes of Je tu il elle, Akerman's Julie is shown spending some time (twenty eight days, according to the unreliable voiceover, although it may very well be 24 hours) in a small ground-floor apartment without stepping outside. She is obsessed with reorganizing this tiny space by continually and pointlessly moving the scarce futniture. A floor-to-ceiling window makes the studio sort of a glass cage, especially when Julie exposes her naked body to a passer-by; at some other moment she blocks the window with a mat, creating a perfect confinement.

Double framing in Jeanne Dielman

Julie and the window (Je tu il elle)

8. Stories they tell are different - Akerman examines detachment of her stand-alone characters, whereas Costa focuses his attention on a community, including stories of several people into each film. And yet there's something else that connects the two: with all that preoccupation with interiors, both directors in their masterworks create portraits of human beings who are much bigger than these interiors. Jeanne Dielman - a housewife, a most untypical hero of whose existence cinema is usually unaware - is a character of an epic caliber; same with Ventura, the self-proclaimed father of Fontainhas' dwellers, the rhapsode of the poor. They may be living in isolation, restriction and wretchedness - but among the isolated, restricted and wretched, they are the heroes. That is, indeed, something bigger than politics.

The Impotence Of Being Un-Earnest

By the year 1963, the so-called British New Wave was recognized, accepted and praised by critics and audiences not only inside the country but also beyond. Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, John Schlesinger and their counterparts have found themselves well-established directors with international awards, not the rebels they had used to be. It was time for them to sum things up, to look back - in anger or not, - and to reinvent themselves.

Schlesinger's Billy Liar, despite sharing many traits with and exploiting many staples of the already canonized social realist classics, was a change of game in comparison with earlier kitchen sink films (including Schlesinger's own cut-and-dry debut, A Kind Of Loving). For one thing, Billy Liar is a comedy - most New Wave films before 1963 had been bleak dramas. Secondly, it incorporated some new techniques borrowed from the French. And, last but not least, it was less a social drama than a character study - at the same time picking on the change of the social environment that was partly provoked by the young angry men themselves.

Urban reconstruction was a popular metaphor
for the 1960s' social change

As for the the genre - or should I say the tone, for it's not a pure comedy, - Billy Liar was an early example of the shift expirienced by the New Wave. The same year saw releases of Basil Dearden's unusually light-hearted A Place To Go and Tony Richardson's period extravaganza Tom Jones, a quite unexpected follow-up to his The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. In the following few years more would emerge - most notably, The Knack And How To Get It, The Beatles vehicle A Hard Day's Night (both directed by Richard Lester), and Alfie with Michael Caine. Billy Liar, however, is by no means a crowd-pleasing unproblematic kind of comedy; it is, as I've stated above, hardly even a comedy at all. For a comedy, it's too bitter, its ending too unhappy. Satire would be a more precise word - or tragicomedy, which often comes in hand. Schlesinger's film is almost as angry as Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, and almost as desperate as The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner. Almost, but not quite.

That latter title is especially interesting to draw parallels with - along with less known Private Porter, Richardson's masterpiece was the film that made Tom Courtenay, the star of Billy Liar, famous. Courtenay's performance in The Loneliness is emblematic for the whole movement of the young-and-angry - an angular, grim, not so bright young man, deprivated of any hope in a northern working class milieu. Unlike the characters of the above-mentioned Dearden's film, he doesn't have a place to go and never will. He spends all the film running but his run is bound to nowhere. Unempolyment office or prison - these are the only options he has.

Julie Christie as Liz, a breath of fresh air in the
town's suffocative environment

Courtenay's character in Billy Liar is very different. He is a white collar, working as a clerk in an undertaker's office, has artistic ambitions (in word rather than in deed, but still), and unlike The Loneliness' Colin he is a charismatic and cheerful lad. Billy's face is never straight, he bubbles over with mops and mows - and, being a compulsive liar, he's armed with a vivid imagination full of tall tales. Yet Billy's destiny is the same as that of Colin - he is doomed to end his days in the drab Northern town of his. The difference is, Billy chooses his fate himself - while in The Loneliness' world the mere idea of escape was impossible to conceive, Schlesinger's film assumes the feasibility of liberation, beautifully embodied by Julie Christie's Liz. Her first appearance onscreen is one of the most memorable moments in the film. For this rapidly edited scene Schlesinger adopts cinéma vérité technique - Liz is shot from a distance with no audible dialogue as she is walking around the town, seemingly aimless. While Schlesinger's style is overall influenced by the more famed New Wave from the other side of the Channel, this short sequence looks almost exactly like a hidden camera footage from a Godard movie. Liz doesn't belong here, hence the strikingly odd imagery that presages Richard Lester's portrayal of the Swinging London. Indeed, London is where she came from and where she wants Billy to go. Billy, a twentieth century's male edition of Madame Bovary, won't do that; he will go on living in his drab town as a perpetual wannabe, finding comfort in pipe dreams and reverie, impotent of anything. Even of getting laid despite being a womanizer and having three dates at the same time (there's a hint that Billy's still a virgin). His occupation as a coffin seller foretells his future; or, rather, lack of any.

Billy's job gives a handle to a couple of black jokes -
this scene shows him trying to seduce his girlfriend
amid the phallic gravestones

Schlesinger doesn't negate the social oppression coming from multiple levels of authority (even if he wanted to, his options were limited for Billy is an adaptation). Family, two bosses, and the whole social order of the town - no wonder that Billy constantly daydreams of being significant and in charge. He often fantasizes of being a military officer, or even warlord, enduing himself with symbols of ultimate masculine power - shoulder loops, peaked cap and phallic guns. There're even two imaginary killings of his primary antagonists, the father and the office superior. Billy's of course not a lunatic who can't tell reality from fantasy; cuts from the former to the latter are always abrupt - until the final sequence where the real transits to the imaginary in a cotinuous shot. Now they're one, and that is the end for our lad.

It's interesting to note that daydreaming is the mode of perception closely linked to cinema. Christian Metz in The Imaginary Signifier argues that there is more of a reverie than of a sleep in film watching - both are special modes of wakeful state; in particular, both assume staying awake but inactive. Yet I wouldn't go as far as claiming that Billy Liar is a metaphor of cinema as a mean of escape and, subsequently, source of indecision - although that would be a good explanation of the film's peculiar format: it's shot in Cinemascope just like an escapist genre flick, only it's monochrome, lacking the James Bond's rave of Technicolor. You can invent your own wide-screen country but you will still live in a black-and-white world. Unfortunately, in Billy Liar nobody goes to or talks about movies so that hypothesis would be a stretch of interpretation.

Tom Courtenay giving up: the last shots of
The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner (above),
and Billy Liar

However, Billy Liar certainly adds one reason for the despair and anger of the youth - the oppression is not only external but also internal to one's personality. A character study comes to the fore. Again, let's remember The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner, the ending of which resembles that of Billy. Courtenay's Colin in the Richardson's picture also gives up in the end - he stops before the finishing line of the race organized in prison, letting his competitor finish first and throwing away the possibility of being reformed into a decent member of society, for conforming a rotten society doesn't worth a damn. Billy, in turn, backtracks from the railway station simply because he doesn't feel like running off. Billy Liar is more inclined to the literary tradition of a psychological novel - its protagonist could find a character very akin to himself in the classical Russian novel Oblomov.

Social issues take second billing, and in contrast to the hopelessness of Billy's situation they are handled with a certain cautious optimism. The social landscape is changing, visualized by the urban development - new buildings being constructed and old ones torn down everywhere in town. A common metaphor in the Sixties - Basil Dearden, for instance, used it twice, in both A Place To Go and Victim where the first scene is set on a construction site. And there's Liz, an embodiment of hope for a change. In Darling, Schlesinger's follow-up to Billy Liar, we learn what's come out of her life in London - the very same Julie Christie stars as a fashion model at the middle of the capital's vibrant life. For Schlesinger, that film marked even further breakaway with social realist tradition and developing his Bildungsroman ambition, tied with Fellini's Dolce Vita's influence. However, Christie's Diane in Darling ended up being as desperate as many New Wave characters before her. But that is another story.

Nevermore

The older one gets, the more one tends to succumb to that nostalgic idea of the personal golden age one presumably expiriences during the childhood. It is quite understandable how this self-deceptive image is developed in the machinery of mind - memory is selective, and as time goes by our actual memories make way for those invented by ourselves. The first, but not the only thing that makes Carlos Saura's Raise Ravens great is that it eschews the commonplace sentimentalizing on the time of joy and innocence.

Split subject: Ana looks at herself

The story's protagonist is a nine year old called Ana (Ana Torrent, also known for Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive and Jaime Armiñan's The Nest), and she's anything but a Little Miss Sunshine. For this sensitive girl childhood is the time of total dependence, deprivation of freedom, and fear - and is it really something special? When you're a child you must do whatever the parents tell you, anything unknown is a potential source of a danger (in terms of psychoanalisis, anything unsymbolized can cause a trauma, and there're many such things in a child's world); and everything is so bigger than you are. Saura with an assistance of Teo Escamilla (his permanent DoP) and production designer Rafael Palmero does a great job of sustaining the child's point of view throughout the film with low camera angles and elaborate organization of space - the enormous labyrinthine house where Ana and her sisters live. Ana's world is split in two, the real one and the imaginary; there is a moment of pure cinematic magic when we literally see two Anas. From the fenced garden the girl looks at the roof of a neighboring house - and sees herself jumping down.

Ana is an orphan and has to deal with loss of parents. Her mother Maria (Geraldine Chaplin, Saura's longtime collaborator and then-wife) died first - Ana saw her suffering in agony. Shortly after passed the father, and since then the three sisters has been guarded by Maria's sister Paulina. The mother and father are seen only in flashbacks and Ana's daydreams, and from these sequences we learn that Ana feels very differently about the two.

The father (Héctor Alterio) is a dominant military officer, abusive towards his wife and seemingly indifferent towards the three daughters. An embodiment of patriarchy and machismo, he is a counterpart of Luis Buñuel's male characters, typically tyrannical and obsessed with their masculinity. The father's ill-treatment of Maria leads Ana to believe that he's directly responsible for her mother's death, and to hate him. In the very first scene of the movie Ana witnesses a sexual intercourse between the father and his lover - an echo of the Freudian primal scene where a child sees his or her parents having sex and perceives this as a violent act of establishing the father's authority. The association evokes the memory of Ana's mother and the latter appears onscreen for the first time (not until the next sequence we'll learn that it's only a fantasy or hallucination). This night the father dies - poisoned by Ana as the girl herself is convinced.

The mother, on the other hand, is the parent Ana's bound to and moreover, strongly identifies with, which accounts for her hate towards the father. We see the girl pretending to breastfeed a doll, and when the sisters play house she is the mother (note how the children apply their age hierarchy to that of the family: the eldest sister plays the father while the youngest is Rosa the chambermaid). In her daydreaming Ana recalls the tender moments between the mother and herself. In one scene we see a replica of the famous shot from Bergman's Persona - Geraldine Chaplin is caressing Ana Torrent's hair in front of a mirror. Later in the movie Ana and her mother will amalgamate into one just like Persona's Liv Ulmann and Bibi Andersson - the adult Ana, who is the narrator, appears onscreen and we see that she and Maria look exactly alike.

The little heroine is afraid to share the destiny of her mother who sacrificed her career in music for the sake of her husband. Ana is resistant to every manifestation of the traumatizing male dominance - at certain point she even claims she will never wear a bra (to the elder sister's surprise); when she learns about the affair aunt Paulina has with the father's friend - who also happens to be an army man - Ana wants her guardian dead.

The fact that there're only two male characters in Raise Ravens and both of them are military officers is, of course, not a coincidence. The androcentric hierarchy of Ana's family parallels the patriarchal system of Spain under generalissimo Francisco Franco, an autocratic father figure for the whole society (like many dictators do, Franco even adopted a paternal nickname - caudillo, Spanish for chieftain). The dictator is of course represented within a film by Ana's father. The eerie funeral sequence - candlelights, silent whispering, shadowed faces - is a depiction of something Spain itself experienced two months before Raise Ravens was released, when Franco passed. Death of a fatherly dictator is always a shock, even for those who hated him - a phenomenon well-known from memoirs of people who witnessed Stalin's death in the Soviet Union. That said, it is still a relieving disposal from suppression, and Ana demonstrates her attittude by refusing to kiss the deseased; Saura does something quite similar, having overriden the ancient formula "de mortuis aut bene aut nihil." Franco/the father wouldn't have had anyone to blame but himself - it was him who raised those ravens.

Political allegory as a device of defamiliarization (and a mean to trick the censorship - although Franco's censors were not that harsh) was nothing new for Saura's work. In Raise Ravens, however, it is combined with another kind of estrangement - a  temporal distance constructed within the film. Saura had approached the theme of memory before - in El Jardín de las Delicias and La Prima Angélica - but only in the context of past events, especially the Civil War. Raise Ravens, in turn, is a memory of the present - set in the 1970s when the movie was actually made, yet designed as a rememberance. It's also the first Saura's picture to deal with a specific event contemporary to it, namely Franco's death - in fact, Saura's reaction even preceded the cause, and production began when the caudillo was still alive, though generally known to be terminally ill. Such topicality can easily lead to unnecessary present-dayness, making a film a subject to date rapidly; hence the memorial modality that allows to avoid those risks by building the narrative as it was of the events long gone (there's hope in it too - nevermore Franco will be back, he's history). One's own memories are never shocking by virtue of their nature - they're familiar to us, and our mind has a quality of coming to terms with most traumatic experiences - so instead of hysteria and agitation the intonation of Raise Ravens is calm - despite the dramatic events - and pensive. There is sadness and unchildish seroiusness in Ana Torrent's eyes, and some scenes are tantalizingly melancholic; most strikingly so is the dance to a sentimental pop hit Porque te vas.

Photography, the twentieth century's basic medium
for conservation of memory is a recurring motif in
Saura's work (see La Caza, Peppermint Frappé or
El Jardín de las Delicias for references)

So long as Raise Ravens is narrated from twenty years after, it is not a political film but a historical one. Politics doesn't know past tense - pull it out from the present, and it's not politics anymore. When things like Franco's death happen we usually say that we're witnessing the big history, which is some kind of a paradox for the history is the past and cannot be witnessed, it can only be remembered or reconstructed - or constructed for that matter. Ana herself provides an example of how the past is reinvented when she makes up a story behind an old postcard on the wall. Maybe the whole story in Raise Ravens is invented by the adult Ana - to some extent it certainly is: history is never real, it is reality symbolized, framed and edited. But here's what is interesting about this unreliable narrator: provided that she's some twenty years older than the little Ana, she must be talking from the 1990s, yet she doesn't look like she is. Instead of limiting the narrator's presence to a voice-over, which would be quite enough for comprehensibility, Saura shows us her in the flesh, dressed in fashion of the 1970s and looking exactly like Maria, the Ana's mother. Ana/Maria is seemingly not beyond the film, a part of it - and yet she is from twenty years after. She's there and she's not. So is, in turn, the film, transforming the present into past in real time. And so is cinema itself - always chasing reality only to find that, when captured, it's not real anymore.

Spain and Gain

When it comes to any sort of average, there is always a temptation of perceiving it as an allegory - especially if we are talking about an environment unfriendly towards freedom of speech like the Francoist Spain. Whether the double meaning is really intended, remains in question in case of pictures like El Extraño Viaje by Fernando Fernan-Gomez, a film noir set in a small nameless town. The story of wickedness and perversion hiding under a façade of decency could be a hint to a bigger picture of what was happening, or could be just a capture of the twentieth century's uncertainty and paranoia found not only in Spain but elsewhere. However, in case of Luis García Berlanga's ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! (Welcome Mister Marshall, 1952) a political message is certainly there.

How propaganda works: Villar del Río's inhabitants are
convinced of accepting the Marshall Plan in five minutes

A classical satirical comedy dealing with the theme of Spanish identity, ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! was created in the middle of Franco's forty years reign. The infamous caudillo's regime was officially nationalist and conservative, although by the 1950s the censorship grew relatively weak - so the overtly left directors like Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem got an opportunity to make their films without really being afraid of any punitive action. Bienvenido was the second of Berlanga's overall 21 films - by this time his style hadn't yet been elaborated and he hadn't yet met Rafael Azcona who would write the filmmaker's most successful oeuvre. However, as early as in his sophomore effort Berlanga ventured upon a critical comment on the very core element of the official agenda - Spanish nationalism.

Reactionary theorists tend to seek for a role model society in countryside communities, or rather in some non-exisiting idealized place called A Village. That is exactly where Berlanga heads for - an average locality of Villar del Río (literally, a village by the river): five or six streets, a plaza, a church, a cafeteria-cum-club-cum-mayor's office; bus connection to the provincial seat. Berlanga's films are known for having a choral quality, which means the frame is densely populated with characters in various social relationships with each other; these relationships are made clear through non-stop rapid dialogues. Even if there is a protagonist (which is not the case of Bienvenido), it's not an individual character that is in focus but a society. Not to be confused with an indiscrete crowd - for one thing, each member of a society has his or her own distinctive role in it, and also one of Berlanga's talents was to make all his numerous characters easily distinguishable with a couple of characteristic traits. For this type of storytelling an isolated small community like Villar del Río is a perfect setting - in some eighty minutes of running time the whole social system of the place is outlined. This average village is also a model - not a role model of what Spain should be but rather a synecdoche of the whole nation, an epitome of what it really is.

McCarthyism as imagined by a Francoist

The film starts of the reel - in five minutes or so we are introduced to the inhabitants of the village. A big event is announced by a local official - the arrival of American diplomats who enforce on the Spanish soil the so-called Marshall Plan - a program of humanitarian aid to post-WWII Europe and an early countermeasure to the increasing Soviet influence in the region (in fact, Spain never received a cent from the program). The rustic elite are at first reluctant but eventually grow enthusiastic, seduced by the transoceanic milk and honey promised to them. What begins as a light-hearted, maybe a little condescendent comedy about those loveable village folks, the salt of the Spanish earth, at some point turns out to be something quite the opposite. Behind the charming eccentricity of the village's cloth-eared alcalde, god-fearing priest and old-fashioned nobleman a dark side is revealed. The myth of the saint simplicity and purity is being destroyed little by little - you can't tell at which point the kindly irony gives way to bitterness, and the slight comic exaggeration, to a downright grotesque. (Berlanga would develop his skill of gradually turning things upside down in his later work - the most exemplary is El Verdugo (1963), a screwball comedy sliding by the end into horror, Berlanga's trademark sequence shots acquiring the suspenseful feel of an undying nightmare.)

Not only the characters disapprove the idealistic image of true Spain by their actions and attitudes, they also deliberately fake this image to please the Americans. Enter a flamenco dancer and all other aspects of Andalusian exoticism: Villar del Río is transformed into a phoney southern village. Rundown houses are camouflaged under fake white walls and openwork ivied balconies, the villagers put on folk costumes and take guitars in their arms. The village is, in fact, by no means Andalusian - it's situated someplace in the central region of Castilia - but who cares anyway? Spain-ness thus is a construct - formed in many respects from the outside, as the villagers employ external stereotypes about Spain.

Yet another great performance by El Verdugo's José Isbert

Nationalism also leads to isolation and subsequently to ignorance, and the residents of Villar del Río are as prejudiced about American culture as Americans presumably are about their own. The night before Mister Marshall arrives four leading characters are dreaming. This is the climax of Bienvenido, as its grotesque reaches the highest point here. Alcalde's dream, for instance, is a parody of Western genre movies with all Bienvenido's characters dressed as cowboys and speaking gibberish English. Meanwhile the cowardly padre who knows that most Americans are Protestant is having a nightmare about being captured by KKK and interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee. What the poor fellow does not know is that HUAC and Marshall Plan he waits for so desperately are two links of the very same anti-communist chain. Political right knows few national differences.