Movie Review: The Brain in Spain
Intriguing and Cerebral Spanish Flicks

By Lynn Hamilton

Competing with France has been tough going for Spanish film makers. The French established their preeminence in cinema early on with the new wave movement and have clung to their status as Europe's most serious film making country with determination.

But Spain may finally be coming into its own. Spanish film maker Pedro Almodovar gets Academy Award nominations nearly every year. And now Spain has launched a style of film making closely akin to the surrealism of painter Salvador Dali and architect Antonio Gaudi. Two recent films, Abre Los Ojos and El Arte de Morir, aim to capture the terrain of the human subconscious as did Dali and Gaudi.

Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes)

Abre Los Ojos has gotten by far the most attention because it was remade, with indecent haste, as Vanilla Sky, a film that religiously follows the riveting plot of the original but repackages it with brand name American actors and aggressive American distribution and marketing techniques. It has frequently been remarked that Penelope Cruz plays the same part in the original and in the remake, which is what I mean by indecent haste. Remakes are always a little disrespectful, but when they happen instantaneously, it's really a way of saying, "great idea, but somebody needs to do it right."

Vanilla Sky followed so close on the heels of Abre Los Ojos that the American version completely eclipsed the Spanish film which never really had time to find a following. Which is a pity, because though it was produced with a much smaller budget, Abre Los Ojos is every bit as intriguing as Vanilla Sky which had all the advantages of bottomless Hollywood pockets.

The film starts out with a woman, never identified, urging "open your eyes." (In Spanish, of course, it's "abre los ojos", from which the film takes its title.) The central character, Cesar (played by Eduardo Noriega), seems to be living life with his eyes pretty well open. He's rich, he's privileged, and he's a sexual opportunist if not a predator. His downfall comes when he accepts a ride from a wronged girlfriend who plunges her car off a bridge in an attempt to kill her former lover as well as herself. She succeeds in her own suicide. Cesar lives, though he is badly disfigured‹just about the worst thing that can happen to an entitled playboy.

The twist of the knife is that Cesar appeared to be falling into something like genuine love (with Penelope Cruz) just before his accident. Now that his face looks like an unassembled jigsaw puzzle, she tactfully declines to pursue the relationship. The females in the audience, at least, will hardly blame her. Would he be chasing her if she were horribly maimed and he still looked like Adonis? Doubt it.

Then plastic surgery comes to the rescue, and Cesar's vapid good looks are magically restored. Love with Cruz blossoms for a brief moment before his world starts falling apart and refusing to obey the known laws of the universe. His dead ex comes back to life. Somehow she has the key to his apartment and an uncanny ability to disguise herself as Cruz. And what's with this advertisement for immortality that we keep seeing on the television?

You're not looking for a sci-fi plot twist in this film. It seems so dedicated to psychological realism. Cesar spends much of his time confessing his sins, mostly of lifestyle, to an understanding psychologist. But it turns out that a lot of this film is controlled by Cesar's subconscious. Reviewers tend to pussyfoot around the surprise plot twist, but I'm confident that even moviegoers who have cut their teeth on the Matrix and Existenz will not see the spin coming in Abre Los Ojos. It's that original. The science premise is so creepy, you may wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you're really in your bed or not.

El Arte de Morir (The Art of Dying)

Directed by Alvaro Fernandez Armero, El Arte de Morir has been dismissed as a slasher flick though it is anything but. It's true that a series of young people do die mysteriously in this film, but while slasher movies are repetitive and predictable, this movie is subtle and speculative.

A group of typical young Spanish yuppies, cocky and superficial, share a secret. Somehow they are all implicated in the disappearance of their eccentric artist friend, a man who somehow managed to offend everyone with his self-centered brashness and existentialism. HOW they are implicated, exactly, is withheld from the viewer until near the end of the film to ratchet up the suspense. One by one, the conspirators meet tragic ends.

You may, at first, think it's just Spain's answer to Ten Little Indians, but there's actually a lot more going on here. Influenced by Spanish surrealism and magical realism, Armero gives you a film in which, like Abre Los Ojos, the subconscious mind is the key player. But in El Arte de Morir, there's this extra twist: the subconscious is also a gateway for ghosts.

Watch closely and you will see little clues that everything is not what it seems to be. Why is the construction site deserted when one victim falls from an upper floor of an unfinished building? How did the killer get into another victim's locked car? And how did the floor of an athletic club suddenly turn into a frozen sheet of ice?

In a lesser film, like the slasher genre classics to which El Arte has been compared, none of these illogical details would add up to anything coherent, but in El Arte they are all part of a brilliant psychological puzzle that few, if any, film buffs will put together until the very end.

Please don't confuse El Arte de Morir with The Art of Dying, a B teen movie made in the US. It's easy to do so because El Arte de Morir literally translated means "the art of dying," so we have two movies, made around the same time, with the same title. Getting the wrong film could be truly horrifying.

La Belle Epoque (The Beautiful Time)

It doesn't fit into the school of magical realism category that we've been perusing, but there is something really magical about La Belle Epoque, which won the academy's best foreign language film a few years back.

To people who aren't versed in the Spanish Civil War, La Belle Epoque may seem like nothing more than a high-toned sex comedy. Not that there's anything wrong with that, now that I think about it. And it's perfectly delightful on that level. A young Spanish army deserter (played by Jorge Sanz) falls under the spell of an elderly country squire (Fernando Fernan Gomez) whose atheism and revolutionary ideals give him the very best dialog in the film. You have a wonderful scene in which Fernan Gomez complains that he can't be a proper atheist because he was baptized as an infant and he can't rebel against the institution of marriage because he is only aroused by his wife. He's a free thinker, but only in his thoughts, in other words.

This desiderata of unfulfilled radicalism sets the stage for the whole film. Sanz falls right into step with the older man. Sanz believes staunchly in the republic, but not enough to fight for it. His talents are for peace. He is a great cook. And when Fernan Gomez's four gorgeous daughters step off a train like goddesses disembarking from a cloud, the younger man becomes their gently-fondled sex toy. One by one the girls seduce him--with various degrees of sincerity and manipulation. In a wonderful reversal of the usual gender roles, Fernan Gomez thinks he has to marry any girl he's spent the night with. He's knee deep into two rejected proposals before it begins to dawn on him that the girls aren't quite on that same page.

Meanwhile, the political backdrop continues to be more than just a stage set. La Belle Epoque is located in that golden moment when Spain's coalition of free thinkers--Republicans, Anarchists, and Communists--voted together to bring in democracy and throw out the monarchs. The educated viewer knows that this utopian dream didn't last long. In a war that would last for years and devastate the country, Franco used his enormous army to wrest control from this fledgling democracy and establish a dictatorship that would last until 1979, when he finally died. The Spanish refer to Franco's multi-decade reign as "the national tragedy"--when they mention it at all.

There's a strong tendency afoot in Spain to deny Franco's regime, sort of like a bad memory you just want to keep repressed. Franco's name is religiously omitted from some guide books, widely distributed to lead visitors through the treasures of Spain. It's as if the whole country would like to go back in time to the moment before Franco took over. And, through La Belle Epoque, they're able to indulge that fantasy.

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