alvaro_dd

I have just seen a french DVD copy of this film. It is one of the most interesting thrillers I've seen in along time. The visuals are astonishing and the dialogues are as sophisticated as you would expect from someone like Giono. The concept is fascinating: a policeman and a serial killer play cat and mouse in an isolated mountain village in Nineteenth century France. Unlike most thrillers, there is no psychological explanation of the killer's motives, but a metaphysical, existential reflection of the nature of murder, which can be considered highly original, and at least as immoral as De Quincey's thesis.

It is clear that this film was a heavy influence on Chistophe Gans' "Brotherhood of the wolf", although I would suggest that the unexpected (yet totally coherent) twist at the ending has been copied in many films such as Friedkin's "Cruising" (francophile smart ass!) or Von Trier's "Element of crime".

"Sobre el arco iris" is an interesting film. This is hardly a compliment, as it is clear that the director looked for an extreme, "love-it-or-hate-it" kind of reaction. As it stands, "Sobre el arco iris" is just ok.

A Spanish young man buys a video camera and travels to Berlin. All that we see are his recordings. As he sinks deeper into a mental breakdown (whose motives remain unexplained), he begins to consider the camera as a mirror that excludes everything else, that is to say, he only exists and acts for its camera. When he decides to abandon reality and to turn his life into fiction, to transform his video diary into a thriller, we enter the dangerous territory of Powell's "Peeping Tom" and Haneke's "Benny's video".

"Sobre el arco iris" is hugely ambitious. It deals with our erotic/schizophrenic rapports with images, the blurring lines between reality and fiction and the ultimately vampire nature of cinema, both for the film-makers and the audience. It borrows from the masterpieces cited above, as well as from Dogma movement and even "The Blair Witch Project" (in the sense of trying to scare us by making us think: "what if this was real?"). However, the real source of inspiration is 80's Spanish underground cinema masterpiece, "Arrebato", with its idea of a vampire camera that steals the souls of film-makers and actors alike. These ideas have clearly inspired the scene where the main character fakes his suicide and then begins to film as if he wasn't there and the camera had taken a life of its own.

Alas, the film never quite reaches the heights it clearly aims for. As usual with Spanish films, it is basically a screenplay problem. Lopez-Gallego wants to capture visually a scary process of self-disappearance, but the changes that the main character undergoes in the last reel are dramatically unbelievable, and his actions seem too forced. One thing is trying to preserve the enigma (Why is the main character calling himself Ludwig?, Why is he so traumatized?, Has he planned the whole thing from the beginning?) and another is to ask the audience for a tremendous suspension of disbelief, that no director has any right to ask both in moral and aesthetic grounds.

All in all, a failed but interesting experiment by one of the few adventurous Spanish directors (try checking out López-Gallego first film, the excellent "Nómadas"). It is stuff like this we need right now, if only to make up for senseless, obsolete crap such as Almodovar's "La mala educación".

This hiper-realistic film is one of the most original serial killer films I have ever seen. The main character, Abel, is the owner of a boutique in the Barcelona suburbs. We follow him through his extremely boring everyday activity, arguing with his girlfriend, helping out a friend to start an advertising business, trying to sell his shop...an anodyne, ordinary life, except for the fact that sometimes Abel brutally murders total strangers with his bare hands. The unnerving thing about this movie, and what makes it a very disturbing experience is that no explanation is given for Abel´s killings. Actually they are shown with the same detachment as the rest of Abel´s boring activities. Even though there are no grisly details nor gore, the actual murder scenes are difficult to watch because they are shot in the same realistic, quasi-documentary style. On the other hand, Abel´s criminal activities do not interfere in his daily routine, so if the murder scenes were cut, you would see a fairly accurate description of the life of an ordinary young man in any part of the western world. This is not a film for everybody: there is virtually no plot, it is excruciatingly boring sometimes, and the violence is too real to be fun. But you should see this film if you are tired of standard horror films with hollow stories and characters. This film is virtually different to anything you have seen (except maybe Michael Haneke´s "Funny Games"). Although everything in it is familiar, in the end the film, like its main character, remains a mystery, an abyss in the midst of routine. There´s no final revelation or catharsis. Maybe that is why, unlike most contemporary films, it haunts you for a long time after leaving the cinema, even if you would not consider it a pleasant experience.