El Planeta (2021)

A box of Ferrero Rocher chocolates in a display window. Filmed in digital black and white, a framed image that the camera lingers on and one of my favourite shots in the movie El Planeta (2021). In the Spanish town of Gijon, there are numerous shops boarded up, closed down on account of a recession. The Ferrero Rochers are part of a montage of street scenes. We see other shops and their display windows. Commercial items like shoes, lingerie and dresses. Even without the black and white cinematography, the atmosphere is austere. In the commercial shopping districts, we mainly see the elderly walk past. I find the Ferrero Rochers funny because of how they’re thought of as what you buy for a special gift or occasion. Real fancy, even though they’re available in supermarkets, service stations. Not necessarily expensive or hard to get – just imbued with something that is supposed to be classy and special. Appropriate to the theme of the movie, which is about carrying on as if you are expensive, and wealthier than you are, even as the restaurant tabs are piling up and the utilities are about to be cut for unpaid bills.

El Planeta is directed and written by artist Amalia Ulman, starring her and her mother, Ale Ulman. They play a mother and daughter named Maria and Leonor respectively, and we find them in slow free-fall. With the husband and father having died, their status as an upper class family is evaporating. And yet, they exist without urgency, cutting costs and stealing where they can, carrying on the charade of privilege. Casual shoplifting, returning items for refunds, and weathering their dwindling resources. Outside it’s too hot to wear their fur coats. Leonar is an artist and gets an opportunity to design a pop artist album cover in New York, yet has no money for the flight costs. In contrast to a comedy like Arrested Development where a wealthy family is forced to find other means of maintaining their status, the humour here is not broad. The comedy is deadpan and observational. Even as figures of satire, the relationship between mother-and-daughter feels believable and likeable, despite their grifting means.

Great low budget indie flick that is a promising debut for Amalia Ulman. Walks a modulated tone between being endearing and sharp, especially in the use of real world news footage in the closing credits. Available to stream on Stan. Shout out to Static Vision for distributing El Planeta. Recommended.

Conquest (1983)

After listening to the recent Pure Cinema Podcast episode on Fantasy movies, I was keen to submerge myself into some 1980s era sword-and-sorcery flicks. One title they talked highly of, and that I’d heard good word for some time, was Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci’s entry into the post-Conan genre, Conquest (1983), an Italian-Spanish-Mexican co-production, which is available to stream on Amazon Prime. Even in the recent remastered edition with it looking better than any VHS ex-rental, the first thing to notice about Conquest is its foggy, hazy aesthetic. Along with cinematographer Alejandro Ulloa, Fulci ensures that every scene is swimming with mist or smoke, and at times even the film lens feels like it was shot through gauze; the effect is definitely dream-like, like an impressionistic oil painting coming to life in slow motion. That, and Claudio Simonetti’s (from Goblin) ethereal, pulsating synth score, and the markers of 1980s special effects such as the key weapon wielded by the heroes – a mythical bow that fires laser arrows – cements Conquest as having a distinctive retro fantasy style. The plot? A young hunk named Illias (Andrea Occhipinti) from a mythical land journeys to a primordial landscape of cave dwellers and wolf warriors, which is ruled by a nude sorceress wearing a gold mask, Ocron (Sabrina Siani). Eventually Ilias teams up for with an older hunk, Mace (Jorge Rivero) who communes with animals (like a beastmaster) and survives on his own wits (that, and a pair of nunchucks made of bone). The story then alternates between one of the two – Illias or Mace, Mace or Illias – getting jumped by a group of strange creatures, and the other rescuing them, intercut with Ocron writhing around with a snake and tripping out over a vision of her own death, which she seeks to stop with all the creatures and warriors under her command. Also, because it is directed by Fulci, it’s quite violent in a splatter way with either someone getting brained or blood spurting out of someone every ten minutes or so (if not splatter violence, then something very weird will happen every ten minutes i.e. the Fulci touch). I thought this was very entertaining, and a true vibe experience, depending how much you’re into the misty and mythical fantasy aesthetic; the film definitely has a greater sense of style than other low budget European Conan knock-offs (even though it was a box office flop on release). Conquest is like if you were staring hard at a Frank Frazetta painting by a camp site fire and then tripped out on a smoke induced haze while listening to some synth prog pumping out of car stereo speakers. It’s also great that for a fantasy film that features a nude sorceress, a bow that shoots laser arrows, and lots of man-animal warriors, the first thing we see in the closing credits is: ‘Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.’ Recommended.

Our Time (2018)

I took a chance on Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux mainly on the basis of the intriguing image of a red demon with horns moving through a living room. In the end, that was one surreal image included in a visually immersive arthouse drama about an upper class family and their workers in Mexico. I thought it was really great and several moments still linger in my memory (a child alone in a muddy paddock with animals, an English schoolboy rugby scrummage, an Eyes Wide Shut style orgy of adults). I was curious about Reygadas’ follow up, Our Time (2018; Nuestro tiempo), and it long beckoned intimidatingly with its three hour length. I felt that it literalised a lot of what Post Tenebras Lux left unsaid and abstract, and the story is more of a direct portrait of a marriage under duress between poet-rancher Juan (played by Reygadas himself) and his wife Esther (Natalia Lopez, Reygadas’s wife). The characters have an open marriage, but a serious schism occurs when Esther falls in love with an American hired hand, Phil (Phil Stevens). It’s hard not to read into everything once you know it is Reygadas and his wife playing these roles, their children also playing themselves. Reygadas in interviews has strongly denied there’s any autobiographical or therapeutic work going on here. Yet it all feels loaded particularly when Reygadas’ character, Juan, almost finds perverse pleasure and suffering in being the cuckold while Reygadas the director is filming his wife in very intimate scenes with other men. Hence, some critics have labelled it self-indulgent (you might too). I don’t know if I felt too much for either character, and sometimes wondered if professional actors in the lead three roles would have been better (Lopez is the strongest performance). But I appreciated that as the film kept going, moving on from Juan’s masculine perspective and finding complexity in the difficulties the characters are trying to work out openly with each other. Helping this are startling visuals and sequences filmed by Adrian Durazo and Diego Garcia – from the vistas of the ranch where Juan and Esther raise bulls, the changing weather patterns of Mexico, a sequence that explores how the motor of Esther’s car works, a lengthy shot of Mexico City from above while Esther reads a letter that examines their marriage eloquently, to the final poetic moment scored to King Crimson’s ‘Islands’. In the end, I was glad that I watched it, and how it took its time to reconcile the emotional and sexual actions of its characters, and also depicted small moments (receiving a text in an opera, ignoring texts while driving) as epic cinematic offerings. Available to stream on Stan and Kanopy. Recommended.

La Caza (1966)

I took another chance on a film screening on The Cinephobe TV website. La Caza (1966) aka The Hunt was directed by Carlos Saura, a major Spanish director whose work I was generally not familiar with except for seeing one of his late-1980s flamenco movies (El Amor Brujo), which are gorgeously visual with bold colours. Here, La Caza, is a black and white drama that focuses on four men – three middle-aged friends and one younger relative – setting off in a jeep to a village in the desert to hunt rabbits. Over the course of a hot day, resentments between the three friends start to emerge – Luis (Jose Maria Prada) is an alcoholic loser who reads sci-fi novels, Paco (Alfredo Mayo) is a successful businessman with a sadistic streak, and Jose (Ismael Merlo) is in financial trouble after leaving his marriage for a younger woman. The hunt is Jose’s idea to ask Paco for a loan, and Paco’s cousin Enrique (Emilio Gutierrez Caba) observes the increasing masculine friction, petty squabbles and capitalistic, sexual drives, all of which are sharply conveyed in the framing and editing, conversational close ups of the men and whispered voice over of their inner thoughts. While there are cultural references to the Spanish Civil War and WW2 that I didn’t immediately catch or understand, La Caza was still an absorbing slow burn drama that reminded me a bit of Deliverance or Wages Of Fear in the mounting tension and the violent climax that it’s been building towards. Recommended. Warning: this was filmed on a legal hunting reserve, so there is real footage of rabbits being hunted included.

The Untamed (2016)

When we held VHS Tracking – Live for the Blue Room Winter Nights, one of my questions to the panellists was “What movie would you use to vet the people in your life?” One of artist Nathan Beard’s choices was The Untamed (2016; La región salvaje) which he described as a “horny movie” and one that would truly be a litmus test as a movie recommendation. Thanks to SBS OnDemand, I was able to finally see what Nathan was talking about, and the film was both what I expected but also completely different to what I anticipated, particularly since all I really knew about it was that there was an alien tentacle or something that people had sex with. Much like other auteurs who take a grounded approach to horror/sci-fi terrain (Cronenberg, Glazer, Von Trier), director-writer Amat Escalante establishes an eerie tone with mysterious images right from the start, but the film more or less focuses on the tensions across an unhappy marriage. Alejandra (Ruth Ramos) is the stressed mother of two children who has a macho husband Angel (Jesús Meza) that cheats on her. Then there is the haunted Veronica (Simone Bucio) trying to get over her time with a mysterious entity in a cabin out in the countryside and starts getting to know Alejandra’s brother who is a nurse, Fabian (Eden Villavicencio). How all of this interconnects and touches on aspects of class, gender and sexuality in Mexican culture is doled out patiently and slowly with sensuous force and anxious anticipation. The Untamed is great, and even by the end, leaves much unsaid to ruminate over even as it produces images you can’t believe you’ve seen. Recommended.