It
sounds like an unduly severe nickname. In modern days, this rough patch of
Galician shoreline might have been dubbed the “Coast of Insurance Claims”
instead. Notorious for the many shipwrecks dotting its waters, this picturesque
coastland supplies a hard but steady living to the weathered locals. Lois Patiño,
in collaboration with assistant director Carla Andrade, paints an austere
portrait of the land and its inhabitants in Coast
of Death (trailer
here),
which opens this Friday in New York.
If
you asked them, the taciturn fishermen, sea-combers, and foresters would say
they were Galician, not Spanish. Patiño quietly records their intermittent
conversations as they go about their work, but he is more concerned with the
general ambiance than the particulars of their shell fish harvesting. Through
the film, he maintains long slow fixed takes that focus on the wide misty
vistas rather than any of the faceless people laboring antlike in a corner of
the screen. It is hard to get a sense of the personalities attached to the
ghostly voices occasionally floating through the film, aside from two old-timers
Patiño periodically returns to for their salty commentary.
Coast is sort of like
watching an entire film made up of ECM covers. It looks great from the outside,
but in this case, there is no record inside. Eschewing narrative and other such
conventionalities, Coast is truly
landscape cinema in the Peter Hutton tradition. Granted, Patiño is working with
a few big themes, like eternity and man’s interrelationship with nature. With
respect to the latter, the infamous mishandling of the 2002 Prestige oil spill
is referenced several times throughout the sparse voice-overs, but the two
grizzled cats claim to have seen worse when a National Socialist petrol tanker
foundered in the shoals during WWII.
More
than one decade after the Prestige spill and seventy-some years since the
previous tanker misadventure, the titular coast looks timeless and unspoiled.
The modern world (and its carnivals) has reached their remote corner of
Spain/Galicia, but you would hardly know it from the daily rhythms Patiño
documents. Initially, it is a strangely immersive viewing experience, but the
eighty-five minute film eventually starts to repeat itself.
