Spanish Cinema Now ’12: Wrinkles

Emilio is about to rediscover the joys of institutional food.  The former banker has a hard time adjusting to life in an old folks home.  Unfortunately, his fading faculties will eventually rob him of the relationships he forges in Ignacio Ferreas’s animated feature Wrinkles (trailer here), which screens as part of the 2012 edition of Spanish Cinema Now.

Emilio has Alzheimer’s, but nobody will tell him that directly.  Increasingly difficult to handle, his grown son has packed him off to a nursing home.  His new roommate Miguel, an Argentinian scammer, has been down this road before.  Still sharp as a tack, Miguel specializes in conning the more addled residents out of their pocket money and flirting hopelessly with the nursing staff.  Initially, Emilio is quite appalled by his shameless roommate, but they warm to each other over time—sort of.  Miguel insists he is actually doing good deeds by keeping his suckers emotionally engaged on some level.  While completely at odds with his middle class morality, Emilio starts to see his point.

Adapted from Paco Roca’s graphic novel, Wrinkles is entirely honest to its characters and their circumstances, making it a bit of a tough sell commercially.  Nonetheless, its deeply humanistic spirit is quite refreshing.  Avoiding cheap melodrama, it has more quietly telling moments than most slice-of-life live action indies, let alone the typical animated tent-pole.

Ferreras, who served as an animator on Sylvain Chomet’s wonderfully wistful The Illusionist, employs a similarly sensitive 2D animation that feels reassuringly nostalgic.  Some of his richly detailed flashback sequences are even quite lovely.  While the narrative occasionally resorts to the odd cliché, like the defiant, doomed-to-fail road-trip, most of the notes Wrinkles hits ring true.

While its themes are about as “mature” as they get, there is absolutely nothing objectionable in Wrinkles for young viewers.  Still, the vibe of sad resignation is probably best appreciated by somewhat older audiences.  Featuring two very real cartoon characters and an elegant visual style, Wrinkles is recommended surprisingly strongly for fans of both animation and Spanish film.  It screens this coming Sunday afternoon (12/16) as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s annual Spanish Cinema Now series.

Spanish Cinema Now ’12: The Dream and the Silence

Oriol is an architect, but he is terrible at rebuilding broken things, like his family.  At least he is carrying on just fine.  Not only has he forgotten the accident that killed his youngest daughter, he has blotted out all memory of little Celia.  It might sound like the set-up for a psychological drama, but traditional narrative form is not something Jaime Rosales gets hung up on with his pseudo-experimental The Dream and the Silence (trailer here), which screens during the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2012 Spanish Cinema Now.

Oriol and Yolanda are two very unexceptional parents with two perfectly presentable daughters, Alba and Celia.  That all changes on the fateful day Oriol drives Celia back from her grandparents’ home.  The architect’s mental block might help him deal with the situation, but it makes matters far worse for Yolanda, who as a result feels added pressure to keep Celia’s memory alive.  As her emotions fray, Oriol becomes more distant and disengaged in family life.  From time to time, the audience witnesses extreme situations that could have been the stuff of genre cinema, but are presented by Rosales in a diffuse, roundabout manner instead.

Take a deep breath before walking into Dream, because it is described by the sympathetic as “demanding.”  Like high-end mumblecore, Rosales employs a highly improvisational approach with mostly nonprofessional cast.  While it sometimes takes a while to tease out what is going on in a given situation, viewers will get a keen sense of the personalities that make up this family.  Jaume Terradas is especially powerful as the grandfather who was one of the last people to see Celia alive.  When bickering with his wife and later mourning a grandchild, his weathered face commands the screen.

At times though, Rosales appears to be fighting his actors with his stylistic excesses. Granted, he frames some striking tableaux, but they lose some of their potency when held too long.  As for the Godardian jump-cuts, they are an unnecessary distraction.  Still, Óscar Durán’s black-and-white cinematography is unusually powerful, better described as stark rather than beautiful.  For added intellectual heft, the film is bookended by scenes of work by Miguel Barcelo (seen in The Double Steps) taking shape on his canvas.

Without question, Dream is a festival film that is unlikely to see any regular theatrical bookings in America, except perhaps in the ever daring Anthology Film Archives, God bless them.  There is a there there, but there is also plenty of meandering slack.  Visually distinctive but indulgently elliptical, Dream and Silence is only for cineastes that privilege image over narrative.  It screens this coming Thursday (12/13) at the Walter Reade Theater as part of this year’s Spanish Cinema Now.

Spanish Cinema Now ‘12: The Sleeping Voice

They might be atheists, but they certainly have their passion plays.  A Communist martyr will meet her fate as her sister vainly struggles to save her in Benito Zambrano’s The Sleeping Voice (trailer here), which screens tomorrow as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 2012 Spanish Cinema Now, their longest running annual film series.

As Voice opens, twelve prisoners are executed by a firing squad as the women inmates of Madrid’s Ventas jail break into “The Internationale.”  Yes indeed, why ease into things, when you can break out the bloody shirt right off the bat.  The best Spanish films on the Spanish Civil War explore the irony and moral ambiguity of the bloody conflict.  This is not one of those films.

It is 1940 and General Francisco Franco is very much alive.  He is quite well in fact, having just consolidated power.  With the support of the church, he has rounded up all the leftwing troublemakers, including Pepita’s beloved sister Hortensia.  Although she and her husband are active in the Communist guerilla forces, we are assured she is innocent of everything.  Arriving in the big city to support her very pregnant sister during the sham trial, Pepita finds work as a maid for the well to do Don Fernando.  While he is sympathetic to her situation, she is not to mention jails or Loyalist family members around his wife, a committed Nationalist whose brother was killed by the Communists.  Of course, being completely guileless, she does so anyway.

Despite her determination to stay out of politics, Pepita finds herself embroiled in a plot to help Hortensia’s husband escape to France.  That is how she meets the dashing “Black Jacket.”  Against her better judgment, she starts to fall for the wanted fugitive.  While she navigates the shadowy world of Franco’s Spain, the clock ticks down to her sister’s presumed death sentence.

Voice has an unmistakable point of view, which is perfectly fine.  However, the large ensemble of women inmates is largely a collection of interchangeable martyrs.  You would think the Nationalists would have scooped up one or two less than noble prisoners, by sheer virtue of their volume.

Still, there are some interesting figures sprinkled in here and there, particularly Don Fernando, a Loyalist sympathizer, whose past activism cost him his medical practice.  Only his high ranking military officer father prevents him from sharing Hortensia’s fate.  Pepita is also an intriguing character (rather fortunately so, since she is the lead), often appearing mired in childlike state of arrested development, yet knuckling down in times of crisis.

There is something deeply arresting about María León’s performance.  Her Pepita is the absolute picture of naiveté, yet she develops some pleasing chemistry with Marc Clotet’s Black Jacket.  Jesús Noguero also adds a realistically human dimension to the proceedings as Don Fernando, even though he is banished from the third act.  Conversely, the undeniably lovely Inma Cuesta is stuck playing a symbol rather than a character as secularly angelic Hortensia.

Cinematographer Alex Catalán’s work is attractive to look at, but Zambrano’s hand is simply too heavy.  We just so get it after a while.  Frankly, Voice’s sequences outside the prison, in which poor Pepita learns something of life, consistently work better than the scenes of predictable sisterly solidarity behind the walls.  Achingly earnest but fairly grueling over the long haul, The Sleeping Voice is mostly for diehard Spanish cinema fans and any surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades.  It screens tomorrow (12/9) and this coming Thursday (12/13) at the Walter Reade Theater during this year’s Spanish Cinema Now.