Chilean

Cinequest: THE MEMORY OF WATER

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THE MEMORY OF WATER
THE MEMORY OF WATER

The most masterful filmmaking achievement at Cinequest 2016 might just be the Chilean drama The Memory of Water by Matias Bize. The Memory of Water is an exploration of grief, its process and its impact. After all, the individuals who make up couples grieve in different ways and at different paces.

We meet a couple (Benjamin Vicuña and Elena Anaya) who has recently experienced a tragedy.  He is undertaking an everyday task.  She is (literally) revisiting the tragedy.  Director Bize brilliantly takes us to the wall in the home where parents record the height of their growing kid –  the camera scans up the marks for  2, 2/12, 3, 3 1/2 and then stops after 4.  We understand.

The husband is extremely sensitive and tries his best to comfort her.  It’s not enough.  She tells him that he needs to cry just once.  The movie is his journey to being able to cry that one time.

We see him at work, faced with something that reminds him of the tragedy,  She is a medical translator and, in the most heartrending scene, must maintain her poise to get through a task that no one should be asked to perform.  There’s an explosive sex scene, beautifully shot in red light, that’s all about the release of passion in an encounter that is itself passionless and meaningless.

And we see water.  Water that evokes tragic memory.  And water in a different form that brings joyful memory.  And, finally, water in a scene of closure.

The Memory of Water explores the same ground as Rabbit Hole, the excellent Nicole Kidman/Aaron Eckhardt film based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play. But The Memory of Water is better cinema.

The 35-year-old Bize (The Life of Fish) is a major filmmaking talent.  The Memory of Water is a Must See at this year’s Cinequest and screens on March 2, 10 and 12.

https://youtu.be/6ygJP2p5eqI

Cinequest: The Illiterate

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AnalfabetasThe Illiterate is a Chilean two-hander of a drama. A woman in her mid-50s can’t read. She navigates life by telling passersby that she has lost her glasses and needs them to read the signage to her. A woman in her 20s comes to read her the newspaper. Prompted by an unread letter from the older woman’s father, the younger woman decides to teach her to read. The older woman is proud and prickly, and they clash. Each has a meltdown as we move from first to second to third act. When she finally reads the looming letter from the father, it’s underwhelming.

The illiterate is played by the accomplished and appealing Chilean actress Paulina Garcia (Gloria), and The Illiterate is mostly an excuse for Garcia to act up a storm. Not much else here.  Too bad, because I love promoting Chilean cinema and really wanted to like this.

DVD/Stream of the Week: No

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In No, Gael Garcia Bernal stars as an ad man brainstorming the guerrilla advertising campaign that dethroned Chilean dictator Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite.  It turns out that the key was not to rehash the atrocities of the repressive Pinochet dictatorship, but to get his audience to picture the alternative democratic future.  The ad man’s biggest challenge is to pitch his soft sell campaign to Pinochet’s ideologically driven opponents.

No has a grainy look and was shot in the same aspect as is television (i.e., not widescreen).  This allows the transition between the filmed scenes and the inserted historical footage (including the original Yes and No campaign commercials) to be seamless.

I visited Chile in the last days of the Pinochet dictatorship, after the October 1988 plebiscite but before the new democratic government took office fifteen months later.  No ably captures both the scariness of the authoritarian regime and the culture of the period.  As always, Garcia Bernal is excellent.  No was nominated for the 2013 Foreign Language Oscar. No is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Vudu.

No: when the soft sell is the most subversive

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In No, Gael Garcia Bernal stars as an ad man brainstorming the guerrilla advertising campaign that dethroned Chilean dictator Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite.  It turns out that the key was not to rehash the atrocities of the repressive Pinochet dictatorship, but to get his audience to picture the alternative democratic future.  The ad man’s biggest challenge is to pitch his soft sell campaign to Pinochet’s ideologically driven opponents.

No has a grainy look and was shot in the same aspect as is television (i.e., not widescreen).  This allows the transition between the filmed scenes and the inserted historical footage (including the original Yes and No campaign commercials) to be seamless.

I visited Chile in the last days of the Pinochet dictatorship, after the October 1988 plebiscite but before the new democratic government took office fifteen months later.  No ably captures both the scariness of the authoritarian regime and the culture of the period.  As always, Garcia Bernal is excellent.  No was nominated for the 2013 Foreign Language Oscar.

Cinequest – Salt: the best spaghetti western this year

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I love spaghetti westerns and so does the protagonist of Salt (Sal), a would-be screenwriter who must have the only cat in Spain named Clint.  He has written a movie set in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, but nobody else thinks it’s any good.  When he decides to visit the Atacama to improve his script, he is mistaken by all the locals for someone else – the guy who had cuckolded the local crime boss.  That first night in Chile, he is plunged into a real life shoot em up and is soon experiencing a story that Sergio Leone himself would have loved to film.

Much of the fun is in the fact that our hero has never shot a gun or been shot at, and he doesn’t take easily to either – he’s no Clint, for sure.   Salt is filmed in the style of a modern-day spaghetti western and comes with its own spaghetti western score with jangly guitar and jarring harmonica.  If you love A Fistful of Dollars, this is the movie for you.  Even if you don’t love the spaghetti western, you’ll find this a satisfyingly funny movie.

I attended the North American premiere of Salt at Cinequest 22.