11 · 03 · 11

At the Movies

But the city cleaned up its streets, activated the tourist trade, and
thanks to much skilled restoration now looks even more colonial than it
used to. The effect is of a visit to an elegant and bustling 18th
century, updated by cars and discos and cellphones. And for one week of
the year at least, the time of its annual international film festival,
now in its ninth season, Morelia has glamour in addition to its old
charm: red carpets, parties, international directors and stars,
journalists everywhere, lots of happy gawking crowds. A waitress asks me
discreetly when Diego Luna is arriving. I can’t tell her, because I
don’t know; and I don’t tell the waitress I don’t know who Diego Luna
is.

The festival has various premieres, retrospectives of the work of
several directors, thematic cycles (the presence of Mexico in film noir,
for example), showcases for the films of special guests (in this case
Volker Schlöndorff and Béla Tarr), and competitions for best Mexican
documentary, feature film and short. Along with Mark Cousins and
François Dupeyron, I am a member of the jury for the best feature. Of
course the chance to watch films you are not judging is one of the
attractions of such a festival, and I thought of devoting this space to
Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947),
an inspired film noir I hadn’t seen before, where the ruthless,
calculating woman, in the shape of Jane Greer, may also really care for
the man she is framing and using, a very young Robert Mitchum. This
complexity is not going to do her any good, because both the plot and
Mitchum believe in the simpler story of her murderous guile. But we are
left wondering if there isn’t some sort of baffled innocence lurking in
her evildoings.

The festival programme also allows for riffs and sequences you couldn’t
have foreseen. I came to wonder, for instance, why new Mexican movies
linger so obsessively over lost or distressed figures whom ordinary,
undamaged people can’t help, and indeed for whom normality itself has
become a brutal, unforgiving enemy. There may be a link here to the use
of black comedy to cope with unmanageable realities, and an accidental
sequence of viewings brought this strongly to mind. One day I saw Luis
García Berlanga’s The Executioner
(1963), in which a young man becomes a public executioner in Spain:
accommodation is scarce, and this way he is entitled to a flat. His hope
is that no one will be sentenced to death for a long time, and his plan
is to resign as soon as it does happen, before he is required to act.
He isn’t opposed to capital punishment, just horrified by the thought of
the job and its unpopular social aura. The truly memorable moments of
unlaughable comedy come when he finally has to take a man’s life. The
condemned criminal is sick, and is half-led, half-carried towards his
death by a group of warders. Behind him the reluctant, still struggling
executioner is dragged along by another group. In one shot these two
clusters of figures in black, seen from behind in long shot, cross an
empty courtyard within the prison, and vanish. This is as close as we
get to the actual execution, but we feel we have seen some sort of
parable about conformity and coercion, and how death’s servants will
always get the job done.

The Mexican movie I saw the day after, Kenya Márquez’s Expiration Date (Fecha
de Caducidad; ‘Best Before Date’, or ‘Best Before’, would be a catchier
and crueller translation) picks up this note, but is even darker. The
audience was laughing out loud, but I felt its (irresistible) humour
called for a more troubled reaction. It stars the well-known Mexican
actor Damián Alcázar as an odd-job man who is delighted to find a
beat-up old Datsun abandoned on the wasteland where he lives. He is less
delighted to find a severed head beside the car, and much of the movie
has to do with his trying to dispose of it. There are two other stories –
that of a girl who has killed her abusive boyfriend and run away, and
that of a mother whose graceless grown-up son has disappeared – and the
narrative takes up the three different points of view in turn. One of
the beauties of the film is that each of the characters is forced to
invent a story for what is happening to them, and each set of lies fools
someone else irremediably. The film’s combination of perfectly false
stories and impeccably pitched grim jokes says a whole lot, it seems to
me, about how one talks about the unspeakable.

The Iliad of Homer - University of Chicago Press

There’s no connection through comedy to Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011),
which is probably the most impressive film I’ve seen at the festival,
although Tarr himself was very funny about it in the Q&A session
after its first showing. Asked if the division of the narrative into six
days had any significance, he said the inhabitants of a Catholic
country – as I write the remains of John Paul II are doing the local
rounds, Pátzcuaro this afternoon, Morelia this evening – should know the
answer to the question, and then added a gloss to the effect that God
took six days to make the mess we live in, and then had the gall to give
himself a day off. The movie, by implication, takes six days to let the
mess unwind to its final point, and there is no seventh day.