Movies in Madrid

We just spent the past week in Madrid, got back to Carboneras yesterday morning. Mostly what we did in Madrid was see movies. The Coen brothers' "True Grit" (here in Spain called "Valor de ley") was fun (very convincing acting by Bridges, Damon and the girl, Hailee Steinfeld). "Pa Negre" (Catalán for "black bread") won lots of prizes in Spain, has two excellent child actors, but the story disappointed me — the Spanish Civil War is just a pretext, the real violence centers on a dark personal secret. "Ispansi" (Russian for "Spaniards") is about the plight of a large group of Spanish children sent for their safety to the Soviet Union during the civil war and the adult Spaniards who are trying to take care of them, now all caught in the much bigger war when the Germans invade Russia. The encounters between Spaniards and Russians, their misunderstandings, and hardships of the convoy of children and adults trying to avoid German aircraft strafing and snipers and contending with cold and hunger — I was glad to be made aware of that episode.


The great thing about seeing foreign (non-Spanish-language) movies in Madrid is that we can see them in "versión original", that is, not dubbed into Spanish (almost impossible in smaller Spanish cities). Besides Pa negre (where we could listen to the actors in Catalán while we followed the meaning in the subtitles, we also watched a sublte, quiet, moving story in Turkish, Bal ("Miel" in Spanish, "Honey" in English), winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin and the third of a series of films about a character named Yusuf at various stages of his life; Bal shows him at about age 7, in a remote, wooded, mountainous area of northeastern Turkey where his father makes his precarious living by hanging bee hives and gathering honey from the rare black bees that live high in the tree tops. Sweet, sad, charming, with a wonderfully expressive child actor.

We also saw a curious, low-budget film in Catalán (with subtitles in Castellano) that interested me because I had read the collection of short stories it was based on: Mil cretins, by Quim Monzó. It was screened in the aptly named Pequeño Cine Estudio in Madrid (truly pequeño — at most 50 seats), where Susana and I were the only viewers on a Friday afternoon. It's a mix of pointed vignettes, clever and ironic skits and dumb jokes. But if you have read the book, you will surely enjoy seeing how some of your favorite stories are played out on the screen. My favorites include "Un corte" ("A Cut") and, best of all, "La alabanza" ("The Blurb"),  about what happens when an older, established writer drops a mildly favorable remark about a younger, aggressively ambitious new writer. One story not filmed, but that I strongly recommend you read (the collection should appear sooner or later in English) is "Miro por la ventana" ("I am looking out my window") — where the narrator's refusal to tell us what is bothering him ends up making it extremely obvious what is bothering him. Look for other works by Quim Monzó.

Code of vengeance

McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2005.

I saw the movie before I read the book, and it's a good thing: the violence and intensifying threat of more violence is even more stunning in the book than the film. The latter is very faithful to the book, but cuts some of the goriest details. In the movie the central villain (Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh) is more peculiar, like an alien (i.e., extraterrestrial) or robot programmed to kill, whereas a couple of dialogues in the book that don't make it into the film make it clear that he is a quite ordinary human who has reacted more extremely than most of us to traumas. Though not explicit, he is almost surely -- like two of his victims -- a Vietnam vet, which explains his (and their) comfort and familiarity with lethal weapons, and there is a strong hint in his farewell speech to Carson Wells (just before he shoots him) that he has a compulsion, a peculiar personal code, to kill anyone who offends his sense of dignity. I.e., the first murder we see/read of was the result of somebody's having insulted him in a bar.

See my summary & comment here.

Uprooted

This week on my birthday, April 3, El País reported that Spain "will need 157,000 immigrant workers a year until 2020". This week in Madrid we saw two foreign films highlighting radically different aspects of the disruptive effects of global migration. The first was Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite (2007) -- literally, "On the Other Side" (oddly translated "On the Edge of Heaven" in the English version), a moving, ambiguous story about suffering and reconciliation of Turks in Germany and Germans in Turkey. There are no really evil people here, just people who hurt (and even kill) others without intending to. Akin extracts marvelous performances from his cast.

Auf der anderen Seite -- that is, on the other side is the evil system exploiting the desperation and vulnerabilities of migrants, exposed in Ken Loach's powerful fictionalized exposé, It's a Free World. Angie, a high-energy single mother who unfairly loses her job at a labor-contracting agency, decides to start her own agency and discovers, first, by playing fairly she can't win competing with the guys who operate illegally, and, secondly, that there are big rewards and little risk for going illegal herself -- hiring workers without papers and then, when convenient, faling to pay them. This is a classic tragedy, in which a victim of the exploiters who starts out with a lot of sympathy for the Poles, South Americans, Iranians and other foreign job-seekers, becomes herself a heartless exploiter of immigrant labor.

Loach has done a tremendous job. But there are still other "other sides" to this story, and we'll keep trying to relate them. Maybe there are some things we can do, as ordinary citizens pressuring governments and companies, to ease the constant churning of families from poorer to more promising lands.

(For more on immigration in Spain, see the many articles from El País at La inmigración en España.)

Changing history

Kate Coe wrote me today to point out an error in my note on Ralph Lauren and Jay Gatsby (actually a note about a witty article by Cathy Horyn in the NYT). I had written, "It seems that Ralph, not a noted reader, saw the 1974 movie and liked the clothes." (You'll have to click the "Archive" link to the left to find it; it was way back on Jan. 12.) I wasn't paying close enough attention when I read the article. As Kate points out, and Cathy Horyn had made clear, Ralph designed the clothes for the male leads in the 1974 movie.

I thought I could go back and correct it, and it looked like I could. "Blogger" let me open the old note, edit it and republish. But when I looked in the archive, it was still the original text, with its glaring error. I'm glad. Otherwise, we could be going back and back, never admitting to any error. It would be tempting to go back and insert prophecies of things that had already happened.

Speaking of prophecies, Andreas Ramos predicts that the attack on Iraq will come on the night of February 1, regardless of anything the UN or Saddam might do. The reason: It will be the first available moonless night, closely following Bush's Jan. 27 speech, and the air force will prefer bombing on a moonless night. GWB won't want to wait for the next one, March 3, because the desert will be too warm and the issue might be too cold. (Andreas has been fooling around with his astronomy software. He's also been looking at the weather reports in Dante's Inferno, to see if conditions were really as he reported them on those dates. So far, he says, they check out.)