BIFF 2012 #11: Adalbert’s Dream (Visul Lui Adalbert, Romania 2011)

Iulica (Gabriel Spahiu) as the engineer in the coat on the factory floor with two of the machinists who he is persuading to do a little personal job for him.

For some obscure reason I seem to have missed all the major films of the Romanian New Wave, so I was pleased to get the opportunity to see this film. As far as I can make out, it isn’t typical and in fact seems to be a conscious attempt to create a contemporary version of the pre-1989 satires of East European communist states.

The plot (based around a real incident) follows a day in the life of a middle manager, a ‘comrade engineer’ in a Romanian factory. The date is precise and important: May 8th 1986, the day after Steaua Bucharest beat Barcelona in the European Cup. Our hero Iulica has videorecorded the match (in which the Steaua goalie made four saves in the penalty shootout) and hopes to show it for his boss at the factory and other colleagues after the ‘festivities’ for the 65th anniversary of the Romanian Communist Party. (The videorecorder itself being a rare and desirable object.) Iulica has a role in the festivities as well – as the producer of two films made in the factory, one a ‘health and safety’ documentary and the other an ‘artistic’ film, again about health and safety, which provides the overall title of Adalbert’s Dream. Things don’t go quite as planned.

I enjoyed the film which I thought came to life once we reached the factory and met Iulica’s boorish but entertaining boss. After a while, I realised that the tone of the film was familiar, combining elements from the Czech New Wave films of the 1960s such as Milos Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball (Czechoslovakia 1967) and also Dusan Makaveyev’s wonderful and surreal Switchboard Operator (Yugoslavia 1967). Gabriel Achim, director of Adalbert’s Dream, captures the absurdity of social relations in these particular communist societies. He does this both in the interactions of characters and in his decisions about formats. The film was shot on various video formats including S-VHS and Beta SP in Academy ratio to match the propaganda and health and safety films of the period.

I confess to a certain nostalgia in watching a film set in a factory with lathes, men with oily rags and overalls, smartly-dressed women from the office etc. By 1986 in the UK factories on this scale were disappearing – and with them aspects of working-class culture. Some of what was lost won’t be missed, including the sexism and the drudgery of some work patterns. But what the factories did provide was employment and a sense of community and belonging. The best factory systems also provided a social and cultural life for the workers and this is something that is important to recognise when watching Achim’s satire. All of those possible pluses are there but they aren’t allowed to be fulfilled because of the underlying problems associated with Romanian communism. Everything is focused on pleasing the political bosses, but because everyone’s individual desires (and beliefs) are very different – and because the system is ‘broken’ in terms of the quality of goods and services it produces – the sucking up to the party boss is doomed to failure. Achim brilliantly crystallises this analysis in his use of the Health and Safety Film, examples of which, with their bureaucratic pedantry, crop up throughout the film. I won’t spoil the film by listing all the ways in which the issue is presented – but Achim is able to end the film with a very striking sequence. I should say that several scenes are also very funny.

I’m not sure how the film will fare in the Bradford competition or how it will be read by younger audiences, but once I’d properly tuned in to the film I realised that it works very well.

A brief trailer:

Surviving Life – Theory and Practice (Czech Republic/Slovakia/Japan 2010)

Two of the supporting cast in 'Surviving Life'

What better way to escape the madness of consumer Christmas than watching a Jan Svankmajer film? This is the potential treat for lucky filmgoers in a handful of UK cities over the next few weeks. See this distributor website for a list of cinemas showing the film. I’m usually a fan of Verve Pictures but they don’t seem to have done a great deal to promote their acquisition, despite Svankmajer’s status amongst fans of animation and surrealism.

First shown at Venice in 2010, this is only the second feature-length film from the director since Little Otik in 2000. I can’t claim extensive knowledge of his work but I’ve seen some of his earlier short films and Sílení from 2005 (a live action horror/melodrama drawing on both Edgar Allen Poe and the Marquis de Sade) and therefore I had some idea of what to expect. The film begins with a prologue delivered to camera by the director himself in which he explains that his team were going to make a ‘real film’ but they had such a small budget that they decided to use only a studio set and photographic cut-outs of the actors which could then be animated. This is quite a witty opening but I was baffled as to why Svankmajer’s presentation was overlayed by an actor reading out an English translation (with the Czech original mixed down but still audible). I hate this practice and fortunately the film itself was subtitled.

The film overall is a mix of live action and stop-frame cut-out animation. The central character is Evzen, a middle-aged man, married for 25 years but without children and working in a boring office job. Evzen dreams – but not enough. He wants to have more dreams and to understand them. Inevitably he is sent to a psychoanalyst who attempts to explore his unconscious. These are some of the funniest scenes in the film with framed photographic portraits of Freud and Jung looking down from the psycho-analyst’s walls an reacting to what is happening. I won’t spoil the narrative by outlining what is in the dreams but if you know any Freudian or Jungian theories about dreams you’ll probably guess the kinds of characters, symbols and stories that emerge.

Václav Helsus is Evzen, the dreamer who spends much of his time in his pyjamas

The pleasures of the film for fans are likely to be in the exploration of the technique and the use of colour in particular (lots of vivid reds). It isn’t such a startling form of animation as that in the earlier stop motion shorts, though there are glimpses of the earlier style, especially in the eating scenes and the glee with which squidgy watermelons explode etc. For British fans there will be reminders of similar techniques used (by Terry Gilliam) in sketches in Monty Python and, more disturbingly, The Goodies (disturbing for the more cerebral perhaps because The Goodies was supposed to be ‘light entertainment’). This familiarity with the technique perhaps made the film less frightening and terrifying for me (compared to the earlier films). I’m happy to sit back and enjoy this kind of surrealism as comedy (Svankmayer calls it a ‘psycho-analytic comedy’) but I like to try to find some form of satitirical edge in the film. My knowledge of Czech culture is limited but this film fitted in with what I know – it felt ‘East European’ whatever that might mean. As well as the obvious discourse about sexuality and alienation for the middle-aged trapped in boring lives there are nostalgic references to food and music as well as metaphors about consumerism and the dangers of capitalist monetary policies – so something we can all relate to!

My Christmas message is to suggest that you choose Svankmayer over David Fincher or Tom Cruise. It’ll be more fun and better for you. Here’s the Czech trailer (no English subs but the techniques speak for themselves):

Mitsuko Delivers (Hara Ga Kore Nande, Japan 2011)

Japanese poster with Naka Riisa as Mitsuko and Nakamura Aoi as Yuichi

The Leeds Film Festival Programme tells us that writer-director Ishii Yuya is a ‘Leeds favourite’. I assume that this is a reference to the young man’s (he’s still only 27/28) previous film Sawako Decides that seems to have been very successful on the international festival circuit. In fact he has produced some eight features in six years since graduating from film school in Osaka. Mitsuko Delivers has so far been seen at Vancouver, Busan, London and Tokyo – picking up high praise from Tony Rayns and slightly bemused and fairly negative reactions from Variety and Hollywood Reporter.

I enjoyed the film very much and the fairly healthy audience at the Hyde Park seemed to be laughing along with it. I’m struggling to pin down a classification but it’s possibly a ‘comedy melodrama’? Mitsuko is coming to the end of her pregnancy. She seems unconcerned about the birth, even though her gynaecologist tells her that her pregnancy has never ‘stabilised’. In fact she isn’t phased by anything, including the fact that the father of her baby, an American GI, took her to California and then dumped her. (All she can remember about him is that he’s ” kinda big and black”. Now she is back in Tokyo, penniless and accepting eviction from her flat. Her philosophy is to find her cloud in the sky and follow it as the wind moves it. In this case it takes her back to a poor street in a forgotten area of Tokyo where she lived as a child for a period 15 years ago. A sepia-toned flashback then reveals how things were and who the significant people in her life were. The melodrama plot now brings them all back into play in the same street in the present so that Mitsuko can ‘solve’ their problems in the few days before the baby is due.

Tony Rayns suggests that the film could be “a lacerating satire of the pickled nostalgia and homey working-class stereotypes of Shochiku’s old Tora-san series, but Ishii gives it a brio and originality which transcend satire”. I haven’t seen any of the mammoth series of Tor-san films, but I did recognise all the types from comedies and social dramas over many years of Japanese Cinema, coming right up to date with the unemployed salary-man who can’t tell his wife that he’s lost his job (e.g. in Tokyo Sonata). The film works for me because of the confident handling of both the younger and older actors whose different performance styles are blended her and then further stylised. The exaggerating playing then gets a couple of boosts in the film’s climax with some absurdist touches. I’m not sure what Rayns means by his “transcends satire” comment. I think that the narrative does make you think about a nostalgia for the kind of humanist dramas we used to see and how much better the world would be with a bit more sense of looking after each other. As the agent for all of this, Mitsuko is an interesting character – both annoying and endearing at the same time. As her childhood sweetheart Yoichi says following her re-appearance in his life and her attempts to revive his moribund local restaurant, “We have lots more customers now – but the profits haven’t gone up”. Mitsuko cajoles customers in and then offers them food “on the house”.

He makes you think and he makes you laugh – as long as you approach his film in the right frame of mind. Ishii Yuya looks like a real talent to watch.

Films From the South #15: Virgin Goat (Ladli Laila, India 2009)

Kalyan Singh (Raghubir Yadav) and his goat Laila

There were several new Indian films in the festival, but most were on at times that were inconvenient for me. Virgin Goat turned out to be quite distinctive. Essentially a form of ‘parallel film’ it isn’t what one might expect from that label, nor from its other institutional classification as a ‘festival film’ (with funding from a host of the usual suspects from Europe and North America). Instead it qualifies as an outrageous satire on Indian society, ranging across politics and identity.

The title refers to a slight but very attractive black goat called Laila who, according to her owner Kalyan Singh, is the last in line of a flock which has been owned by his family for 500 years. Unfortunately she has yet to conceive and Kalyan is prepared to try anything to make it happen. Convinced that the local vet has finally got Laila into heat he sets off with her to find the local stud billy-goat. We learn that his desperation arises from what he feels is persecution by the state and his own family. The government have seized his lands and forced him to sell his live stock. His son is a layabout, his wife chastises him and all his wealth has gone on his daughter’s dowry. His daughter returning home from the failed marriage seems like the last straw. When Kalyan attempts to walk the several miles with Laila to find the billy-goat he finds his way blocked by the arrival in the area of a political leader. At this stage the director Murali Nair starts to ramp up the surrealism of Kalyan’s experience. Laila is taken from him and she becomes the model for the symbol of a new political party with disturbing fascist connotations – a black goat on a white circle against a red background (reminiscent of Nazi symbols, but I’m not sure if this has other specific meanings in an Indian context). Can Kalyan rescue her and still mate her before her fertile period ends?

The political rally with Laila now a political symbol.

I did enjoy the film and parts are very funny. Unfortunately it was projected from DigiBeta tape and the visual quality was poor. This was a shame because it undermined to some extent the investment I had in the opening sequences (which suggested a conventional ‘social film’) and the subsequent twist towards surrealism. The film is heavily dependent on the performance by Raghubir Yadav who is a well-known and highly respected actor in both parallel and mainstream popular cinema. Because he is a believable figure who we can identify with, the surrealist sequences become more powerful in sharpening the satire. I was reminded of some recent Indian novels and also some aspects of African Cinema such as Sembène Ousmane’s Xala (1974) with its similar satire on politicians.

Murali Nair (born 1965) is originally from Kerala and he had an early success with his Malayalam art/parallel films, winning the Caméra d’or at Cannes for his first feature, Marana Simhasanam (Throne of Death, 1999). At that point he had formed his own production company Flying Elephant Films with his wife Preeya and was supporting the company through his work in UK television. Virgin Goat was made in and around Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh, which is his current production base. He has had several Cannes screenings and developed a profile on the festival circuit, but some of his films have found it difficult to get releases in India. Virgin Goat has a Hindi language soundtrack which should make it an easier sell in India.

The Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren Norway 2010)

Otto Jespersen as the hunter with Johanna Mørck & Glenn Erland Tosterud as two of the three students. Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing.

We’re off to Norway this week for a few days, so what could be better preparation than a Norwegian film currently generating much goodwill internationally? The Troll Hunter is a ‘creature feature’ that doubles as a satire about aspects of Norwegian culture on several levels – and it is hugely entertaining.

This film has been described as a ‘mockumentary’ but that doesn’t feel right to me. I don’t like the ‘mock’ suggestion. The Troll Hunter is presented as a ‘serious’ story (although there is plenty of humour as well) which uses the ‘found footage’ premise underpinning films like The Blair Witch Project. I didn’t really fancy this idea at first but I soon forgot about the premise as writer-director André Øvredal focuses on the story and doesn’t feel the need to remind us of the fact that it is supposed to be a student film project every minute. The shoot used Panasonic’s AJ-HPX3700 Varicam in order to get the best coverage of night-time events (which take up much of the narrative) and to replicate the look of the kind of digital camera that film students might use on a project like this. According to the Press Notes the dialogue and actions in each scene were improvised to retain the documentary feel (although the script gave detailed outlines of what would happen). The handheld work is pretty smoothly done so after a while you tend to forget about the conceit and focus on the story.

The story begins with a trio of student filmmakers, Thomas, Joanna and Kalle, who decide to investigate a mysterious local man who is suspected as a poacher of bears. Doggedly they pursue the man and one night they follow him into a forest in the hills where they witness his real work – hunting trolls. After initially telling the students to get lost, the troll hunter eventually invites them to join him on the hunt on condition that they do exactly what he tells them without any argument. You can imagine what that leads to.

The great thing about The Troll Hunter is that it is a genuinely interesting story that explores the possibility that trolls actually exist and that the Scandinavian authorities attempt to keep the troll’s presence in the mountains and forests secret. This policy then requires a hunter to ‘manage’ the troll population and several other government personnel to ‘cover up’ whenever troll behaviour threatens to become generally known. In this scenario it isn’t surprising that the troll hunter becomes disillusioned about the way he is treated and that some of the ‘cover-ups’ are poorly executed. In a neat touch we see the troll hunter filling in a ‘Slayed Troll’ Report Form over his breakfast.

The script is very good in explaining how trolls live, what they eat and what happens when they die. Trolls are deeply embedded in Norwegian folk culture and Øvredal offers four very different creatures from the gregarious ‘Mountain Kings’ living in caves to the 200 foot tall ‘Jotnar’ roaming the most remote mountains. All four types are humanoid in appearance, moving as bi-peds, but with various ‘distorted’ features – and they don’t like Christians. This religious intolerance is well worked into the narrative. The giant troll is the most spectacular, reviving memories of Japanese monster movies and American exploitation films like Attack of the 50 foot Woman. To my untutored eye the trolls look pretty good in terms of effects. However, it’s the human characters who drive the narrative and Otto Jesperson as the hunter is terrific. He’s a famous comedian in Norway and he plays his role to perfection. There is also a nice little cameo from Robert Stoltenberg as a bogus Polish trader who supplies the Norwegian authorities with a bear carcase for their cover-up. I wonder what Poles think about the ways in which their national stereotype turns up in other European stories?

The Troll Hunter was very popular in Norway last year and is currently on release in several territories. An IMdb user from Norway worries that it is ‘too Norwegian’ but that seems to me to be one of its most important features and it joins the small but growing list of domestic popular genre films that could be described as ‘global’ in appeal. The dreaded US remake is already on the cards, so make sure that you see this version first.

The official Norwegian trailer (with English subs):

Marcides (Mercedes, Egypt/France 1993)

Gamel (centre) with his partner (left) in the gay community at the cinema in Marcides

To Liverpool for the ‘Arabic Film Festival’ at FACT (part of the Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival). The ‘Arab Spring’ has increased interest in all aspects of Arab culture and this is a welcome event. I’m sure it is very difficult to get prints of Egyptian films into the UK, so I wasn’t too surprised that this particular film turned out to be on DVD. The quality was pretty ropey but quite watchable – better anyway than the experience of lolling about on squidgy sofas to watch a cinema screen which somebody thought was a good idea for patrons of ‘The Box’, the FACT space dedicated to more arty fare.

Marcides isn’t arty as such but it is a challenge for UK audiences. I think it is best described as a political and social satire presented in the format of popular melodrama. Written and directed by Yousry Nasrallah and starring one of Egypt’s major female icons, Yousra, the film was programmed because of the director’s links to the major Egyptian director, Youssef Chahine. Nasrallah (b. 1952) assisted Chahine and then had his own films produced by Chahine’s company, Misr Films. Nasrallah was first a journalist in Lebanon and then assisted Volker Schlöndorff in 1980. (See this Cannes posting)

Plot outline

Warda (Yousra) is first seen in flashback to 1956 at a VIP function interrupted by the British/French/Israeli attack on the Suez Canal. She is being put forward for marriage by her wealthy mother who doesn’t know that she is already pregnant after a liaison with an African diplomat. Quickly, we learn that she married a much older man who conveniently died soon after. Her first child, to her relief, is not visibly ‘African’ but she calls him Noubi (i.e. after ‘Nubian’). She later has another child she names Gamel (after Nasser) and who is passed off as her uncle’s boy. In 1990 these past events set up the melodrama when Noubi returns home after being incarcerated by his mother (under pressure) in an asylum – because he wanted to give money to the Communist Party! When his uncle marries and then collapses at the wedding, he tells Noubi that the family fortune is bequeathed to him and Gamel, who Noubi thinks is his cousin. All Noubi has to do is find Gamel and avoid the clutches of his new aunt Raifa (a lesbian with a drug problem).

Yousra as Afifa dances with Noubi (Zaki Abdel Wahab) on the streets

From this point on the melodrama develops at a frenetic pace. It involves all of the following – drugs, politics, corruption, people smuggling, Cairo’s underground gay community (in ‘slum cinemas’), street battles between the police and the Muslim Brotherhood, the fall of communist leaders in Eastern Europe and the 1990 World Cup in which Egypt played both Algeria and England. Yousra also appears as a second character, Afifa, a supposedly much younger woman making a living as a belly dancer who falls for Noubi and who in one scene performs for a night club audience. The star is thus fully utilised in twin roles separated by 34 years, looking little different. In fact Noubi is able to pass her off as his mother at one point. Noubi is played by an older actor with dyed blonde hair but none of this really matters. Scenes are underlined by musical cues and for melodrama fans this is a real treat. I enjoyed the film immensely even if there were aspects of the plot that puzzled me or that just whizzed by too quickly. (The title refers to the status symbol of ‘successful’ Egyptian life.)

Commentary

I was intrigued to discover more about Yousra who is famous in Egypt for her TV drama appearances, including in that Egyptian institution the ‘Ramadan Soap’ or musalsalat. These serials, rather like Latin American telenovelas, include historical dramas and thrillers as well as romances. Up to 50 a year are produced in Egypt currently and they obvious draw away potential cinema audiences during Ramadan. Marcides was presumably a model for the way in which some of these shows have developed.  A great beauty and a popular music star, Yousra (b. 1955) has been seen as a modern star who accepted playing the mother role in narratives at a time when she could still be a romantic lead. Her celebrity status is such that she has become a much quoted figure in the Egyptian media.

Marcides was produced during one of the low points for Egyptian Cinema when popular films were often seen as too formulaic. In this film, Nasrallah is possibly satirising the formula by offering title cards to head each ‘chapter’ of the film. Usually these introduce a new character perspective but the last one announced ‘The happy ending’ – which turns out to be just a little ironic. I’m not sure how effective Nasrallah’s satire is but it is interesting that the story links the oppression of gays, the Muslim Brotherhood and football supporters in seemingly a general critique of those in power. The overall narrative offers the ‘downward descent’ of a rich young man from a Christian élite who finds that the life ‘underground’ is more acceptable. There are quite a few laughs in the film but these are undercut by some of the more disturbing images – such as coffins returning from Iraq with the bodies of Egyptian contract labourers.

Marcides received a couple of American reviews which clearly have problems trying to understand the film. It perhaps acts as a good example of films that don’t travel easily – in this case beyond the Arab world. It’s available on DVD from Arab Film Distributors, but only for institutional screenings at $200 per show.

Here’s a 2008 interview with Yousra on Al Jazeera (in English):

Tamara Drewe (UK 2010)

The two teenage girls, the 'chorus', wait outside Tamara Drewe's house to see what's going on.

I’m not sure what I can say about Tamara Drewe except that I enjoyed every moment. But that’s hardly surprising since I’m a fan of director Stephen Frears and the source material, Posy Simmonds’ comic strip/graphic novel from 2005-7, is one of my fondest memories. The strip ran in the Guardian‘s Saturday Review section in 110 instalments (click on the image below – the whole thing is available online) and I didn’t miss a week. The problem is, of course, that the film is being heavily promoted and released through mainstream multiplexes to audiences who have no knowledge of the strip. The result is a very mixed reception. Audiences under 40 have seemingly ignored the film and IMDB carries several outraged reviews. Interestingly, the film has done pretty well in France and I suspect that it might do well in some other territories where audiences might take it at face value as a bucolic comedy (though the ending – even though softened from the original – might be a shock).

Episode 5 of Tamara Drewe as it appeared in the Guardian

Perhaps the most useful thing I can do is to set it in context and try to explain to readers outside the UK its peculiar allure. Posy Simmonds has had a long career, much of it in the Guardian where she has maintained a gentle satire on the English middle-classes, holding a mirror up to the Guardian readership’s sense of itself as well as taking down the more conservative readers of the UK’s other broadsheets (and tabloids like the Daily Mail). During the 1980s Simmonds’ vehicle for this was a strip about a London family with generally leftist/vaguely hippy politics known as the Webbers (possibly a joke about the sociologist Max Weber). Throughout the period of Thatcher’s Britain the travails of the Webber clan offered a complement to the more vicious satire of the UK’s greatest political cartoonist, Steve Bell. Between them, Posey and Steve kept many of us sane throughout those dark years. In 1999 Posy Simmonds produced Gemma Bovery which also ran in the Guardian. That novel, set in Normandy states its source inspiration in its title. Tamara Drewe as a title is less revealing but the film adaptation lays on enough clues to reveal that we are in the world of Thomas Hardy and his novel Far From the Madding Crowd – adapted as a John Schlesinger film in 1967 with Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene, the Tamara Drewe character. If you don’t know the story, it concerns a young and very attractive woman who comes into property in a Wessex (Dorset) village and finds herself pursued by three men – a solid local farmer, a flash young blade (in the novel, a hussar, in the film a rock drummer) and an older married man. Valentine letters (emails) to the men create rather unfortunate circumstances. Simmonds’ innovation is to provide a ‘writers’ retreat’ in the village so that Hardy fan-writers, amongst others, can join the fun.

The screenwriter Moira Buffini has captured much of what was in Simmonds’ satire, but either she or the producers have chickened out with the ending and overall I would have liked the darker and more ‘Hardyesque’ ending of the original. Some of the other, nuanced changes work much better. The ‘Greek chorus’ of the two teenagers who watch all the goings-on and interfere in the narrative are slightly younger than I had imagined from the strip, but work very well and are the best bit of the satire. I don’t remember the American academic from the strip, so perhaps he is an invention. If so, it’s a great idea. He is the balance for the two girls in the ‘chorus’ offering postmodernist comments about Hardy which I enjoyed. The trump trick for all those of us who are fans of the UK radio sitcom The Archers (now in its 60th year and possibly the longest-running sitcom of all) is the casting of Tamsin Greig in the movie as the long-suffering wife of the philandering novelist. She’s there because she is one of UK stage and TV screen’s greatest comedians, but for Archers fans she is always Debbie Aldridge and part of the upper middle-class of the farming community where she is a counterbalance to her evil father, Brian Aldridge, once über-villain and now mellowing paterfamilias. In fact it’s a joy to see so much great acting talent in Tamara Drewe, including the wonderful Susan Wooldridge (Daphne Manners in The Jewel in the Crown) for once allowed into a feature film as a gun-toting cattle farmer.

Poor Stephen Frears, like Michael Winterbottom, seems to suffer from being too eclectic in his tastes and too willing to lose himself in his projects. For me, he has made some of the best British films of the last 40 years and although he doesn’t give a good interview and promote himself as an auteur, he deserves recognition. Tamara Drewe isn’t the UK film of the year, but it’s certainly worth watching and thinking about.

Here’s the best trailer – no annoying American voiceover and some nice graphics touches:

La Muerte de un Burócrata (Death of a Bureaucrat, Cuba 1966)

Dirty work for nephews?

Made in 1966, it took this film until 1980 to be released in America (see below) – as with this post, see the other Cuban films below! Made by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who much later went on to make Fresa y chocolate (1994), the first Cuban film to receive an Oscar nomination for the best foreign film, the film is a fantastic blend of all kinds of influences that reflect Alea’s own career up to that point and post-revolutionary Cuba. As interesting, especially when you read other reviews, is the varied responses to the film that seem to say as much about the culture that people are writing from, as any intended effect or message devised by the filmmaker himself. Alea, himself a supporter of the revolution that brought Castro to power, did not look at his culture from within. Early in his career, he studied film in Italy (in the early 1950s – post the major works of Italian Neo-Realism).

La Muerte concerns the death of a dedicated working man, so dedicated that he has been buried with his working card as a symbolic acknowledgement of his lifetime of service (churning out busts of José Martí, ‘the Apostle of Cuban Independence’). When his wife, accompanied by her nephew, goes to collect her widow’s pension, nothing can be done without the missing card, and the rest of the film is the tale of our hapless hero’s attempts to retrieve it and to rectify the injustice that has been done.

Given the specificity of the film’s time and cultural place, the expectation is that you would need to explore all the references to even begin to fully understand it. Certainly, it’s filled with in-jokes about the regime in Cuba, which is apparently why its release in the US was so substantially delayed (for fear that its Latin-American self criticism would be grist to the US political mill). In fact, it works brilliantly now – perhaps for any of us who have experienced petty bureaucratic frustrations and the apparently wilful misinterpretation made by people with that authority (temporarily) over you. Hang on – something like a universal experience there then!

I won’t pretend to even begin to have understood all the references, but I was struck (as an outsider) by the nephew’s regular use of of the word “Compañero/ Compañera” when addressing (politely) the increasing stream of uncooperative, disinterested bureaucrats he encounters. It implied a shared vision and belief and therefore added to the humour through its increasing dissonance with their behaviour. The whole film begins with the collective version of the noun to address the mourners at the funeral. Reading a variety of reviews, there is a difference in the interpretation of the tone – from interpreting it as being a gentler kind of humour to a subversive critique of the Cuban social structure. The film certainly resonates with British examples, probably more in the former category, which lampoon British rituals and empathising with the common man (of which the nephew is a perfect example). Immediately, I found myself reminded of Joe Orton and Loot – with its ascerbic, farcical treatment of a funeral that’s being used as a cover for a robbery. The black comedy is less severe in Death, although at times no less dark – with the vultures circling over the uncle’s house where the unburied body awaits an exhumation order. Both indulge in that ‘comedy of manners’ where characters are increasingly going through the motions of the behaviour expected of them, while everything unravels underneath. (There is no surprise at the nephew’s final murderous chase through the cemetery).

Rather than ‘Ortonesque’, critics refer to it as ‘Kafkaesque’ – because of its links with the spiral of hopelessness of Joseph K in The Trial within the ‘corridors of power.’ However, this belies the effect of the humour (in both Loot and Death) that casts something like tolerance over the society it represents. It is humour shared by insiders, who have experienced those rituals and problems and continue to do so, without the threat to individual identity and the real hatred of the power of oppression that Kafka shows in his narrative.

Alea had adapted a Kafka short tale early in his filmmaking (Una Confusión cotidiana (1950)). His biography demonstrates the wealth of influences in his work and these are visible even within this one work. Luis Buñuel is referenced and there is a surreal, absurdist sensibility running throughout. However, there is the silent comedy style (Mack Sennett is referred to) – and there is a direct hit on Harold Lloyd as the nephew attempts to escape a building via its high ledge and a large clock. The comedy is played with such sympathy (my limited reference palette wants to suggest ‘Chaplin’) – because of the way we are completely on the side of the little man, whilst laughing at some of his disasters. There is a wonderful moment when he is sent to the back of the queue, only to reach the front as the clock ticks onto five. The current ‘compañero’ dons jacket and disappears, refusing to stamp even one more sheet. I laughed at and with – Salvador Wood’s unassuming underdog was perfect, with all kinds of small nuances of expression and gesture that communicated exactly his response or emotion.

I’ll end with a reference to B. Ruby Rich’s review of the film in Jump Cut (22 May 1980) for a most comprehensive analysis of the film and its cultural context.