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WEAPON LOADED WITH FUTURE: Achero Manas’ November
Exactly four
decades after its first public showings – at the Toronto and San Sebastian
film festivals of 2003 – this seems an appropriate juncture to revisit
Achero Manas’s November: the movie’s ‘future’ has finally become
our ‘now’. Many viewers were initially disoriented by temporal ‘dislocation’
deployed in Manas’faux-documentary tale of a radical street-theatre troupe
from 1997 to 2001. Scenes showing the student-age members gravitating
around the charismatic, chamaeleonic Alfredo (terrific Oscar Jaenada)
alternate with stark (and, crucially, utterly convincing) talking-head
‘testimonies’ from the principals, now visibly in their early sixties.
Though the
Reds-style testimonies are clearly set at some (unspecified)
date around, say, 2043, the coy Manas is careful to avoid any science-fiction
trappings. The speakers’ costumes and hair are studiedly neutral, and
we learn next to nothing about the ‘future’, though someone does wistfully
remark how “unthinkable” the troupe’s refusal of payment seemed “back
then, when nothing was for free.” This technique – to have the action
of the present commented upon from the (unemphasised) perspective of a
middle-distance future – seemed in 2003 primarily like a bold experiment
with cinematic narrative, and provided the first hint at the extent of
Manas’s audacious imagination.
His debut –
battered-child drama El Bola
(2000) - had of course won him the Goya (Spain’s Oscar equivalent)
for Best Picture and the Discovery Prize at the European Film Awards.
But while suitably harrowing and unsentimental, it was a familiar and
relatively conventional slice-of-life: the sort of worthy subject-matter
which never seems to go out of favour with either funding bodies or awards
juries.
November,
however, was a quantum leap forward: I myself still vividly recall standing
in the old town of San Sebastian back in ‘03, seriously wondering whether
I felt like enduring what looked like the woefully predictable ‘rise and
fall of a radical street-theatre company.’ Thoughts of a walk-out were
dispelled as soon as I saw Alfredo, auditioning for drama school, perform
his marionette show with a puppet strikingly similar to those deployed
in Spike Jonze’s Being John
Malkovich (1999). Though for the most part far from comic, Manas’s
film soon stakes out a territory of deadpan absurdity not that far removed
from Jonze’s off-kilter world.
As November
(so-named because that month’s revolution “came after” the more famous
October event) stage their happenings – beginning with the usual harlequin-punks
causing merry hell in public – it’s impossible to tell whether Manas is
celebrating their antics or quite royally taking the piss, Spinal Tap
style, or both: “Revolutions waiting to happen, dreaming of changing
the world,” someone sings, semi-mockingly, at one point.
This (relentlessly
intriguing and entertaining) film works just as well either way, and the
‘message’ is thus a subjective issue depending on what each individual
viewer brings to the party. Or rather, the fiesta: so strongly
do the colourful, energetic troupe’s more elaborate costumed ‘pieces’
recall the licensed bacchanals of the traditional Spanish feast-day parades,
while cocking a somewhat Bunuelian snook at the country’s more conservative
forces of order and tradition.
This anti-authoritarianism
is to some extent played for laughs – Oscar’s tickings-off from a long-suffering
but sympathetic cop (El Bola’s ‘cool dad’ Alberto Gimenez) are
unambiguously funny, and there’s an excellent gag during a Christ-on-the-cross
piece in which Oscar indulges his messianic side. But there’s no mistaking
the genuine anger that motivates this ferocious anti-capitalist – among
the troupe’s more effective pieces of “Documentary Theatre” is ‘The Forgotten’
(‘Los Olvidados’, a clear Bunuel nod) in which the noviembristas
pose as the dispossessed to torment (obviously genuine) passers-by.
November 1999’s
“Shooting”, which takes the form of an all-too-convincing firearms incident
in the street, is a major turning-point: intended to “help people understand
modern issues, like terrorism”, it gets the troupe arrested and charged:
“We were accused not only of simulating a crime, but of justifying terrorism.”
The group’s unity shattered by the inevitable internecine rivalries and
jealousies – not to mention ‘artistic differences’ – Alfredo stages his
ultimate performance/stunt at the Royal Theatre, in the presence of major
dignitaries, in September 2001…
That isn’t
an accidental choice of date, of course – November’s drum-tight
script is calibrated to the tiniest detail. The jarring climax, in which
the film suddenly goes beyond seriousness to the point of shattering tragedy,
raises fascinating questions about the very existence of Oscar’s dealistic,
radical, transgressive, prankish art in the post-9/11 world: “Art is a
weapon loaded with future,” reads a title-card, after a survivor has commented
“We wanted to change the world. We failed miserably. Now I just try not
to let the world change me.” So, was The Fool really dead? Was it really
no longer possible to ‘change the world’. Forty years on, the answers
seem plain. But, as November continues to remind us, things can
look very different with the benefit of four decades’ hindsight.
7th
November, 2043
(written via precog, 7th November 2003)
For the original
review of November click here.
by Neil
Young
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