for this week’s ‘Tribune’ (2/2) San Sebastian / Donostia Film Festival report

Published on: October 7th, 2011

“Most of the feckless, listless quality of today’s art,” wrote Manny Farber in 1962, “can be blamed on its drive to break out of tradition while, irrationally, hewing to the square, boxed-in shape and gemlike inertia of an old, densely wrought European masterpiece.”
Farber’s essay – a landmark in film-criticism whose influence seems to grow with each passing year, was entitled White Elephant Art vs Termite Art, its title being explicated thus: “Movies have always been suspiciously addicted to termite-art tendencies. Good work usually arises where the creators … seem to have no ambitions toward gilt culture but are involved in the kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus art is that it always goes forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.”

The writer, who died in 2008 aged 91, was an eminent painter as well as being one of the 20th century’s most influential writers on film. And he might well have gotten a kick out of The Double Steps (Los pasos dobles) [5/10] by the 36-year-old Catalan writer-director Isaki Lacuesta, which last month was named the surprise winner of the top prize – the Concha d’Oro or Golden Shell – at the 59th San Sebastián Film Festival, Spain’s biggest and most prestigious cinema-related event, held in the bijou north-coast resort known in the local Basque language as Donostia.

Lacuesta’s fable-like, dreamy exploration of artistic inspiration and creation draws upon the oeuvres of two white European artists who sought stimulation in north Africa: writer and occasional painter François Augiéras (1925-71), and one of Spain’s most highly-regarded living pintores, Miquel Barceló (b.1957) – who has represented his country at the Venice Biennale and has also enjoyed the extremely rare distinction of seeing his own works on display at the Louvre in Paris. Barceló has often left his canvases in places where he knows termites will have a good nibble at them, using the resulting organic shapes and forms to add extra layers and complexities to his finished pieces.

Lacuesta draws upon Augiéras’s books, where his alter ego is called Abdallah Chambaa – an angry young man who embarks on a series of wild sexual escapades and perilous adventures. In the film Chambaa is played by the commanding black non-professional Bokar Dembele (a.k.a. ‘Bouba’), and segues from a desert military camp to life as a buccaneering bandit, to a mystical folk-hero existence before buckling down to the business of artistic creation. These fanciful, enigmatic episodes are punctuated with documentary-style sequences in which Barceló blitzes though a series of dazzling watercolours that become Rorschach-style blots when blurred within the pages of his sketchbook – or become a tasty repast for his insectoid ‘collaborators’.

What it all adds up to is anyone’s guess, and Lacuesta – whose previous works have blurred fiction and documentary with highly uneven results – is perhaps guilty of mistaking gnomic obfuscation for profundity. Nevertheless, the main-competition jury headed by Oscar winner Frances McDormand selected this, his fifth feature-length work, as the pick of the Competition section – ahead of generally better-received contenders such as Liverpudlian auteur Terence Davies’ Terence Rattigan adaptation The Deep Blue Sea (whose star Rachel Weisz is already being tipped for Academy recognition), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s child-centric I Wish from Japan and – marginally the critics’ choice – the 139-minute Portuguese contender Blood of My Blood by João Canijo. Lacuesta thus became the first Spanish recipient of the Golden Shell since Fernando León de Aranoa’s Mondays in the Sun from 2002, though that’s about the only thing the two pictures have in common – Mondays being a wryly gritty study of football fans in the working-class north-west city of Vigo.

The biggest discovery of San Sebastián was another Spanish production, though for reasons best known to the festival organisers Ignacio Ferreras’s Wrinkles (Arrugas) [8/10] wasn’t deemed worthy of a main-competition slot. This is perhaps partly due to its being Ferreras’ debut, and partly to its status as an animated feature. It’s still unusual for ‘cartoons’ to compete with live-action movies at major film festivals, though thankfully this outdated convention is gradually changing thanks to the realisation – in this age of regular marvels from studios Pixar and Ghibli – that animations are at least as worthy of attention and respect as any other type of film-making.

Adapted from Paco Roca’s graphic novel – regarded as a significant achievement of its type both within Spain and further afield – it’s the accessible but rigorously unsentimental story of Emilio (voiced by Tacho Gonzalez), an elderly chap whose befuddlement due to Alzheimer’s disease results in his being placed in a residential care-home. Here he’s shown the ropes by the mentally-sharp Argentinian veteran Miguel (Alvaro Guevara), whose genial façade hides a ruthless solipsism.

Illuminating, amusing, sensitive and touching, Wrinkles tackles a topical and serious subject – the care of the elderly – that faces many nations in the developed world head-on, its animated format allowing us to experience the characters’ fantasies and hallucinations at first hand. A significant word-of-mouth success at San Sebastián among audiences and critics (domestic and foreign) alike, Wrinkles deserves at least as much international exposure as Sylvain Chomet’s Oscar-nominated The Illusionist, upon which Ferreras worked as a character-animator.

The other notable ‘find’ at the venerable festival hailed from South America as part of the ‘Latin Horizons’ (Horizontes Latinos) section showcasing the latest in Spanish-language cinema from around the world. Pick of the bunch this time was Sebastian Cordero’s Pescador [7/10] (i.e. ‘Fisherman’), the vibrantly atmospheric story of a sad-sack thirtysomething from the Ecuadorian coast who seizes a rare chance to make money when stashes of cocaine are washed up on his village’s beaches.

A Colombian-Ecuadorian co-production, Pescador has a snazzy liveliness which distinguishes it from – and indeed elevates it above – the standard run of depressive, slow-paced south America art-movies, and barrels us around an eclectic range of locales as our hapless hero finds himself enmeshed in a big-city drug-deal. Easy on the eye and stimulating on the ear thanks to its upbeat, jazzy soundtrack, Pescador certainly isn’t the kind of challengingly ‘worthy’ fare that wins awards on the festival circuit but Cordero deserves credit for the way he’s able to express a personal voice while adhering to the demands of the current commercial marketplace.

Signs of what Farber called “eager, industrious, unkempt activity” abound in his film, in a manner notably lacking from too many of this year’s San Sebastián selections. And if the festival is to thrive under the new leadership of its director José Luis Rebordinos, it should seek out such pictures that combine genre excitement with auteur vision – as the genial cinéphile Rebordinos was recruited from the town’s ‘Fantasy Horror Film Week’, there are certainly grounds for cautious optimism.

Neil Young
27th September 2011
written for Tribune magazine

Jigsaw Lounge’s 2011 San Sebastian Film Festival index-page