Spain

Chef’s Special – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Big Night meets the Bird Cage might be the best way to describe this gay cooking comedy. It was funny in the way that slapstick and exaggerated characters can be: fun for a while, but not good for a repeat viewing. It was an at times funny movie filled with stereotypes that were played well: the flamboyant gay man, the ex-punk, the desperately lonely woman, the parents who are unable to understand the gay son and either make constant jokes or are constantly praying to God for his salvation. Mix all those together and you’re bound to get some laughs. At times, though, the movie seemed a little slow, in part because it is more than just comedy. The chef also has two children with whom he has a bad relationship. In particular, the relationship with the son is troubled and the film is much more serious. In these scenes the film slows down and could have been treated a little better in serious film. The real problems between the two are somewhat distracting and would be better served in a less comedic way where the topic is respected more.

The description from the SIFF guide describes the part of the film quite well: “Maxi is a master chef who wants a Michelin star so badly he can taste it. After years of toiling in his chic Madrid restaurant, he feels he’s on the brink of culinary superstardom—that is, until Maxi’s two estranged children show up on his doorstep. Not only are the children grieving over the recent death of their mother, they must now come to terms with their father’s openly gay lifestyle. To complicate matters further, Horacio, a sexy Argentine ex-soccer star, moves in next door, diverting the attentions of both Maxi and Alex, the restaurant’s unstable maître d’.” The soccer player, though, is in the closet becuase he is afraid of the homophobic sports world.

In all it is a light romantic/family/food comedy that has its moments.

The Anarchist’s Wife – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Every war once it begins to be committed to film has its own cliches. The Anarchist’s Wife from film makers Marie Noelle and Peter Sehr is full of those from the Spanish Civil War as it attempts to tell the sweeping love story of a young wife who stands valiantly by her husband’s side. Really it is always the risk with a war film because if it is not out and out propaganda, then it is easy to fall into the passion trap. The passion trap is where the passions of the war filter into construction of the story and infect the story with either heart wrenching shouting or overly emotive writing.

Unfortunately, The Anarchist’s Wife piles on the cliches and the shouting and the crying so that by the end of the movie you wonder did they leave anything out? Probably the most glaring cliche, or, to be kind, simplistic device, is the complicated political alliances of the family members. The wife’s brother is a Republican, her husband a Republican, and his brother and his wife a Fascist. To make it hear wrenching the sister-in-law is summarily executed by a Republican and the the young brother is executed by the Fascists. While all of this could have happened, it seems the film makers had to make sure they explained each side had its savage moments and that if someone dies on each side the emotion can be greater.

Eventually, the anarchist has to flee the fall of the government and goes into exile in France where he is put in a concentration camp.The wife waits for him and suffers the privations of the losers in the war. The wife is a fighter, but she comes off as a spoiled brat more annoying than anything else, wearing her old mink coat from when she was a rich anarchist, and unable to understand times had changed. Ultimately, though, she is allowed to go to France to reunite with her husband. At first it is happy, but then a mystery seems to swirl around him. Why is he so secretive? What is the relation with the French-German woman? Oh, they are plotting to bomb Franco from a small plane, that’s all. This is when the movie really lost its focus and really began to take on the cliches. Naturally they fail, but at least the wife and husband are together. Perhaps if the film had been about just this or without the assassination plot it would have been better.

Finally, the ending of the film was terrible. The last minute of the movie is closed by the narration of the daughter who says when Franco died Spain moved into democracy without out any problems, which isn’t true. Then she goes on to say everyone who knows a survivor must talk to them. A laudable goal, but a difficult one too. More importantly, though, it makes the film too self important. After sitting through the assassination plot that weakens what every power there was in the film, the ham handed command to talk to the survivors is just silly.

War films, easily to overloaded with passions and plot, are best left simple and shouldn’t try to encompass every last detail as The Anarchist’s Wife did.

Vickie Christina Barcelona – A Review

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

Vickie Christina Barcelona should probably have been called Vickie Christina New York, since Barcelona has little to do with the film and New York, the alter ego of Woody Allen, is really where the movie should have been set. The film is filled with his usual preoccupations: failed relationships and the quixotic quest for happiness in a relationship. While Crimes and Misdemeanors and Deconstructing Harry weren’t necessarily funny, they were more they were more than just the light exotic fantasy that Vickie Christina Barcelona is.

Perhaps if the movie wasn’t so full of clichés it might have been a better movie. The first and most egregious was Penélope Cruz’s dark haired bundle of fire. The feisty, dark haired Spanish woman who is only interested in fighting but who can channel her passions to become the most intense lover, is an old cliché. Perhaps Allen had just seen Carmen when he wrote the movie? Then there is Bardem, the Spanish man, in other words, the Spanish lover who chases anything with a skirt, a cliché that only lets Allen explore his real interest, Vickie and Cristina. He is not interested in Spain, but a stereotype of Spain that lets him play with his real interests.

Unfortunately, the clichés are really the only Spanish elements in the film. Except for the occasional Spanish guitar music (which was often out of place: Catalan music in Oviedo, Spanish in Barcelona), the film might as well have been shot in New York. Yet had the film been shot in New York it would have had its own clichés that still would make the film one of his lesser efforts.

What makes the film weakest is Vickie and Christina are obscured by Bardem and Cruz and never really have a chance to be more than Americans on a lark. One has an affair the other a menage a trois, and both escape from their ordinary lives. The escapes, however, tell you little and though confusing for them, they are meant to be liberating as the women find themselves in the midst of new adventures. The escapes are contrasted against Judy, another American, who doesn’t love her husband. She is the antipathy of Christina—she wants adventure but is afraid to be free. Yet she is the more real character. The other two are on vacation and just as Bardem is something exotic, the freedom they have in Barcelona is the idealized freedom one feels in a city where one neither has to work nor to try to really belong.

In the hands of a lesser director the film would have been terrible, but Allen is able to make the film seem interesting despite the narration that instead of being cleaver, seems banal. Ultimately though, cliché and fantasy sinks the film.

Tribute to El Caso – Spain’s Crime Paper

~ bythefirelight

El País has an interesting article about El Caso, a trashy crime tabloid from the Franco period. It is not the material they covered that is so unique, but how popular it was within Spain and how it carved out a space for the salacious in the Catholic Dictatorship.

The film director Pere Costa, one of the editors of El Caso, explained how at the hands of Eugenio Suárez its inclusion as a section of the daily Marid came to an end, and became a weekly “with the condition to no publish more than one Spanish assassination a week.” The 12,000 issues of its first run grew to 100’s of thousands, and its readership was even greater because it was normal for it to be read out loud to a group.

El director de cine Pere Costa, uno de los redactores de El Caso, explicó como de sección fija del diario Madrid pasó, de la mano de Eugenio Suárez, a semanario “con la condición de no publicar más de un asesinato español por semana”. Los 12.000 ejemplares semanales del primer número fueron creciendo a cientos de miles, aunque su audiencia fue mucho mayor, pues era normal que se leyera en voz alta y en grupo.

It is worth a read if you are interested in crime fiction.

Chinese Muslim’s Pilgrimage to Al-Andalus

~ bythefirelight

Bruce Hume’s blog on Chinese writing notes a new book in China that sounds interesting. He is giving out English synopsis if you email him.

Zhang Cheng-Zhi (张承志), the white-hot Red Guard who mastered Mongolian and Japanese — and then converted to Islam — has just launched En las Ruinas de la Flor: Viajes por Al-Andalus (鲜花的废墟). His new Chinese-language travelogue takes us throughout Moorish Spain, Portugal and Morocco in search of the spirit of Islam in its golden age (8th-15th centuries).

Ana María Matute Interview in El País

~ bythefirelight

There is a great interview in El País with Ana María Matute. They talk about how her heath has kept her from writing recently even though she has been completely mentally able to write. When talking about literature they discuss Matute’s works for children and how she has often written from the perspective of children. It has been very important throughout her career to write for them, in part because there wasn’t anything good and she wanted to write for her son. They also talk about how her mother supported her writing, something rare during the Franco Period, and with her help would type up her drafts before submitting them to publishers.

There was fascinating questions about her style.

You seem especially predisposed to this type of literature [sparse], since you uphold plain and straightforward writing that is not easy to achieve; en fact, you say it is very difficult. Yes. It is that I want the whole world to understand me. I don’t want to torture the reader. No. There are a lot of writers that love to torturer the reader. Not me! [Said harshly] I like that the understand me. For this reason I write. In addition, I’m not such an elitist.

Usted parece especialmente predispuesta a este tipo de literatura, ya que defiende la escritura llana y sencilla, que no es tan fácil de conseguir; de hecho, usted dice que es muy difícil. Sí. Es que yo quiero que me entienda todo el mundo. Yo no quiero torturar al lector. No. Hay muchos escritores a los que les encanta torturar al lector. ¡A mí no! [Proclama con dureza]. A mí me gusta que me entiendan. Para eso escribo. Además, no soy tan elitista.

She also talked about her relationship to the Civil War and recent pushes to investigate the past in Spain.

Undoubtedly it is a traumatic experience. It was tremendous. I still can’t stand fireworks. They have the same sound as the bombs. The bombardments here in Barcelona were terrible. By sea and by air. We lived on Platón Street and back then I saw the sea from my room and I was completely frightened. You feel so powerless…My father would say: take everyone by the hand against the teacher’s wall. And we all would stay that way…[She remains quiet, in suspense, with a face of fear]. I also remember the lines. Those of us who were bourgeois children, those that didn’t go out without one’s father [she makes a face of horror], we quickly had to go stand in line to get bread, where nobody gave a damn. For us it was great! Because we had the liberty to come and go…We looked like mice wanting to go after cheese. My older brother and I discovered freedom. We enjoyed it a lot.

I have found that many people your age reject, perhaps out of fear, the plans to recover the historical memory, to remove this part of history from the past. It is that the way perhaps the fear hasn’t gone, but yes the sadness [remains], the laceration, and the waking of hatreds. I understand that those that have not lived the war have their own feelings, but for me it makes me shiver. To return to relive, to remember. I remember the attempted coup de Tejero [in 1981]. I was with my son in a taxi and we hear the shots on the radio. Look! And I became desperate. “Not again! No, God, not again!” My son asked me: “What’s happening mama?” The taxi cab driver and my son began to talk about what was happening and I would only say: “No, not again. No I will resist it.

Indudablemente es una experiencia muy traumática. Es tremenda. Yo todavía ahora no soporto los fuegos artificiales. Tienen el mismo sonido que las bombas. Los bombardeos aquí en Barcelona fueron terribles. Por mar y por aire. Nosotros vivíamos en la calle de Platón y entonces veía el mar desde mi cuarto y pasaba un miedo espantoso. Te sientes tan impotente… Mi padre decía: cojámonos todos de la mano, contra el muro maestro. Y así nos quedábamos todos… [Se queda quieta, en suspenso, con cara de susto]. También me acuerdo de las colas. Nosotros, que éramos unos niños de clase burguesa, de esos que no salían más que con las tatas [pone cara de horror], teníamos de pronto que ir a hacer colas para conseguir el pan, sin que a nadie le importara. ¡Para nosotros era fenomenal! Porque teníamos libertad de entrar y salir… Parecíamos ratones deseando salir del queso. Mi hermano mayor y yo descubrimos la libertad. La disfrutamos mucho.

He comprobado que mucha gente de su edad rechaza, quizá por miedo, los intentos de recuperar la memoria histórica, de remover esa parte del pasado. Es que de la guerra quizá ya no te queda el miedo, pero sí la tristeza, el desgarro y un despertar de odios. Entiendo que los que no han vivido la guerra tengan un sentimiento distinto, pero a mí me escalofría. Volver a repasar, a recordar. Me acuerdo del intento de golpe de Estado de Tejero [en 1981]. Yo iba con mi hijo en un taxi y oímos los tiros a través de la radio. ¡Mira!, me entró una desesperación… ¡Otra vez no! ¡No, por Dios, otra vez no! Mi hijo me preguntaba: “¿Pero qué te pasa, mamá?”. El taxista y él empezaron a hablar de lo que estaba pasando y yo sólo decía: “No, otra vez no. No lo resistiré”.

El País Reviews Bolaño and Bolanomania Again

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

El País has another article about Bolanomania in the United States. (You can see a previous post I did on the subject here). It talks about some of the reviews he has received, how most talk about his biography as much or more than the books and notes the controversy over his heroin usage. The article also notes that one’s reputation after death is based on luck. The author notes that the translation into English has created a different Bolaño, a Bolaño that Americans read from within their own cultural framework. Nothing surprising there. He goes on to compare Bolaño to Kerouac and suggests Americans are placing reading Kerouac and the Beat’s vitalism into Bolaños vitalism and from this reading they are culturally locating Bolaño.

Probably the North American reader recognizes a diction en these novels that es not dissimilar and lets the reader make the book their own, with local flavor and its riches. In English the books are not only very literary and miticulous, pasionate and brillant; they are, over all, vitalist.

The grand tradition of North American vitalist prose, in effect, has been the setting where the various styles of fiction characteristically Yankee were defined. The greatest stylist of this style is Jack Kerouac, and his On the Road, written in 1951 and rejected by 19 publishers before its publication in 1957, is a a modern classic. Even though the Beat Generation ended up being devoured by its own reputation, its works are more serious than the image of its authors, simplified to the point of being taken granted, and converted into merchandise. The brilliance of that vibrant, radiant, fluid, and unpredictable prose echoes like a spell in the pages of Bolaño.

Probablemente el lector norteamericano reconoce en estas novelas una dicción que no le es ajena, y que le permite hacer suya, con apetito local, su riqueza. En inglés no son sólo muy literarias y minuciosas, apasionadas y brillantes; son, sobre todo, vitalistas.

La gran tradición de la prosa norteamericana vitalista, en efecto, ha sido el escenario donde se definen los varios estilos de la ficción característicamente yanqui. El mayor estilista de este estilo es Jack Kerouac, y su On the road, escrita en 1951 y rechazada por 19 editoriales antes de su publicación en 1957, un clásico moderno. Aunque la generación Beat terminó devorada por su biografía popular, sus obras son más serias que la imagen de sus autores, simplificados al punto de darse por leídos, convertidos en mercancía residual. El brillo de esa prosa vivaz, irradiante, fluida, imprevisible, resuena como un conjuro en las páginas de Bolaño.

Ana María Matute in El País

~ bythefirelight

Ana María Matute has a new book out and El País has given it a great review. If you have never read her work, she is definitely worth it. Her sparse short stories are excellent. Her name often comes up around Nobel time (although that may just be in Spain). If you are unfamiliar with her, the description from the article is a great synopsis.

Aunque perteneciente, cronológicamente, a la llamada generación del medio siglo, con cuyos más destacados miembros comparte determinados trasfondos temáticos (la Guerra Civil española, la desolación como paisaje moral de los años de posguerra, la rememoración de la infancia como irreparable pérdida de la inocencia edénica, y el descalabro humano reinante en una sociedad en la que los más débiles sucumben bajo la impiedad de los poderosos), la escritura de Ana María Matute siempre se ha regido por un talante despegado de las consignas tanto ideológicas como estéticas de la época.

Although she belongs, chronologically, to the mid century generation, whose most well know members share certain thematic overtones (the Spanish Civil Way, the desolation as moral voyage through the years after the war, the child’s memory as the irreparable loss of an Eden like innocence, and the reigning human misfortune in a society where the weakest succumb to the impunity of the powerful), the writing of Ana María Matute has always been marked by a talent not tied to ideologies but the aesthetics of the era.

In Search of a Lost Ladino

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

In Search of a Lost Ladino
Marcel Cohen

I bought this book because I wanted to read the original Ladino which is quite similar to Spanish., and as a Spanish speaker I was quite curious about the structure of the language and its similarity to Spanish. However, there is something else to this book that makes it a fascinating book, a kind of elegy for the language itself.

Ladino as Cohen says is a dead language and when he speaks it he “speaks a dead language”. But it is more than a language he is talking about, but a memory of his family and more: the memories caught up in the history his language and the language caught up in history. To be Ladino, is not only to speak it, but is also to have lived a certain history that is now gone. And in this sense the elegy takes its full strength as it describes the people of the Ladino barrios in Salonika and else where, their trades, their food, their clothing. The structure of the book is in little chapters that are almost prose poems to an idea or a memory of something lost. It gives one a fleeting glimpse, and almost dream like look at what has been lost. Its as if Cohen is remembering not to forget, but can’t leave the labyrinth of sadness that permeates the book and is unable to structure an over arching narrative.

As you read the book you often have a sense of grief, a grief stretches back to Spain and the city of Cuenca when the programs first began some 700 years ago. The grief reemerges in the Ottoman empire when Sultans turn on the Jews or the Malamukes roam through the streets and attack Jews at will. Thus the grief is not only the loss of the language and the community in Salonika during the Holocaust, but a lingering pain of hundreds of years of hope and diaspora. It makes for a beautiful and sad book.

A Spaniard in New York – La ciudad automática

~ bythefirelight

Letras Libres has a review of what looks like a fascinating book. A Spanish reporter, Julio Camba, comes to 1930’s New York and writes his reactions to the the city and the depression. As the review points out, it would make a good contrast to Poet in New York by Lorca. Apparently he didn’t quite like the city nor America, but nerveless his impressions sound worth a read.