In the film Being There (Hal Ashby, 1979)—a cinematic adaptation of a story by Polish writer Jerzy Kosiński—Chauncey Gardiner, an unforgettable Peter Sellers, is a simple man without a past, an ideology, or an inner world, whose life has been reduced to just two activities: tending a garden and watching television…
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The dichotomy between the “madonna and the whore”—between the woman one loves and the woman one desires—and the difficulty of reconciling them into one, was an expression coined by Freud that gained currency to denote a certain schizoid ambivalence inherited from the Oedipus complex in some men…
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When Love Alone Is Not Enough Read More »
Stalker—the protagonist of the 1979 film of the same name by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky—is a guide who leads visitors, lost to themselves, to “the Zone.” It is an abandoned place of indeterminate geographical coordinates where a meteorite is said to have fallen and where an extraterrestrial civilization once resided…
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Stalker, the Guide to Nowhere Read More »
Les Diables (2002), a film directed by French filmmaker Christophe Ruggia, is a marvelous work about two lost children adrift—Joseph and Chloé—who, having been abandoned at birth, flee from the rest of the world…
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Christopher Nolan is a film director who deeply interested me in his early days. I felt that, hidden beneath his films, he was covertly asking himself a question that I, too, had been pondering since adolescence…
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Nolan Before He Got Lost in Interstellar Space Read More »
Perhaps because I was very young when I saw it, perhaps due to the beautiful and passionate music of Georges Delerue —although this prolific composer has hundreds of wonderful scores (and I am not exaggerating)— or perhaps because from beginning to end the story drags the viewer into a vortex of raw emotions that offers no respite, “L’important c’est d’aimer” (The Important Thing Is to Love), a film by Polish director Andrzej Żuławski released in 1975, is one of those I always remember with the greatest emotion…
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While not strictly a “film” in the conventional sense, but rather a documentary, The Disenchantment (El desencanto, 1976) is, in my opinion, along with The Spirit of the Beehive, one of the great cinematic documents for understanding the Spain of the late Franco era. By its very nature, it transcends that scope entirely…
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We often find her on the screens of the biggest blockbusters, whether in the form of an AI lecturing Einstein on the theory of relativity, an alien with extraordinary powers, an ancient mermaid, or an indigenous warrior lost in the jungle with incomparable combat skills. It is her, the innocent seductress, encased in an adult woman’s body brimming with sensuality, dressed in exotic and suggestive attire…
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Leon and His Friend Read More »
In the 1940s, at the height of the Franco regime, a traveling cinema arrives in a small village in Segovia, on the Castilian plateau. They screen Frankenstein, a film that deeply impacts Ana, a six-year-old girl. This moment marks the beginning of a journey that will lead her to discover her own self…
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In the solitude of my “boomer” years, I sometimes feel a wave of nostalgia for those fascinatingly grotesque and delightfully dim-witted cinematic train wrecks of my childhood and adolescence. I’m talking about the films that invaded the video rental shops where I used to hide, simply because there was nothing else to do…
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The Lost Paradise of B-Movies Read More »
