Monday, October 10, 2011

Mil cretinos

♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Ignasi (Jordi Bosch) writes scripts for a living. The movie is divided into three parts, which are further divided into different chapters. The first part is a series of disjointed story lines with some overlapping characters. The second is set in the world of folktales and traditional stories given realistic twists in the end. The last part is where the writer is introduced along with his parents who are living in a retirement home and contemplating  suicide.

This film is a trip to the writer's imaginary world populated by the characters he invents. Somehow the dilemma of the characters reflects his own. Like what many people would say, a part of the writer would be obvious in his works. The different story arcs do not make sense when taken on their own. Some do but the stories are incomplete. Thanks to the captions giving each chapter a title, at least you get some idea as to what happens next. Watching this movie is like scanning a book, to say the least. Everything starts to make sense during the last part but this is still not enough to make sense of the connections between the stories, if there are any.

Don't try to make sense of it all. Just enjoy the mini stories like listening to an incomplete gossip. The lack of necessary information leads you to yearn for more, but in the end it just doesn't matter, and the next thing you know you are listening to your next gossip.

My favorite mini story would be "Cleaning" where a woman decides to get rid of her husband's stuff and ends up dismantling the whole house all the way to the wallpaper and the tiles. Crazy. She does not say a word, not until she starts to skin her finger. Only then does she say "Limpieza". Another favorite would be the suicide story where the guy trying to stop the suicide ends up the one falling from top of a building. And then there's the "Letters" episode. Just enjoy them as if someone were telling you a random anecdote and you will see how fun this movie is.

The second part with the folktales was a bit boring at first because of the costumes and the improvised sets. Later on it becomes enjoyable because of the camp acting and the new twists that actually make more sense than the original endings. Everything seems to be an alternate version with modern values applied to them.

The third part is a bit funny because of the senile mom but since this portion contains the film's denouement and the director is starting to reconcile everything, it becomes rather dragging.

I was quite disappointed because I thought the movie would be in Catalan but it seems to have been dubbed in Castillian. However, the language is still present in written form through the captions and real world signs in the city where the story takes place.

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