FILM: Destinity, eternity and morphine
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Javier Rebollo doesn’t believe in destiny. He believes in fortune—an important distinction, for the Spanish film director.
It was fortune, he says, that first brought him to Argentina, where his previous two feature films were well-received, opening doors that led to his latest obra, “The Dead Man and Being Happy,” shot mostly on location in Argentina.
“I believe a lot in luck—not in destiny but in fortune. God deals the cards; you play the ones you get,” according to the madrileño, whose film headlined Friday night at the AFI Silver Spring cinema as part of the Latin American Film Festival.
The road movie is the story of Santo (Spanish film and theater star José Sacristán), an aged hitman dying of cancer who botches his final job and goes on the lam, subsisting on a steady diet of fernet cocktails and morphine injections. He picks up a forty-something drifter (Roxana Blanco) at a gas station. She’s not your typical Big Screen beauty, the voice over relates, an aside that underscores Rebollo’s interest in the imperfection of real life rather than a Hollywood-style fantasy.
If the film succumbs to the cliché of the hitman genre, it makes up for it with luscious cinematography of Rebollo’s longtime collaborator Santiago Racaj, lyrical storytelling, and unusual use of voiceover, which starts with the opening scene and continues almost non-stop until the credits roll.
During the public conversation that followed the screening, Rebollo put up a passionate defense of traditional film techniques verses more modern digitized movie-making, comparing the former to a budding starlet and the latter to a aging beauty. With the older woman, he joked, “you know her and know what to do.”
The wisecracking, fast-talking filmmaker’s sardonic sense of humor anchors the off-camera narration, though its function changes as the story unfolds. From the “almost clinical” opening commentary, akin to a crime movie, the voiceover eventually turns to the interior lives of the protagonists. The objective, Rebollo says, is to confuse past, present and future—often in rebuttal to the onscreen action. It’s a juxtaposition that also seems very much like real life, where the voice in our head may tell us something entirely different than what we see or speak aloud.
For Rebollo, it also sets the film apart from the neat cinematographic formulas of commercial film or even art house classics by Jean-Luc Godard or Luis Buñuel, two famous European directors to whom audience members tried to compare him.
Rebollo gently deflected the comparisons. He says he tries not to think when making a film and eschews writing scripts except when he must appease producers. Instead, he says, he soaks up the atmosphere and let the characters lead the way.
Rebollo spent about 18-months in South America, traveling 25,000 kilometers of highways and back roads while preparing for the film, and returned with a Spanish-French-Argentine cast and crew to shoot scenes across 6,000 kilometers from Buenos Aires to the Andes.
“The accents and faces of the people are authentic,” says the director, who recruited locals he met along his journey to play bit parts and give the film the kind of local color “you don’t see when you travel by airplane.”
The film also references the local history. Sacristán’s character, a Spanish immigrant to Argentina, becomes increasingly haunted by his past “killing people for money,” an oblique reference to the country’s military dictatorship and Dirty War from 1976 to 1983 when as many as 30,000 people were tortured and killed or disappeared, according to official reports.
“This man probably did work with the military dictators … or maybe he never left the hospital and it as all a morphine dream,” Rebollo says.
The Latin American Film Festival continues through Oct. 9. “The Dead Man and Being Happy” will be screened again on Oct. 9 at 6:30 p.m. Visit the AFI website for details.
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