Festival de Valdivia 2006: PART III

Sunday was marked by two non-film related events: eating a delicious baked sierra fish with white wine and playing a pichanga (impromptu and informal soccer with a poorly defined playing field, with ad-hoc goals and usually involving lots of dirt or holes) with some students we had met earlier down the road in front of a nearby cabin. These cabins, by the way, were complete with a wood fireplace, porch, cable and maid service. For only twenty five thousand pesos a night, not bad deal.

The Austral University students were tremendous Pink Floyd fans, singing and mumbling the words to typical Pink Floyd songs while strumming on their guitars in front of their porch; they seemed to be living in some fairy tale world, just relaxing and playing music in the shadow of their rustic cabin. We woke them up a little with our city enthusiasm and I played some annoying Radiohead for them. They seemed to appreciate it.

We re-entered the world of films soon after. It was late afternoon by the time I made it to the Austral campus, where two of the festival's screens were located (just on the other side of the Valdivia river), the documentary about the Mapuche had already started. The film, called We Pu Liwen (New Dawn) and directed by Francisco Toro Lessen, was your typical film about Mapuches and there was very little that could be rescued. The importance of mapuche culture, the struggle to maintain mapuche identity alive, etc.

This specific documentary focused on the Mapuche Cosmovision and included poetry by Lorenzo Aillapan. The problem with these documentaries is that the Mapuches depicted tend to automatically revert to a very rehearsed discourse about their identity and the struggle to keep it alive. At no point do we feel that we really understand the subjects better or that we are closer to them as a result of the exposition. Quite frankly, images of mapuches with their ponchos walking through the wilderness flanked by the sounds of the kultrun and the trutruca have become quite cliché and it's not clear whether they contribute anything new to the mapuche documentary genre. Sometimes it's important to expose the subject's own discourse and not just take it at face value.

The best of Sunday, we thought, would be reserved for the Chilean premiere of Almodovar's latest film, Volver (Return). This was clearly the public's favorite. Penelope Cruz was scheduled to present the film, but for some reason, she didn't show up and the supporting actress, Lola Duenas, presented the film instead. There were a lot of cameras hovering over the "almodovar girl" and the intense light they were constantly beaming on her while could only have been annoying. The Lord Cochrane theatre, where most of the competing films were screened, was overflowing with people and we could sense the intense hype surrounding the film.

Of course, a film with semejante level of hype can only become a let-down. Surprisingly, however, there are quite a few things that made Volver, Almodovar's latest festival winner, worth remembering. For one thing, Penelope Cruz. It is truly remarkable to watch and hear her move around the screen. She is in constant motion, both physically and emotionally. While in one minute her face explodes in laughter as she prances around an equally colorful interior, in another it reveals a precise level of panic and fear as she tries to cope with the complicated realization that her daughter has killed her husband.

All this, of course, complimented by fantastic dialogue which dominates each scene, it provides the essential energy for each character and never for a second feels forced. Completely spontaneous. And never do we doubt for a second that Penelope Cruz is Raimunda, never does it occur to us that she's an actress playing a part, until, of course, the spell is broken and the film comes to an end.

More so than in other films where he clearly accentuates his female characters and fills them up to the brim with an exaggerated sense of confidence, emotion, sex appeal, intelligence and physical and intellectual panache, Almodovar really goes the extra mile to pay homage to the female race. In many interviews given around the world, he has stressed that for him, this film is a return to his childhood, which he remembers to be predominantly marked by women. Indeed, it is made clearer with Volver that his fascination for the female character, translated cinematographically into a wonderful spectrum of female color, emotion and intelligence, is what drives his filmmaking.

In Volver, men simply don't exist; they are not important, they are secondary at best and often simply fill spaces that need filling, to reaffirm their own obsolescence or to consecrate their obvious dysfunction in the world. Men are there because they played some marginal partin the creation of their daughters (often in unconventional ways), but not because they contribute or because they deserve any real screen time. In the world of Volver, Raimunda (Penelope Cruz) is alone to construct her life and to raise her daughter in spite of her husband (who is, basically, a loser imported from a different world or genre altogether). When the husband is killed off early in the film, his sudden departure from the world of the living automatically becomes a problem of what to do with the body; his absence is never interpreted as a significant loss nor seen as a tragedy in its own right.

In Volver, women are masters of their own destiny. They are hardly well organized, disciplined, overly confident (like the corporate women in El Metodo) or even emotionally or economically stable for that matter, but that doesn't necessarily translate into a loss of will or control, or the sudden interruption of a life well-lived and felt. Raimunda is a mess, she works as a sub-contracted maintenance worker in an airport, has no other clear or stable source of income (but she does stumble upon an opportunity to take over a restaurant and she doesn't hesitate for a second), she is haunted by a mysterious fire which claimed the life of her mother (whom she has a lot of unfinished business with), her sister Sole runs an illegal beauty salon out of her messy apartment, she has a daughter who doesn't know where she came from, but this never for a moment brings into question Raimunda's freedom. She works it out, then panics, relaxes again, figures it out again, devises plans, carefully calculates her options, carries out her missions, explodes in sadness again, recovers again, and all of it done with unquestionable grace (she even takes a piss on screen, again, full of grace). But never for an instant is her will challenged, her grace compromised, never for one second does she stop feeling and living a su estilo; she is the master of her domain and is never required to explain anything or give up the essential elements of being human- those elements that are so sadly repressed in men (and exaggerated in women by Almodovar).

When we think about the women in Almodovar's world and then switch over to the women in Jafar Panahi's The Circle, we might as well be talking about two different species. The interesting thing about this, especially when we consider the awesome potential films have to convey such contrasting worlds, is that we're not talking about two different species.

Jafar Panahi is a critically acclaimed Iranian director whose films deal with the realities of modern life in Iran. This year, the Valdivia Film Festival has a retrospective which brings some of his most acclaimed films to the tail end of the world for the very first time.

On the last day of the festival (and here we are obviously jumping ahead in time), Panihi presented his film The Circle which deals with the harsh realities that Iranian women have to face in post-revolution Iran. Here, urban Iranian women are depicted as defeated souls, lost in a maze of indifference, in a Tehran which brutally ostracizes and marginalizes women ("you can't go anywhere without a man"). The film takes turns following three loosely related female characters through the streets of Tehran. The first two women have been granted temporary release from prison and have no intention of returning, while a third women, whose story is casually taken up by the film towards the end, has escaped outright from prison and is desperately seeking arrangements for an illegal abortion. They frantically try to achieve their objectives, the first two wish to flee to a far away place and the pregnant woman seeks the help of old friends, but they fail to gain ground in an extremely closed society. There are many alludes to the question of freedom in Iran as well as to male domination, consequently, the film was banned there.

Comparing the treatment of women in the two films, we see immediately that there is nothing beautiful or worthwhile about the Iranian women in The Circle other than their obvious courage. One gets the impression that most of the time invested went into portraying Tehran as this terrible place full of danger and indifference at every corner, while almost no attention was dedicated to actually developing the female parts, characters who will no doubt be seen by western audiences as representing Iranian women in general. For the most part, they come across as one-dimensional and shallow. One never really feels a sense of injustice because the women never reveal their true humanity in the film. It sometimes feels as if Panihi, by forgetting to give these women personalities, is just as guilty of repressing them as the society he is trying to critique.