Or, how Spanish filmmakers jumped the politically correct bandwagon of supposedly feeling guilty for being white – nevertheless, a pretty good film
Manny Face returns to his loft and finds desecration
Manny Face doesn’t completely regret seeing “Tambien la Lluvia,” titled “Even the Rain” in English, since, aside from the film turning into a Hollywood-blockbuster-imitating suspense drama for most of its second half, there is some riveting and intriguing art to be had from this 2010 Spanish offering from female director Iciar Bollain, which the movies website Rotten Tomatoes lists by genre as Art House and International, as well as Drama.
Except that Manny Face, who revels in big city-based flicks – which is why he’s sorry he missed “Mientras Duermes,” as described in Installment 3 of this journal to The Checkout section of the Kyiv Unedited website – asks, purely rhetorically, of course, ‘Who the hell cares about a bunch of native Latin Americans being exploited by capitalist Spanish Whites in the early 20th century, in a way only slightly reminiscent of how their ancestors were exploited by the others’ imperialist ancestors 500 years earlier?’ And that, using what was no doubt for the film’s makers some embarrassingly bad acting by those natives – a sentiment that they also no doubt properly suppressed for the greater good: winning a gazillion awards from film institutions worldwide, who also silently saw through the bad acting to the film’s greater political message. As was only proper of them to do, of course.
Under today’s highly sensitive standards, Manny Face is quite possibly a fucking racist, but Manny Face doesn’t give a shit, because it’s the art that’s most important to Manny Face and not it’s political message, which can go fuck itself. If the art is good, the political message will come out without being dragged out front and then demonstratively beaten into martyrdom and sainthood before the camera.
The delicate reader of these lines can easily turn to Rotten Tomatoes, and particularly to Wikipedia, to learn more of the overarching plot details of the film and all of the international awards and nominations it has garnered, so Manny Face will try not to go too deeply into the storyline here, but will ultimately bring up several artistic points and ruminate on them, drawing conclusions. As I said, there is some good art in the film that, for the artist and those who love art, tips this movie’s scales toward rewardingly watchable.
In the film, which Manny Face will sometimes refer to as the ur-film, which is about the making of a film, Mexican director Sebastian (Gael Garcia Bernal) and his producer Costa (Luis Tosar – star of the film “Mientras Duermes,” briefly described but not seen by Manny Face in Installment 3 of this series) arrive in Bolivia to make, according to Rotten Tomatoes, a revisionist film about the conquest of Latin America, led by Christopher Columbus some 500 years earlier.
They’ve chosen Bolivia for their filming because as the poorest country in South America it would be the cheapest under a limited budget.
Who’s behind the limited budget? Well, it goes like this: The White bottom-line and simpler practical-minded, almost innocent, evil of the poorer Spanish variety doing the filming on the ground is peeled away via phone calls to reveal the invisible ruthless capitalist money-sourcing evil of the English-speaking variety financing the film that the lower Spanish-speaking variety cheerfully work in cahoots with and kowtow to, and this, Manny Face supposes, is to make the increasingly insidious levels and ranks of corporate greed stretching and casting its nets across the globe clearer to the viewer. Manny Face feels good about English-language and very White corporate greed taking the top spot in this film’s material hierarchy of capitalist degeneracy.
Is it any wonder that the British are fiscally holding their own through today’s extended economic crisis, while the Spanish have taken a fall?
In the film, “impoverished locals,” says Wikipedia, “are thrilled to earn just two dollars a day as extras in the film, and willingly engage in physical labor for set preparation. Costa saves many thousands of dollars by having underpaid extras perform tasks meant to be completed by experienced engineers.”
However, set in February and March of 2000, the filmmakers unwittingly land in the midst of a real-life crisis involving the privatization of water, which set off large-scale protests that rocked Bolivia at that time, naturally placing the filmmakers in a moral crisis, which is then milked by the ur-film’s filmmakers through phony and unlikely plot sequences toward a redemptive denouement and a pretty happy ending.
Here is the historical background of the water privatization crisis in Bolivia, according to Wikipedia:
“From the 1950s through the 1980s, Bolivia attempted unsuccessfully to curb poverty through ‘structuralist’ measures: Government regulation and nationalization. As a result, the nation acquired a reputation for ineffective self-management and, accordingly, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund encouraged the Bolivian government to privatize some industries. Thus, the Bolivian government privatized some of its water utilities. The sole bidder for the Cochabamba water agency, Aguas del Tunari, a subsidiary of San Francisco-based Bechtel Corporation, agreed to a forty-year contract with the Bolivian government in October 1999; but it was compelled to fund the mayor’s pet project, an expensive dam, so prices increased. This was followed by widespread protests.”
In the film, as the protests rage, threatening to ignite into a countrywide revolution, some film crew become desperate to leave, while others, with the film almost finished, are willing to take the risk and stay, with the completion of the film becoming both a capitalist-commercial and moral-artistic prerogative, the line between the two becoming blurred. However, according to Wikipedia, “The revolution ends shortly thereafter with the departure of the multinational water company, but Cochabamba is left in ruin from the conflict.” A happy ending looms large and inevitable on the horizon. Crises of every shape and stripe are all simultaneously overcome, and whatever the motives behind its production, it looks like the film will be made after all. Hurrah!
At one point, the melding of the ur-film into its film-within-the-film was so seamless, that the viewer may momentarily be made to believe that the film-within-the-film is the actual ur-film, rather than the actual ur-film itself, and for a second Manny Face even believed that some of the violence in the film-within-the-film was not just film acting, but was being shown, by the ur-film, as actual deadly violence of the natives hired as actors and extras for the film-within-the-film against their White oppressors, who were also just actors in the film-within-the-film.
And why would that be? Because tensions and hatred had risen to such an intolerable pitch in real life, that they spilled over into the art of the film itself, becoming fatal. Artistically, Manny Face found this part so good that Manny Face was relieved and grateful when the ur-film then pulled back to show the filmmakers and some of the acting natives watching a screening of part of the film, that is, of the film-within-the-film, which had been made up to that point.
That’s about the best part of it for Manny Face, so Manny Face probably has nothing more to say. Except this last bit.
Near the beginning, there is a shot of a helicopter flying a huge wooden cross over the mountains. The cross is part of the film set for the movie – the film-within-the-film – to be made. Aside from recommending itself as a powerful visual image, it is difficult to make a case for the symbolic relevance of the cross spreading its significance over the entire film. There’s no compelling reason why such a scene had to be shot, except that it was too tempting to take Fellini’s idea from “La Dolce Vita” (see Manny Face’s movie review of said film in his Installment 2½ for this series). But in “Tambien la Lluvia,” it doesn’t work nearly as well. Except that Christianity seems to be portrayed as another insane White evil in a continuum stretching across the ages that includes rapacious capitalist greed and an apparently genetic predisposition to dispossessing other groups.
***
I got back to my loft and there was my beautiful Tango Baby, all tied up, but she didn’t match the vision I had kept of her in my head through the movie.
Her eyes were wide, but not with lust for Manny Face, but with terror, or pain, or both. Mascara tears splotched her cheeks and she wasn’t wearing it before, since Manny Face doesn’t like artifice of any kind on a broad when he does her, seeing as how they got enough of it inside them already.
The tape from over her mouth was used to stick a note to the headboard. A lipstick of the brightest red, a satire red, a mocking red, was smeared across her mouth and down both sides of her jaw, like a little girl who had been playing grownup whore gone wild. Unresponsive, my Tango Baby’s blank staring eyes were riveted on the ceiling. Hair around her head had turned gray.
And then I heard my Captain Beefheart “Shiny Beast” CD playing in the background.
I ripped the note from the headboard; it read: “Thanks for the girl. The music collection’s not bad, either.”
As I kept looking at the paper, a massive, gruesome head began to appear in outline, something maybe like if I took celluloid pictures of it, the way they did with the Shroud of Turin, and saw the negatives, the features of this monster would become clear. And then slowly, the letters of the signature, like big quarry rocks, began to come in – at first dimly, and then darker and darker, until they read: “The Hunched Cornish.”
I slowly pulled back the sheets covering her body.
Manny Face, April 16, 2013