Smoke and Mirrors
Any film from Alberto Rodríguez
the director of La Isla Minima/Marshland and Grupo 7 is going to
attract attention and El hombre de las mil caras (The Man with a Thousand Faces)/Smoke and Mirrors with its ingenious scams and
multiple striking locations looks promising. However, for those not
familiar with the real life scandal centering on bald & bearded Luis Roldán
the first civilian controller of the Guardia Civil, this one often plays like
an Ocean’s Eleven rip off.
We start with pilot, the busy José
Coronado (also in Boy Missing, To Steal from a Thief and The
Invisible Guest) telling the viewer about his disgruntled master spy chum
Francisco Paesa (Eduard Fernández) who never got paid by the government high
ups for his major strikes against ETA. Confusingly Coronado receives the key to
a Paris Gare du Nord locker the significance of which we will only discover in
the finale.
Fernández is recruited by ex-Guardia
Civil commander Carlos Santos to get him away with his billions of pesetas in
graft, now complicated by the fact that his elegant squeeze is pregnant.
There follows a complex worldwide
pursuit by the authorities determined to bring back Santos, which involves
Fernández shifting his fortune round the globe while he’s hidden in a Paris
garret. Fernández’s associates include an alcoholic who has a vision of a live
deer in an airport lounge and Paris merchants rung in as a menacing underworld
network.
The coup involves having Fernández law
school trained niece physically moving the loot one floor in a Singapore
banking complex, briefcase by brief case full, which makes it untraceable. The
film’s major innovation is showing the strain on the fraudsters. “In
three years you’ll be playing with your child in the park” and close up hand
shake.
Even though he’s beaten the game and
moved his bag and Modigliani back into his wife’s home, Fernández can’t stop
and has to take the government down and go deep undercover till the statute of
limitations expires. Convincing staging, personable cast but conviction in
short supply.
The Exile
Arturo Ruiz Serrano Serrano’s debut as
feature director El destierro/The Exile (which he also wrote and scored)
is a movie of high seriousness from the first shot where bespectacled young
Joan Carles Suau walks into focus against the monochrome winter mountain
snowscape.
In the Spanish Civil War he’s been
allocated, to replace a dead soldier, one of a series of remote Nationalist
mountain stone watch-huts. Fresh from the Seminary, Suau doesn’t have much in
common with coarse fellow sentry Eric Francés who abuses him for oversleeping
and letting their fire go out and is derisive about Suau’s "priest
books". Unmotivated Francés could just as easily have found himself
on the Republican side, like his brothers in Madrid.
However out getting water Francés
discovers wounded girl Monika Kowalska who he brings back to the hut, not
unlike the animals in his snares, to add to their comfort, tying her up behind
the hut to keep her out of sight of donkey sergeant Chani Martín bringing
supplies.
Her papers reveal her to be a “roja”
foreign fighter. We get their back stories, Suau sexually abused, Monika,educated
and aware (but not able to cook), and Francés, desperate for news of his family
on the other side of the war.
All their values of are challenged. The
bleak monochrome winter terrain changes to spring in step with their own
personal thaw - get it! The ending is brutal.
Established editor Teresa Font, with a Jamon
Jamon and couple of de la Iglesias on her resumé is the most familiar name
on the credits. This one is more Film Festival material than the kind of
popular cinema that makes up the body of the current Spanish Film Festival. It
could have come from a different planet, let alone a different country.
An imposing achievement, stern &
thoughtful, The Exile is also approachable and involving. The hits just
keep coming.
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