Spanish Red
by Lostalley
I am on a movie binge again, after a long pause. Maybe, it’s the weather. Friday was a dreadful snow shower, but Saturday is 67 degree, balmy and sunny. Particularly warming are the gracious comments on my “An Enchanting Soundtrack.” It’s a small miracle for the like-minded to find each other amid the cosmic virtual world known as internet.
I watched “71” in theatre last night, a British thriller about an injured solider hunted by IRA (Irish Republican Army) in the turbulent 70s. It kept me seated throughout. By contrast, “Goodbye to Language”, a French 3D experimental by a venerable director, is a dismal disappointment. Out of the theatre under a cloudless sky this afternoon, I cursed the director, Jean Luc Godard, for taking my $14 to go through 80 minutes of artistic abuse. It seems the French, especially the film elite, are at loss. Whatever they put out in the recent years are little more than cinematic farce of bourgeois self-indulgence. By comparison, their northeastern neighbor, Spain, sticks to what they do best and got ahead. Pablo Almodovar has steadily secured his position as Spanish Cinema’s spokesman. I’ve seen most of his films. The last one I watched is “Talk to Her,” a female toreador’s resurrection tale. For Almodovar’s films, I care less about the story than the visual and music. Almodovar likes red color and sad music, which I think is quintessential of Spanish sensibility. The theme song, “Cucurrucu Paloma” (Dove), rendered by the Brazilian Bossa Nova singer Caetano Veloso, adds a sublime touch to this stylized melodrama.
Spain, to me, is a red fire. Like an extinct volcano, her emotion erupts when most unexpected and has the capacity of complete destruction. Flamenco, bullfighting, Dali’s paintings, Gaudi’s architecture, or even Basque separatist movement (ETA), all share one thing--tragic passion. Spanish Red is a sun wrapped in a desert storm, eerie, haunting and mindlessly beautiful. Chinese Red, on the other hand, is a flame cultivated in a fireplace, warm, cozy and predictably peaceful.
Spanish aesthetic always fascinates as well as scares me. Part of me thoroughly identifies with their raw passion, part of me ultimately yields to my Chinese serenity. Intriguingly, I see such contradiction coincidentally expressed by Dali and Almodovar. Dali’s fantastical surrealism stirs up an emotion in me in a way bourgeois French Impressionism, nihilistic German Expressionism, or materialistic American Modernism, can never do. Almodovar's idiosyncratic sensationalism dazzles me with a whimsical adolescent jubilation often lacking in the films of his European and American counterparts. To decipher Dali’s erotic paintings and Almodovar’s erratic films, you have to peel through the kitsch layers of superficiality to find an intensity that is both rare and pure.
03/22/2015, Maryland
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