looking for parallels

I'm not really happy with the UK's "live and let die" with Covid policy pretending everything can go back to normal, so I still don't go out much, but a new Almodovar movie was a good enough excuse to break my own Covid rules in a half-empty cinema on a Monday lunchtime screening. As it happens, the last time I had been inside a cinema before this was the previous Almodovar film, Pain and Glory, in August 2019.

So there are two films to discuss here, really, the double motherhood story at the core of the film (which would have made a perfectly reasonable full length film on its own), and the digging up the bodies of the civil war story wrapped around it and only flimsily attached to it. I'm thinking anybody watching it to learn about the missing casualties of the civil war will be disappointed. That topic would deserve a film (or many) on its own, and if Almodovar doesn't want to do that film that's fine by me. Other directors like Alex de la Iglesia have covered the madness and cruelty of that war and the trauma caused by it very convincingly.

At first, the title of the film and the maternal theme of the main story put me off a bit, as both Penelope Cruz and I are a bit too old for these things, but it did win me over with the generational contrast between the two women, and with the classic Almodovar combo of Penelope plus primary colours. Never fails. As usual, we get slogans to link us to the present day (ok, recent past) feminism, in this case it's Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's title "We should all be feminists" appearing on Penelope's t-shirt. Not sure when this was filmed (allegedly Almodovar had a script and a poster design ready ten years ago), but we're firmly in the pre-Covid era of the late 2010s, with SUVs and iphones all over the place.

So much for my random thoughts after first viewing - for a professional review, try Peter Bradshaw's in the Guardian.

palaeo beyond genomics

I've been covering the very exciting progress in ancient DNA studies for nearly 20 years now, and I'm not complaining, but, in order to persuade editors that they should publish even more of my ravings, I need to introduce new elements every once in a while. So it was rather handy that recent developments in palaeoanthropology have featured a few things that were molecular but not based on the genomes retrieved from ancient people's bones, including proteomes read from tooth proteins (which may allow us to travel a lot further back in time), microbiomes, and DNA from dirt with absolutely no trace of fossil remains.

And the Neanderthal teeth used in the dental microbiome study come from the cave of Sima de las palomas (near Murcia), where I've also been scraping around in the dirt for a while, a few years before the site started coughing up some very impressive Neanderthal skeletons.

Looking at it from an analytics perspective for a chemically minded audience, I've discussed these developments in my latest feature for Chemistry & Industry, which is out now:

Chemistry & Industry Volume 85, Issue 7/8, July-August 2021 Pages 23-26

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI - appears to be on open access right now

Lateral view of the mostly-complete skull of Zlatý kůň, which cannot be carbon-dated but has now been identified as the earliest modern human from Europe, based on recent admixture of Neanderthal ancestry.
Credit: Martin Frouz
Source

Oh, and Blogspot tells me that this is my 1999th published post. So let's party like it's 1999, and watch out for the millennium bug!

before Neanderthals and Denisovans

I have written quite a few pieces about Neanderthals and Denisovans in recent years, but not all that much about the earlier stages of human evolution. This was mainly because I usually covered molecular / genetic studies into prehistoric populations, beginning with the first attempts at the Neanderthal genome and leading up to today's remarkably rich, genetically based accounts of our prehistory.

The limited shelf life of DNA means that we aren't likely to see any comparable details regarding the populations and species that came before Neanderthals and Denisovans, the likes of Homo erectus and Australopithecus afarensis. However, researchers have now succeeded in getting protein sequences from teeth of human relatives up to 800,000 years old, which drives the molecular investigation of human evolution much deeper into the past than has been possible before. Which was a good excuse to expand the range of my coverage as well and look into the deeper layers of our evolution in my feature which is out now:

Digging deeper into human evolution

Current Biology Volume 30, Issue 9, 04 May 2020, Pages R371-R374

FREE access to full text and PDF download




Homo erectus remains have been found in Africa, Europe and Asia. This skull is from the Dmanisi cave in Georgia, where samples for successful proteomic analyses were also obtained. (Photo: Rama/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 FR).)

santa Maria amar devemos

The Cantigas de Santa Maria - 420 songs in mediaeval Galician (aka Galician-Portuguese) collected by Alfonso X. in the 13th century - are an important foundation of Galician culture, and one or two of them have been played (as instrumental tunes) at our Galician sessions as well. However, our harper who plays them from memory, had learned them without numbers or titles, so they were almost impossible to find.



I recently attended a seminar on the cantigas (the relevant paper is here), where I learned lots of things about their structures and storytelling. Also about the fundamentals - for instance, the images of musicians, like the one above, appear only in one of the four known manuscripts. Two others include illustrations relating to the stories of miracles told in nine out of every ten cantigas.

The seminar inspired me to look at the mystery of our harper's cantiga again and I discovered that the lovely database Cantigas de Santa Maria for singers has a forward arrow on the pages displaying the modern notation for each cantiga. Until now I had assumed that I had to access each one separately with several clicks each time, but in fact I can just flick through them. Which I did, and starting at number one, I found that the cantiga we play most often is actually number seven. Quick and easy - not sure if I'd have had the stamina to find it if it had been number 407.

So it's called

Santa Maria amar devemos

and here is a lovely version with karaoke text lines, so you can sing along (and unlike some other versions I found, the melody sticks very close to the version we play):




In other CSM news, I just acquired a big book of solo pieces for alto recorder (Altblockflötensolobuch by Barbara Hintermeier and Birgit Baude, Schott 2014), and that also contains two of the cantigas, namely

No. 353 Quen a omagen da virgen (lyrics video here)
No. 166 Como Poden (lyrics video here)

I really like the 353 as a recorder piece, haven't quite gotten my head round the 166 yet.

Our gaiteiro, David Carril says he can play No. 100, Santa Maria strela do dia, so I will learn that one as well. Here's a video where you can read the manuscript while listening to the music.


In terms of recordings, there are lots of them on YouTube, obviously. This channel has so many, it may well be all of them, but they are in no particular order and mixed with videos of other early music, so it's hard to tell. The ones I checked usually had the lyrics displayed in some form.

This video: Fiesta en el corte de Alfonso el Sabio combines recordings of some 14 cantigas by different artists with a large number of the musicians miniatures from the manuscript.

I have a CD by Ensemble Alcatraz, called Vision and Miracles (1988) which includes CSM 103, 333, 117, 34, and 42 along with an instrumental suite using several cantigas and some other medieval pieces.

The Dufay Collective has recorded a CD full of cantigas, which is called Miracles.

Estampie have recorded a few. No. 120 Quantos me creveren (the numbers ending in 0 are songs of praise as opposed to stories of miracles) is included in their "Best Of" CD (2007) and a few more are on their album Signum (2004) including Non e gran cousa (26), Non devemos (27) and Quen na virgen (this could be 186, 256, or possibly 59, 103, or 276 - I don't have this CD).

La Capella Reial de Catalunya have recorded a dozen cantigas with Hesperion XX and Jordi Savall, available on CD as "Cantigas de Santa Maria - strela do dia". I'm a bit confused as Amazon seems to think it dates from 2017, but since the millennium the ensemble has been known as Hesperion XXI, so I suspect it may be a rerelease of a 1990s recording. Oh, and somebody posted it on Youtube in 2013.

no pain all glory

Almodovar's Pain and glory (Dolor y gloria) is released in the UK today, and I went into the first showing in Oxford, at lunchtime today. (A grand total of 4 other people showed up too.) He's now the only Spanish director whose films reliably get released in UK cinemas (in contrast to these films that don't get shown here), so it's also a case of use it or lose it.

If I've got all my numbers crunched the right way, this is his 21st feature length film as a writer-director, and it's the 18th I've seen (I still need to catch up with some of the wilder ones from before 1988). So a few words are in order (also, this blog has an almodovar tag that needs feeding).

As the media (even in the UK) have widely reported, this one has Antonio Banderas playing a thinly disguised, ageing and ailing version of San Pedro himself, which is of course hilarious for those of us who still remember a barely adult Banderas in the very early Almodovar movies. We're anchored in a very up-to date present (watch out for graffiti representing the #metoo type slogan "hermana yo si te creo" which dates from 2018), looking back at the director's distant past, from his childhood to the early movies. Various clever tricks help to bring back the ghosts from the past, and it's all very warm-hearted, life-affirming and all that. As always, it doesn't harm to have Penelope Cruz on board, ironically playing San Pedro's mother.

All my favourite Almodovar films have female protagonists (Volver, La flor de mi secreto, Todo sobre mi madre, etc. ), but given that this one was about himself, he didn't really have that choice, and right now, just hours after seeing it for the first time, I think I like it almost as much as some of the great female-led ones. Having said that, I will go back and watch Volver for the 3rd time (at least - can't believe I've only seen it twice, must be a bug in the bookkeeping), and Julieta, also for the third time.

Anyhow. Enough of me rambling. Here's a proper review from Peter Bradshaw, who saw it at Cannes.

our Neanderthal heritage

I have a soft spot for Neanderthals, so it's always nice to see new insight coming out into what they left us, not just in terms of bones and artifacts, but also in our genomes. With genetic discoveries in the UK Biobank and the recent discovery of the genome of Denny, the child of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan, there was now enough material for a feature on the encounters and minglings between the three groups of ancient humans that were out and about in Palaeolithic Eurasia. Still no news on why two of them became extinct. Maybe they were just climate change deniers ...

My feature is out now:


Mingling with Neanderthals

Current Biology Volume 29, issue 4, pages R105-R107, February 18, 2019

FREE access to full text and PDF download


Oh, and in the process I also learned that there is now an entire book about the Neanderthal residents of the Sima de las Palomas cave, where firstborn and I spent a week helping Michael Walker's team with the excavations, many years ago:

The people of Palomas : Neandertals from the Sima de las Palomas del Cabezo Gordo, southeastern Spain
Erik Trinkaus; Michael J Walker
College Station, Texas : Texas A&M University Press, [2017]

back to Basque roots

Three years after Ma ma, Julio Medem has a new film out (in Spain), so I am building up excitement. From the trailer and the reviews in the Spanish press it looks like a welcome return to the cryptic complexity of his early films based in the Basque country, such a Vacas and Tierra, which I haven't really understood to this day ...

It's called El árbol de la sangre (The tree of blood), and here is what I could find about it:

IMDB

Julio Medem returns to his origins, says Milagros Martín-Lunas in El Independiente.

Old style Medem with the brakes taken off, says John Tones.

A compendium of his themes and obsessions, says Manuel Lombardo in the Diario de Sevilla.





My guess is that it will not be shown in UK cinemas, but watch this space!

estevanico's stories

review of:

The Moor’s account

Laila Lalami

I have a thing about the history around 1492 – the end of the reconquista (expulsion of Arabs and Jews from the Iberian peninsula) and the beginning of the conquest of the New World. Arguably, that’s where all our problems started, including slavery, global imperialism, never-ending wars allegedly about religion. One of my cultural reference points here is from Don Quijote - the scene on a market place in Toledo where Christians, Jews, and Moslems mingle and the narrator has no trouble finding a translator for an Arabic document when he needs one. The imperialism and nationalism emerging after the reconquista banished that kind of multiculturalism from Spain for centuries, and other European nations looked at monocultural Spain as an example.

Given this mild obsession, the Moor’s Account is perfectly positioned to attract my attention – it is set just after 1492, with the protagonist, an African Muslim slave getting involved in a Spanish expedition to Florida that goes catastrophically wrong. Estevanico is one of only four known survivors of a crew of several hundreds that set out from Sevilla in 1527. The other three have given reports that were recorded, but his weren’t, or they didn’t survive. Thus, Laila Lalami fills this gap and uses her imagination to figure out what he might have written.

History knows little about the real Estevanico (although he does have a decent Wikipedia entry), but Lalami has given him a childhood and nascent career as a merchant in Azemmour, Morocco, where (according to her guess) he sold himself into slavery in time of need. The value of freedom is a key theme of the novel, as is the power of storytelling. The latter is of course a favourite subject of almost everybody who writes, but it is handled very convincingly here. Storytelling saves Estevanico’s life multiple times, and the novel is also structured as a collection of stories.

Using the accounts of the other three survivors as a scaffold, Lalami also fills in significant events that the Spaniards may have plausibly swept under the rug, including cannibalism among starving groups of the shipwrecked party, their role as healers among the Native Americans (she hints that catholic authorities would have frowned upon that as suspected witchcraft), and marriages with Native women.

The resulting account looks very convincing as invented history and makes a lovely novel. Only occasionally did some English phrase that doesn’t exist in Spanish remind me of what I would consider its only weakness, namely that it is written in a language that Estevanico would have never encountered in his life. (Then again, the same applies to Robert Harris’s brilliant 3-volume biography of Cicero, which purports to be the lost work of his secretary, Tiro.)

In any case, with the links it draws between the Muslim world, Europe and the Americas, and the problems that were to overshadow centuries, it is a great novel not just about what happened after 1492, but about what went wrong in the last 500 years.



PS by crazy coincidence, while I was reading the book I discovered one of the sources that Lalami used at the flea market - Bernal Diaz, The conquest of New Spain, a beautiful hardback of the English translation for £1. Not entirely sure I'll actually want to read it as well, but it does have lovely illustrations ...

ma ma

UPDATE June 2016: UK release on June 24th! I'll just have to watch it again ...

Julio Medem’s eighth full length (fiction) film features an unexpected megastar in Penelope Cruz who did some of her best work with Pedro Almodóvar (Volver). Maybe they did a swap, as Medem’s early muse Emma Suarez stars in Almodóvar’s latest, Julieta.

Cruz plays a cancer patient who only has months to live and makes the most of it. Most of the time her character, still very much alive and lively, contrasts sharply with the sterile white background of hospital wards etc., and she has life to spare for the male characters surrounding her (too many blokes for my taste, perhaps), and even to create a new life.

If I don’t sound quite as jubilant as I did after Medem’s previous films, it’s probably due to the subject matter, which I’m not all that keen on, even though I admit that I’m getting to the age where one has to take mortality seriously, and Medem, who is a few years older than me, is probably right in addressing it at this point. But why oh why does the gynaecologist, master over life and death, have to look like David Cameron? That’s just a bridge too far.

Sweetening the bitter pill of mortality for the fans of his work are numerous allusions to his earlier films, including the use of white spaces (Los amantes del circulo polar), swimmers filmed from below (Lucia y el sexo), hypnotic countdowns (Caótica Ana), “Natasha” (Room in Rome), and more. There is even a plug for his book “Aspasia”, which in the film is credited to Alberto Lafont (Lafont being the surname of his mother, which is his second surname in the Spanish tradition). I know how satisfying it is to find that everything you do connects to everything else somehow, so I can’t blame him.

The title plays with the words for mum and breast, showing how the life affirmation and the death threat are both connected to the same gland.

I ordered the DVD from amazon.es

cover of the Spanish DVD (it does have the option of English subtitles)

galician folk

Since last summer, I got to know most of the regular folk sessions going on in Oxford city (thanks to the young folkie in the family). While I don't spend all that much time listening to folk, the democratic spirit meaning that I can just walk into a pub and join in is very attractive.

In the process, I discovered that Galician folk is my favourite variety. That’s music from the Northwest corner of Spain, the square that sits on top of Portugal – not to be confused with the region in Eastern Europe which for a short time bore the same name, I think the Habsburg Empire only renamed that area to annoy the Polish, or something along those lines.

Anyhow, so the traditional music from Galicia is really lovely, and it also knows a few keys other than G major. I’ll start a new tag on it beginning with this master post listing some of the links I have discovered so far.

local:

Oxford Pandeireteiras

Galician session at Oxford

Xogara – Oxford-based band mixing Galician and other influences

global:

Radio galega: son galicia Galician music 24/7 - two other radio channels in Galician also available via this page.

Xeitona – YouTube tutorials - also on blogspot, twitter, facebook ...

Luar na Lubre – a Galician band that became famous worldwide in the 90s after collaborating with Mike Oldfield, but is still active today.

Ghastas pista? news from the Galician folk scene

Folkoteca galega (tunes database)

Video evidence to follow soon ...

PS In the process I also discovered the Galician language, about which I'll rave some other time.

more films we're not allowed to see

UPDATE 16.6.2024 - the new list for films from 2021 onwards is here: films not shown - part 3

Back in 2010 I started a blog entry listing interesting (mostly European) movies that did not get a cinematic release in the UK. Many updates later, this entry has become just a little bit unwieldy, with two lists running in opposite directions, so I suspect I’m the only one who still finds anything in that entry (although it has been viewed more than 2500 times and is among the five most-viewed entries of all time).

Thus, I decided to start from scratch with a clean slate and just one list of films running chronologically forward, so starting with the earliest ones. I’ll start with films produced in 2012, because that’s where the old review/appreciation list fizzles out (unlike the watch list, which also included films that were more recent and those that I hadn’t seen yet). Within each year, the films that I actually managed to see are listed first. Oh, and female directors are now also highlighted in bold font (work in progress).

So, without further ado, off we go:

Camille redouble (Camille rewinds) - France 2012, Noémie Lvovsky - Charming if slightly illogical time travel story featuring the director in the lead role. It was - released in around a dozen countries but no UK date in sight.

La fille de nulle part - France 2012, Jean-Claude Brisseau - this low-budget ghost story looks like poor old Brisseau is now reduced to filming in his own flat and playing the lead himself, but it is still interesting.

Mapa para conversar (A map for love) - Chile 2012, Constanza Fernandez, starring Andrea Moro, Mariana Prat, Francisca Bernardi - three women in a cute little chamber piece mostly set on a small boat. Restrictions clear the mind, as one of the characters says. Available on DVD from the lovely peccadillo pictures.

Des morceaux de moi (Pieces of me) - France 2012, Nolwenn Lemesle, starring Adele Exarchopoulos (before she became famous in that other role) - growing up in a dysfunctional family in the middle of nowhere (in this case Picardie, northern France) can be hell, as the contrast between Adele Exarchopoulos' character, Erell, and everything around her demonstrates. Erell tries to cope by recording a video diary of her daily life, thus locking up her teenage trauma in a little box which she can eventually leave behind.

La vie d'une autre (Another woman's life) - France 2012, Sylvie Testud, starring Juliette Binoche, see my review here.

El amigo aleman (The German friend) - Germany, Argentina 2012, Jeanine Meerapfel, starring Celeste Cid - a slightly confused story of confused identities as the the daughter of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany gets entangled with the son of Nazi refugees from postwar Germany, with both protagonists moving back and forth between Argentina and Germany.The fact that in both families the parents talk German to their children who answer back in Spanish reflects the mix-up. I do have a soft spot for Sulamith though, played by Celeste Cid.

Una pistola en cada mano - Spain 2012, Cesc Gay - Shown in Germany (Ein Freitag in Barcelona), and at the London Spanish Film Festival 2013.
Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the world) Germany 2012, Detlev Buck. Adaptation of Daniel Kehlmann's bestselling novel.
Klip (Clip) - Serbia 2012, Maja Milos
Weil ich schöner bin - Germany 2012, Frieder Schlaich
3 - Uruguay, Argentina, Germany 2012 - Pablo Stoll - oops, there are too many movies called 3, I was looking for this one and first found the one below, and got all confused.
Tres - Ecuador, Argentina, Germany 2012
3 Zimmer/Küche/Bad (Move) - Germany 2012
Baad el Mawkeaa (After the Battle) - France / Egypt 2012
Después de Lucía - Mexico / France 2012
A perdre la raison - Belgium 2012, Joachim Lafosse, starring Emilie Dequenne
Buscando a Eimish - Spain 2012, Ana Rodríguez Rosell, starring Manuela Vellés, Emma Suárez - shown at the London Spanish Film Festival 2012
Joven y alocada - Chile 2012, Marialy Rivas
Goltzius and the Pelican Pelican Company - UK 2012, Peter Greenaway

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Angélique (I) - France 2013, Ariel Zeitoun - A fresh-looking new adaptation of the bestselling history romances by Anne and Serge Golon. I admit I watched part of it during travels in a hotel room and kind of liked it, so I ordered the DVD. Review to follow.

Landes - France 2013, François-Xavier Vives, starring Marie Gillain - gloomy reflections on life, boredom and social problems in the vast pine forests near Bordeaux set in the early 20th century. Compare and contrast with Therese Desqueyroux, starring Audrey Tautou, which did get a UK release.

Jack et la mécanique du coeur (Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart) - France 2013, Stéphane Berla, Mathias Malzieu - interesting CGI-fairy tale in a surreal steampunk-style setting. One could spend hours unpicking cultural references from Jules Verne through to modern ones.

Las brujas de Zugarramurdi (Witching and bitching) - Spain 2013, Alex de la Iglesia, starring Carolina Bang, Carmen Maura. Shown at various festivals in the US and UK. Too much horror and buddy movie for my tastes, so I won't even attempt to review it, but here's the New York Times' take on it.

Arrêtez-moi - France 2013, Jean-Paul Lilienfeld, starring Sophie Marceau, Miou-Miou. Powerful and disturbing chamber drama about lives destroyed by domestic violence.

Chez nous, c'est trois! - France 2013, Claude Duty, starring Noémie Lvovsky. Very cute little film with a funny sideplot relating to the age-old question of how many kisses people in France exchange for greetings, hence the title. The main plot is about a struggling film director played by Noémie Lvovsky, who in real life directed the equally charming Camille redouble just the year before (listed above) so it could also be read as a reflection on the lack of global success of that work.

Flores raras (Reaching for the Moon) - Brazil 2013, Bruno Barreto
Ayer no termina nunca (Yesterday never ends) - Spain 2013, Isabel Coixet - shown at the Berlin International Film Festival 2013, and at the London Spanish Film Festival 2013
La marche - France 2013, Nabil Ben Yadir, starring Hafsia Herzi - I only know about this film because the trailer is on a DVD I own, probably one I bought in France.

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Todos estan muertos - Spain/Germany/Mexico 2014, Beatriz Sanchis, starring Elena Anaya - the first full-length feature from Sanchis is a nice little film on a former pop singer traumatised by the accidental death of her brother and bandmate. Mecano may have been a musical inspiration. Only released in Spain and Mexico, and shown at a few festivals.

Les yeux jaunes des crocodiles - France 2014, Cécile Telerman, starring Emmanuelle Béart - a spirited defense of authors' rights, in a way. Based on the best-selling novel by Katherine Pancol.

Die geliebten Schwestern (Beloved sisters) - Germany 2014, Dominik Graf, starring Hannah Herzsprung. Young poet Friedrich Schiller's love life - it's complicated.

On a faillie être amies (Almost friends) - France 2014, Anne Le Ny, starring Karin Viard, Emmanuelle Devos, Roschdy Zem. Some nice scheming going on in this female-led comedy where the male chef serves as a trophy husband.

Arrête ou je continue (If you don't, I will) - France 2014, Sophie Fillières, starring Emmanuelle Devos, who gets lost in the woods and finds herself. Otherwise somewhat depressing relationship breakdown.

Respire (Breathe) - France 2014, Mélanie Laurent - shown at lots of festivals around the world, released in half a dozen countries. Managed to catch it on TV5 at some point but memories are evaporating fast. Felt kind of ethereal.

Ocho apellidos vascos (Spanish affair) - Spain 2014, Emilio Martínez Lázaro - only shown at the London Film Festival 2014.
Sous les jupes des filles - France 2014, Audrey Dana
Marie Heurtin (Marie's story) - France 2014, Jean-Pierre Améris, starring Isabelle Carré
Week-ends - France 2014, Anne Villacèque - released in Germany as "Wochenenden in der Normandie"
Au fil d'Ariane (Ariane's thread) - France 2014, Robert Guédiguian - released in Germany in Dec 2014 as "Café Olympique - Ein Geburtstag in Marseille"
Las insoladas (Sunstrokes) - Argentina 2014, Gustavo Taretto - released in Germany in August 2015.
Qui vive (Insecure) - France 2014, Marianne Tardieu, starring Adele Exarchopoulos
Une rencontre (A chance encounter) - France 2014, Lisa Azuelos, starring Sophie Marceau.
Tu veux ... ou tu veux pas? (Sex love and therapy) - France 2014, Tonie Marshall, starring Sophie Marceau (I'm on a roll adding all of Sophie Marceau's movies since 2012, as none of them have been shown in the UK.)

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Jamais contente - France 2015, Emilie Deleuze - starring nobody I've ever seen before, this is a 21st century version of La Boum where the girl gets to sing in a band rather than going to a party. I wanted her band to be more punk though.

Qui c'est les plus forts? (You'll never walk alone) - France 2015, Charlotte de Turckheim, starring Alice Pol, Audrey Lamy. Charming comedy ticking off all the social issues of our time, maybe too obvious in its box ticking, but extra kudos to the director for casting herself in an unlikable role.

Je suis a vous tout de suite (I'm all yours) France 2015, Baya Kasmi, starring Vimala Pons. Billed as a comedy about a woman who can't say no, it has some rather dark undertones too, but overall manages to keep a warm tone and feelgood vibe. I didn't know Vimala Pons before, will have to watch out for other work. Intriguingly, she did an earlier short film with Baya Kasmi, called "J'aurais pu être une pute" which could almost be connected to this film.

Journal d'une femme de chambre (Diary of a chambermaid) - France 2015, starring Léa Seydoux, shown at the Berlinale, all of which is sadly no guarantee that we will get to see it here (except in the French Film Festival UK showing in a small number of cities.)
Mi gran noche (My great night) - Spain 2015, Alex de la Iglesia, starring Carolina Bang.
Le gout des merveilles - France 2015, Eric Besnard.
Go home - France 2015, Jihane Chouaib
Je suis un soldat - France 2015, Laurent Larivière
La taularde (Jailbirds) - France 2015, Audrey Estrougo, starring Sophie Marceau.

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Corps étranger (Foreign body) - France/Tunisia 2016, Raja Amari, starring Sarra Hannachi. Very intimate portrait of one refugee's story.

À tous les vents du ciel (Twisting fate) - France 2016, starring Noémie Merlant. Yes, she may be a bit of a manic pixie dream girl stereotype, but the film is amazing in the extent to which it focuses on her and lets all male characters drop by the wayside. (Update April 2022: just spotted the name of Noémie Merlant here, who later shot to fame with portrait d'une jeune femme en feu, I hadn't made the connection at all, and she plays a character much younger than her real age here)

Rupture pour tous (Love is dead) - France/Belgium 2016. Charming and timely little comedy involving nobody I've ever heard of before.

Fleur de tonnerre (Poisoning angel) - France 2016, Stéphanie Pillonca, starring Déborah François - brilliant and quite a bit scary, see my review. IMDB lists no foreign releases at all - not the image of Brittany and of French women that people want to project ...

Maman a tort (Trainee day) - France 2016, starring Emilie Dequenne - bookended by fleeting party scenes reminiscent of La boum, a 14-year-old girl has her moral compass comprehensively crushed by a week-long work-experience at her mum's insurance company. Bottom line: yes capitalism is evil but just play along and find somebody weaker who can suffer so you don't have to. I might have to channel that anger into a separate blog entry.

O Perfume da Memória - Brazil 2016, Oswaldo Montenegro - amazingly stylish chamber piece in the spirit of Room in Rome and En la cama. Montenegro appears to have made it with his own resources and released it free on YouTube. See my review here.

Sex cowboys - Italy 2016, Adriano Giotti. Mildly interesting little no-budget movie made with people who don't even have a profile picture on IMDB. Selling out your sex life on only fans or whatever the 2016 precursor was comes with unintended consequences. Note that the girl gets a complex character, while the boy is mainly there as the love interest.

Egon Schiele: Tod und Mädchen (Death and the maiden) - Austria / Luxembourg 2016
Paula - Germany 2016, Christian Schwochow. A biopic of painter Paula Modersohn-Becker.
Marie Curie - France 2016, Marie Noelle.
Vor der Morgenröte - Stefan Zweig in Amerika (Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe) - Germany 2016
Orpheline - France 2016 - starring Adele Exarchopoulos, Adele Haenel, Gemma Arterton.

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Luna - France 2017, Elsa Diringer, starring Laëtitia Clément - A male victim of a gang assault and a female member of the assaulting gang meet again, a love story as an almost-thriller due to the dark secret lurking in the past. Impressive work from unknown young actors.

Aus dem Nichts (In the fade) - Germany 2017, Fatih Akin - UK release June 2018!!! - on time for the end of the court case against the neo-nazi terror group NSU, the real-life inspiration behind the story.

Plonger (Diving) - France 2017, Mélanie Laurent, starring Maria Valverde. Ignore the trailer, the film is much more interesting than the trailer suggests.

La belle et la meute (Beauty and the dogs)- France 2017, Kaouther Ben Hania, starring Mariam Al Ferjani. Haunting depiction of the aftermath of a rape not shown - it's all to be read from the face of Mariam Al Ferjani.

Prendre le large (Catch the wind) - France 2017, Gaël Morel, starring Sandrine Bonnaire and Lubna Azabal. A textile company moves production from France to Morocco - one of the workers takes up the insincere offer to keep the job and move along. I'm sure I've seen another French film with a small group of workers moving after their jobs ... ah, found it, it's actually from the same year but I had forgotten to include it in this list after I watched it, so adding it now below:

Crash Test Aglaé - France 2017, Eric Gravel, starring India Hair, Yolande Moreau, Julie Depardieu. In this case it's a car factory relocating to India, and the heroines take a car to follow their jobs in easterly direction.

Djam - France 2017, Toni Gatlif, starring Daphne Patakia. Kind of a road movie without transport, and the title character trying to get from Lesbos to Istambul and back. A lot of spontaneous and informal music making happens on the journey otherwise marked by troubles and tribulations. Also dealing with the issue that many refugees have been risking their lives in the attempt to get from Turkey to Lesbos. Some similarities with Tony Gatlif's 2004 movie Exils, which is also set on the EU's southern border, namely between Spain and Morocco.

La mélodie - France 2017, Rachid Hami. This one is based on an earlier Brazilian movie called The violin teacher. Said teacher leads a bunch of kids in a disadvantaged suburb of Paris from zero to a performance at the Phiharmonie. Unlike the treatment such stories get in Hollywood, we don't have a love story thrown in and get only the bare bones of biographical background on the protagonists, which I think is a deliberate choice to show that once they caught the music bug, the project became the most important thing to them, so everything else has to fade into the background.

La lengua del sol (the tongue of the Sun) - Mexico 2017, José Luis Gutiérrez Arias. Lovely little film about the end of the world, so very topical in this day and age, also a nice chamber play in the style of Room in Rome and En la cama. See my review here.

Rodin - France 2017, Jacques Doillon, starring Vincent Lindon and Izïa Higelin
Le Semeur (The sower) - France 2017, Marine Francen - a 19th century man-sharing plot in a village where only women survived the war.

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El arbol de la sangre - Spain 2018, Julio Medem. See my review here. Medem returns to his Basque roots, which are probably too obscure for UK distributors.

Madame Mills, une voisine si parfaite - France 2018, starring and directed by Sophie Marceau. Wouldn't normally consider watching a comedy with Pierre Richard, but loved this one, see my review here.

Ma mère est folle (My mother is crazy) - France 2018, Diane Kurys, starring Fanny Ardant. Charming and stylish, even though maybe a bit too close to home ...

Joueurs (Treat me like fire) - France 2018, Marie Monge, starring Stacy Martin. Dark stuff from the world of underground gambling, with a compelling lead.

La belle et la belle (When Margaux meets Margaux) - France 2018, Sophie Fillières, starring Sandrine Kiberlain. The 20 and the 45-year-old version of Margaux cross paths and the older tries to be helpful. It is never revealed which rip in the space-time continuum supposedly made this possible, but the encounter is fun to watch.

Sofia - France/Morocco 2018, Meryem Benm'Barek-Aloïsi. Life is complicated for an unmarried woman giving birth in Casablanca, Morocco. There is no good solution, but the female family members stick together and muddle through somehow, which is more disturbing than uplifting, but I found the grumpy young mother in denial (Maha Alemi) very watchable.

Victor et Célia - France 2018, Pierre Jolivet, starring Arthur Dupont, Alice Belaïdi. Given that I have no interest in hair and beauty salons, there is an amazing number of French films set in this environment that I actually like, and this one joins the ranks of Venus Beaute and Caramel. Alice Belaïdi is a revelation, she also had a smaller role in Les tribulations d'une caissière, 2011.

La dernière folie de Claire Darling - France 2018, Julie Bertuccelli, starring Catherine Deneuve and her daughter, Chiara Mastroianni. Charming and surreal drama about letting go, kind of fits my age now.

Normandie nue (Naked Normandie) - France 2018, Philippe Le Guay
Amoureux de ma femme - France 2018, Daniel Auteuil, starring Adriana Ugarte. Released in Germany in October 2018.
Sin rodeos (Empowered) - Spain 2018. Shown at the London Spanish Film Festival in September 2018, but no release date scheduled at that time.
Un homme pressé - France 2018, starring Fabrice Luchini, Leïla Bekhti.
L'amour est une fête - France 2018, Cédric Anger
LikeMeBack - Italy/Croatia 2018, Leonardo Guerra Seràgnoli

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Damien veut changer le monde - France 2019, Xavier de Choudens. Charming comedy on illegal ways to help migrant kids stay. Outside France it has been released only in Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco.

Tambour battant - Switzerland 2019, François-Christophe Marzal - with a bunch of unknown actors, this is a musical fable about the incursion of modernity into a Swiss mountain village. Women get the vote (it's 1970!) and the rebel faction of the village band uses modern contraptions like saxophones and tambourines.

Une fille facile - France 2019, Rebecca Zlotowski. Coming of age story set in the obscene wealth of Cannes marina. Not quite sure what to make of this.

Poissonsexe - France 2019, Olivier Babinet, starring India Hair. I got the impression that this was a very strange film, set in a near future where marine life faces extinction and humans may also struggle keeping reproduction going? I only gave it half my attention while doing something else though, so I may have missed some of the subtle clues.

Fabuleuses (Fabulous) - Canada 2019, Mélanie Charbonneau. Fabulous film about three young women, one is a successful influencer, one wants to be her, and one wants to be a professional cellist and objects to the whole influencer nonsense. I was very grateful that the young cellist plays the prelude of the fourth suite, not the one of the first which you'll hear in every other movie that has ever included a cello. I only understood 10% of the dialogues in français québécois (some characters were more understandable than others), so may have to watch it again to see if I can decipher a bit more. I think part of the problem is that it is both heavily coloured by English and invaded by English vocab, but as both the English and the French part of the speech sound the same to me I struggle to keep up with the switches.

Le mystère Henri Pick - France 2019, Rémi Bezançon, starring Fabrice Luchini, Camille Cottin, Alice Isaaz. Lovely and very bookish film, see my review here.

J'irai où tu iras - France 2019, Géraldine Nakache, starring Leila Bekhti. I'd watch Leila Bekhti in anything, and she does a good job here as the alien recently landed on her sister's planet of Celine Dion superfans (the title is from a Dion song too). I resented the talking cars and the attempts at comedy on the back of disability.

Curiosa - France 2019, Lou Jeunet, starring Noemi Merlant. Interesting reflections on the early adoption of photography as a medium torn between poetry and pornography. For that alone I would not mind watching it several times. People more interested in the human stories may find the characters a bit cold and aloof perhaps.

Tu mérites un amour (You deserve a lover) - France 2019, starring, written and directed by Hafsia Herzi

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In corpore - Australia 2020, Sarah Jayne and Ivan Malekin, starring Clara Francesca. Available on Youtube. Four couples around the globe (Melbourne, Malta, Berlin, New York) are having very loving physical intimacy, but trouble elsewhere in their relationships. Just stay in bed, I would say. Also, possibly the first time I have been exposed to spoken Maltese, which is a very intriguing language as it is a mixture of Romance and Arabic heritage.

Cigare au miel - France 2020, Kamir Aïnouz starring Zoe Adjani. Coming of age story of Selma who faces slightly mixed expectations from her professional parents of Algerian background (somewhat autobiographical from writer/director Kamir Aïnouz). Zoe Adjani (Isabelle's niece) is a revelation, shame that this film didn't spark a breakthrough for her.

Jumbo - France 2020, Zoé Wittock, starring Noémie Merlant, shown at Sundance 2021.

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last updated 20.8.2026

One of our lovely independent cinemas here, not their fault that they're not getting all these films. (Own photo)

origins of our species

Last month I attended a fascinating symposium on human evolution at Sitges, near Barcelona. I got the impression that the origins of our species are getting more complicated with all the new information coming in from genetic and archaeological finds. So my latest feature is called:

The complicated origins of our species

Current Biology Volume 24, Issue 8, pR295–R298, 14 April 2014

and it's on free access now until the next issue appears:

HTML text (with sharing buttons, hint, hint)

PDF download

Full moon rising over Sitges beaches and harbour (own photo).

not showing at a cinema near you

I only just discovered that the annual statistical yearbook from the BFI (British Film Institute) has statistics on everything, including the foreign language films that I would like to see in cinemas but that fail to turn up. So I had a good look at the BFI statistical yearbook 2013:

According to the country of origin stats on page 17, 151 (23%) of the movies released in the UK in 2012 came from other European countries (198 from the US, 162 from the UK). I have a nagging suspicion that figure includes one-off showings at festivals or at specialised cinemas like the Ciné Lumière at the Institut Français in London. At least the number that made it to Oxford cinemas is definitely 5 times smaller. They account for 4.8 % of box office takings, but of course one could argue endlessly which is the hen and which the egg in this story.

Also see the chapter 5, "Specialised Films", which includes specific stats on foreign language films. Apparently, 230 films in 32 foreign languages were released in 2012, accounting for 35.5% of all releases, but taking only 2% of the box-office. Allegedly the number has increased from 96 in 2001, which is contrary to my impression. This is in line with an increase in total releases (and in audience figures), however, so the percentage is stable at 35.5%

Some specific languages (including all that have 10 or more films): French 49 films (I am sure that fewer than 12 were shown here! ), Hindi 44, Tamil 21, Malayalam 19, Turkish 13, Punjabi 10, Spanish 10, German 8, Arabic 4, Italian 3, Mandarin 2, Dutch 1.

On average, foreign language films play at 20 sites on their widest release – the figure for English language films is 159. Commercially most successful foreign language film in 2012 was Untouchable. Three other French films made the top 10 (of non-Hindi foreign language box-office): Amour, Rust and Bone, The kid with a bike (I actually saw this one!). The cumulative stats for the last 12 years have Amélie in 3rd and Volver in 7th position.

Speaking of which, German film “Die Wand” shows exactly once at the Phoenix Picturehouse in Oxford, next Tuesday at 6pm. The same slot will host Fernando Trueba's The artist and the model later this year, which allegedly is on release from this week. After a tweet from me, the distributor, Axiom films, pointed me to the list of "tour dates", so you can check if it comes near you.

Londoners also have the benefit of the annual London Spanish Film Festival at the Ciné Lumière, which will run from September 27th to October 9th this year.

anonymously yours

Back in 2003, the web was a very different place – there was no facebook, and I used to socialise on the Shakira forum where at that point people still went by pseudonyms and didn’t show their faces except after you’d won their trust. I got to know quite a few lovely people this way, mainly by exchanging written words, and it always intrigued me how we influenced each other’s lives just through writing. I always wanted to write a movie script about that experience, but I didn’t quite have the right address book to make this sort of thing work.

Over time, I had the pleasure of meeting a few of my forum friends in real life, among them Ana Esther from Spain who spent a few months in Ireland and came over on a night coach to stay with my family for a weekend:

We met again for a concert in Madrid, but then lost touch, except for google+ which we both hardly use at all. Checking google+ this week, I found a link to one of her videos (she’s studied audiovisual communication) and through that discovered an earlier video where she examined the issue of anonymity in online chat. A boy who pretends to be a girl chats with a girl who pretends to be a boy. And when they meet up and discover their mutual deception, they look extremely cute and embarrassed.

Ana Esther wrote the script and plays the girl, check it out (Spanish only, I’m afraid), I love it to bits:

PS I'm basking in the warm glow of the illusion that I might have provided 0.0001% of the inspiration for this, even though I've never pretended to be a girl. Still, my nick, pensandoenti, may have come across as a bit girly, I suppose?

castillos de cartón

This is a lovely movie about three students trying to find their way in art, love/sex, and life in general, and I reckon it shows about equal parts of these three areas. You wouldn’t be able to tell from the cover of the UK DVD, which focuses on one of these and obviously tries to sell the film as porn, which it clearly isn’t. This is underlined by the very unsubtle English title, "3some". I think the original title, Castillos de cartón, is to be understood along the lines of “castles in the air”. The script is based on a novel by Almudena Grandes with the same title (see book review below).

The three characters are set apart from mainstream society not just by their creative urges but also by their unusual 2+1 love life, which they don’t dare to spell out to their parents. This isolation increases the pressure on each of them to find fulfilment within that triangle. To me, this was the most important aspect, and it was acted very convincingly. The art could have been used even more – I love the triangular arrangement where they draw portraits of each other, but their art isn’t really used to show how they see each other.

Actress Adriana Ugarte also appears in Lo contrario al amor (which was shown at the London Spanish Film Festival this year (but I missed it) and in the earlier film El juego del ahorcado. Will have to check those out ...

Can't bear to reproduce the UK cover, so here's the spanish one, which I will at some point print off to replace the one I have now:

amazon UK - they sell the horrid UK edition a lot cheaper, though.

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PS (23.11.2012): review of the book:

Discovering the book after having seen the movie isn’t an ideal situation, but as we live on an island that seems to be a million miles away from continental Europe, I wouldn’t have heard of the book otherwise. It hasn’t even been translated into English.

This is a slim novel under 200 pages, but it still has some intriguing layers of complexity. On top of the plot of the movie, the love triangle set in the 1980s, it has a noughties level as well. It starts with one of the protagonists calling the second to deliver the news of the suicide of the third. On that premise, which understandably makes the protagonists think of the past, the story is related in flashbacks.

There are also some formal subtleties which I quite enjoyed. For instance, the text has four parts, titled el arte, el sexo, el amor, and la muerte (the fourth, death, was dropped in the film, but the rest agrees with my three-part description above). Each of the parts starts with a statement concerning the number 3, reflecting, of course the status of their relationship:

3 is an odd number;
3 is a peculiar number; (not sure if that’s what she meant with “aparte”)
3 is an even number;
3 isn’t a number after all.

And there are other elements like these hidden in the text, echoes, reflections, repetitions, contradictions, which I rather like, and which I’m sure will keep students in Spain busy for a while.

I think Grandes succeeds in making the artistic mind accessible. I’m a great fan of everything that at least tries to explore how creativity works and what makes artists tick, and this was an interesting addition to the relevant works I knew. Sadly, Grandes doesn’t describe in detail what the art of the most successful of the three artists looks like (or did I accidentally skip a page?). In the movie, his breakthrough moment is when he covers a huge canvas entirely with red paint, but I found no reference to that in the book.

What I did find, however, is the song from which the title is derived. It is Para ti, by Fernando Márquez, and it dates from 1995, so its use in the story is only mildly anachronistic.

The relevant lines, which are quoted in the book, are:

Para ti, nos buscamos el paraíso,
nos cocinamos melodías con su charme,
nos olvidamos de los críticos seniles,
nos encerramos en castillos de cartón.

Anyhow. A lovely little novel. Available in Spanish and in German, but not yet in English, so if anyone wants to push for a translation …

en la cama

Germany/Chile 2005
Dir.: Matías Bize
Cast: Blanca Lewin, Gonzalo Valenzuela

The film that inspired “Room in Rome” would be interesting in its own right, but is even more intriguing when one sees it after Medem’s version of events. It is even more confined to the bedroom (here in a motel in Chile), and the film makes fun of this constraint by bringing up the old children’s game where one is not allowed to touch the floor, restricting the movements of the two characters even further.

Although the dialogue is completely different, the characters can easily be aligned with Medem’s cast. Bruno is in certain ways like Alba, and Daniela clearly inspired Natasha – and both conceal the same piece of information until quite late in the movie.

The cast consists exclusively of the two people in the room (so in the difficult moments one can think of Sartre and conclude that hell is the other person). We don’t even hear the voices of people calling the characters on their mobiles, and we have to trust them on what they report – which may not be true, as trust is being a problematic issue in this story as in Medem’s.

I liked the cast, although, of course, no bloke on the planet could really compete with Elena Anaya. Blanca Lewin as Daniela is almost a Medem-like figure, she’s got something of the look of Medem’s female protagonists, and one can easily imagine how her performance caught his interest. So I would recommend it to anybody who liked Room in Rome (or Sartre’s Huis Clos ?). My DVD from Germany has a 12 certificate - if you convert that from Euro to Sterling and add the number of frames revealing nipples, it would probably end up at 18, if anybody bothered releasing the DVD in the UK (there is a region 1 DVD, released in 2008, not rated, cover shown below).

amazon.com

life is a mad circus

Review of (or, rather, a first attempt at figuring out):

Balada triste de trompeta (The last circus), Spain 2010, Alex de la Iglesia

based on DVD imported from France, as film was not released in UK.

I love Alex de la Iglesia’s knack for absurdity, and I don’t normally mind his over-the-top violence too much, as it is clearly described as absurd, so it’s just actors messing about with ketchup, as far as I’m concerned. So I do make an effort to get to see his films, even if it's sometimes tricky around here.

I suppose this one is about trauma handed down from the generation of the Spanish civil war to the next one, along with cultural traditions and the jobs of circus performers. Very normal in one way, but also completely pointless once you start to question it. As in the previous films I saw, there were lots of absurd details I liked in this film too, but I was somehow missing a positive element to balance it out. As the only female protagonist is variously beaten by one clown and kidnapped by another (just like in real life, come to think of it), I was missing a positive character, like the prostitute in 800 balas. The only relief we're getting here is the realisation that our real lives aren't quite as mad as the mad circus shown here.

Still no reason to censor it, as de la Iglesia clearly has meaningful things to say, even if he expresses them in unusual ways. For instance, the satirical depiction of Franco and his people will have been more meaningful for the domestic (and older) audience than for a foreign observer of post-Franco Spain like me. I'm looking forward to seeing what he will (one day) make of the absurdities of the current economic disaster that has befallen Spain.

I was intrigued to see the film uses a Spanish version of Je l’aime à mourir, by Francis Cabrel – wondering whether that’s what inspired Shakira to use it in the concert for the Live from Paris DVD. The film was released in Spain on December 17th, 2010, and the song showed up in the Paris concerts of June 13th and 14th 2011. You do the maths.

cover of the French DVD, which I ordered from amazon.fr. It doesn't have English subtitles though. There is a US edition available as region 1 DVD, under the title "The Last Circus"

Neanderthals old and new

Way back in the summer of 2003, Firstborn and I did some volunteer work helping to dig for Neanderthal remains in a cave in the Murcia district, Southern Spain. A single Neanderthal tooth that my daughter spotted was the most exciting thing that the hard work of 15 or so people produced during an entire week. There was also a femur head (the “ball” of the hip joint), but it was impossible to tell whether it was hominid or perhaps from a large mammal such as a deer. See my book The birds, the bees and the platypuses (pp77-80) for a more detailed account of our Neanderthal adventures.

I never went back to the cave and lost contact with the research team in the following years. Imagine my surprise then, as I researched an article on modern (genomic, imaging, etc.) methods of research into Neanderthals and found out that in the years 2005-2008, the very cutting where we had scraped around for a week had yielded skeletons with articulated parts of three Neanderthal individuals, found in an arrangement that suggests they may have been buried ritually (with their hands close to their heads, as has also been observed in other Neanderthal graves).

Given the slow progress of the excavation, which is carried out only during the summer months, we must have been less than a metre away from those skeletons. While there have been similar finds further north in Europe, this burial site is a first for the Mediterranean coast, and it may allow comparative studies re. how Neanderthals lived under different climate conditions. Sadly, however, attempts to retrieve DNA from the Spanish Neanderthals have remained fruitless. It appears that the genetic material doesn’t survive very well in the hot climate of southern Spain.

The discovery and excavation of the three skeletons is described in great detail in

M. J. Walker et al., Quaternary International 2011 (in press), doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2011.03.034

As the cleaning and detailed characterisation of each skeleton proceeds, individual studies will also become available. The first one appeared in September in PNAS:

M. J. Walker et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2011, 108, 10087

Oh, and my news feature on how genomics, imaging etc. is revolutionising palaeoanthropology is out in Current Biology today:

Virtual Neanderthals
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 21, R871-R873, 8 November 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.10.031

Abstract and FREE access to PDF file

Almodóvar’s Frankenstein

The skin I live in / la piel que habito

I guess the quickest way to define this film is “Almodóvar’s take on Frankenstein,” although it is loosely based on a different book, a novel by Thierry Jonquet. As I’ve seen a dozen of Almodóvar’s movies, most of them more than once, but zero Frankenstein movies, I’m coming to this junction from a different angle than most people in the English speaking world. So here are some thoughts on how the film fits in with the work of San Pedro (I unilaterally elevated him to sainthood in a previous blog entry, these catholics are sometimes too slow in recognising achievement).

The movie is in fact, Almodóvar through and through, in every part of it there are aspects that are familiar, from the medical / bioethical issues through to he (trans)gender, rape, and sexual identity themes. As these are natural parts of the story, they don’t feel like the auteur is quoting himself – it just amazes me every time that he can assemble a completely different story from what at first glance might appear to be the same building blocks. (Which strikes me especially as I don’t necessarily share his obsession with these recurring themes, and yet they win me over every time.)

There is one interlude where Almodóvar is in fact shamelessly citing himself and contrasting the shrill style of his early work with the mellower style he has adopted since “All about my mother.” It’s the sequence that features a man in a tiger carnival costume and references Kika among other early works. The tiger aside, the rest is all in very mature taste - just savour the interior decorations, worlds away from the women on the verge of a nervous breakdown, although everybody in this movie has good reasons to be on the verge of that or worse.

For fans of the early work it is, of course, a major occasion to welcome back Antonio Banderas, who last appeared in Women on the verge and in Tie me up, tie me down! I prefer not to think of what he did in those 21 years in between (am very busy erasing those spy kids movies from my memory), but it is good to have him back, even if he looks ten times older than the last time. He looks a bit like Sean Connery from some angles, maybe Almodóvar and Banderas should do a Bond movie together, now that would be interesting!

Another familiar face (for the aficionados of Spanish cinema, at least) is the female lead Elena Anaya, who had a supporting role in Julio Medem’s Sex and Lucia and a lead role in Room in Rome (and a small role in Talk to her, apparently, will have to watch that one again to find her). And we welcome back Marisa Paredes who starred in All about my mother and Flower of my secret.

The Frankenstein-esque story is interesting too, of course, not least because of all the bioethical dilemmas that we also have to confront here in the real world, but that wouldn’t necessarily have convinced me to watch the movie if it had arrived from somewhere else. It’s the way San Pedro does it. He could make a movie out of the phone directory of Madrid and I’m sure it would still be fascinating.




The skin I live in is on general UK-wide release from today (I was lucky to catch a preview last night). Full details at IMDB.

Peter Bradshaw's review in the Guardian (his second take, as he already reviewed it when it was shown at Cannes).

Medem medley

All seven of Julio Medem's feature films are mashed up in this six-minute clip, highlighting recurring themes. Must-see for all fans:

• A la carta
• > Especial Julio Medem en Versión española