Lo ha hecho otra vez...

Mike Mills hace pocas películas pero las que hace están llenas de sabios consejos para fortalecer las relaciones que más duran y probablemente las más importantes, las que mantienes con los que llegaron antes y los que vienen después de tí.

Esta vez, en 20th century women, Mills cuenta un fábula de su adolescencia, en la que aglomera cuatro generaciones, que difícilmente han podido coincidir bajo un mismo tejado en un verano californiano de 1979. La síntesis, una de las características del lenguaje cinematográfico, permiten recoger en un suspiro de algo más de una hora la esencia de estas cuatro generaciones que aquí bosquejo.

Dorothea se encuentra a sus 50, en una encrucijada cuando siente que su hijo adolescente se le empieza a escapar de las manos. La suya fue una generación nacida tras la gran depresión, para quien el tabaco no mata, sino que hace sexy y la música se baila, no necesariamente se escucha.

En su antigua casa destartalada cohabitan, a parte de su hijo, una punki que se dedica al arte y a desahogar su frustración en un club a ritmo de black flag; y un mañoso ebanista ex-hippie que da la bienvenida a cualquier mujer que tome la iniciativa llevándole a la cama.

Su hijo, comienza, al final de la película a desarrollar su propia identidad, observadora y sintetizadora de la mélange generacional que le rodea y a la que dedica el director esta película.

bit.lys or tellmethewholestory.includingthetinydetails.com

Not only I enjoy watching films, I also enjoy making perfume with my experiences of them. Squeezing each one, until I get the best of its essence and mixing it with other aromas that are completing or complementary.

Not satisfied with taking one genre at a time, in this post I will go wild, and will not respect a rule I have had for some time. I will just simply pick two films, shake them together, prove my point and show you all. I have recently watched two films I liked enough to immortalize in this connected space of mine.

Boyhood (2001-2014), is being celebrated as unique. Not quite, on top of my head I can think of The Story of the Children of Golzow (GDR 1960 - DE 2008); a documentary with similar intention and quite bizarre a resolution post-fall of the Berlin Wall. Attempts of this magnitude you can count with two or three fingers. Boyhood is so far the best achievement. For the sake of comparing it with the 45-hour GDR-series: the perspicacious summary of twelve years. So much so, that the less-than-three-hour film succeeds in leaving the spectator not only once, but at least twelve times a feeling of déjà-vu with his/her own life. I got to see this in a sneak preview a day before the German premiere recently. A film I have been expecting since I could not get a ticket in the Berlinale this February. Three months biting my nails have I been. And I will not tell you anything else. If by now you have not seen it, go see it and then come back… one) because you are already as late as the white rabbit, and two) because you may not be able to identify all the ingredients of my perfume. Strike two if your sense of smell is not very sharp and go see the movie.

Yesterday I watched James Dean (2001), a title I had repeatedly seen laying around streaming catalogues but had ignored. Basically, because I thought it was a nostalgic TV-documentary and not the reason everyone is talking about James Fanco so much that I already hate the man. This film has gone quite under the commercial radar, maybe due to an ambiguous poster? The more I look at it the less I am sure if it is the Dean James or the Franco James. This one belongs to one of my favorite genres, the biopic. And within the biopic, here is adding to my top 5 right there with gems such as Walk the line, W.E. and Bright Star. This film is already over 10 years old, but in my opinion quite pioneer in a time when biopics such as Ali (same year) were on. Aka: biopics that tell you the whole story including the tiny details making them unbearable epic-like attempts to turn real life into legend. Many would say: yes, James Dean was a legend, a shooting star that went by as fast as he arrived. Well this is exactly the strength of this small TV-film; in tiny moments it captures the whole essence of this strange-behaving and fascinating creature. I am afraid that magic is greatly achieved by the man I hate so much.

Putting one and one together, the point of my short and, as always, seemingly inconclusive analysis is not other than the observation that film —here defined as my favorite way to consume stories— has finally been affected by the storytelling reduced to a tweet or a status update. I don't mean this necessarily in a apocalyptic way or with a bit of criticism! Those five hours I spent with Mason and his family and both James's will remain in my memory for a long time; because I do not need the whole story including the details, but some bit.lys. Some ten minutes each year in Mason's life or five minutes in each of the three movie sets James Dean stepped into, were more than enough to reveal the whole story behind their characters. In other words, to tell a story too large to perceive by the naked eye or to reconstruct an undocumented instant in History; the key is, focus on that which most fascinates (you, by the way) and reduce it to its essence. That takes a good storyteller (in this case Richard Linklater and Mark Rydell) and time… sometimes twelve years.

Rip History

Where there's a good tasty history drama... Slomo Sand taught me with his 'Le XX siècle à l'écran' to take pride in saying "I learnt all I know from films". On the subject history I have always had a lot of immemories, but admit it, who doesn't? I certainly try to compensate for my lack of interest as a child in history; still today I come up each time with a period drama I'd rather spend my evening with, instead of a film based on today or tomorrow (looking retropectively towards cinema history, science fiction almost always looks better on paper).

I like history in shape of a fiction film or series partly due to the fact that my remembrance of (rigorous) history hour at school was a race against the other class which was always “a couple of decades ahead of us”; an effective excuse for our teacher to tin the story of mankind in three hours a week. Today, for me, history is great for having a timeline background if you are interested in understanding something; and you always have the web to find the relevant events that surrounded it, not that essential to really know it all, is it? Otherwise, I'd rather consume it in shape of novels or fiction films. Really, no shame in admitting that, once you take a look at a Spanish history book from the 1958 school curriculum; knowing that the generation who was made to believe that, is today ruling things anyways.

History with a pinch of fiction is the only way to re-create History (with a capital h), if you think about isn't it? I just finished tasting BBC history series 'Ripper Street' which has romance and is melodramatic to the core; both being most welcomed ingredients of my favourite gourmets. In the mix, an always refreshing but hard to combine touch of gore; all stewed together with a sprinkle of some great british humor. I devoured the 16 hours of Ripper Street during last month. I have to say, for being a rough piece of meat to swallow, it has not prevented a wonderful digestion.

Cast of Ripper Str. The line between the hero and the villain becomes thinner as the series develops

One of the fascinating things of this TV series is to discover its aromas... the 1890s is a fascinating and obscure time. The great empires of pre-modern Europe were vanishing while the population of the colonies' capitals were submerging in all sorts of undecent behaviours or keeping such idle and extravagant lifestyles that only a war could put end to... Great works of fiction were cooked under this stormy weather ('The picture of Dorian Gray' 1890 or' Dracula' 1897). This series takes superbly the temperature to the times not only in the infamous Londons' Whitechapel district with echos of what goes around in places far away such the morally repressed high society of New York af the 'Age of Innocence' or the exacervated expeditions that also frames Chaplin's 'The Gold Rush'. Not forgetting that it was also this time and place the cradle of what 'Dr. Zhivago' will suffer a couple of years later.

A part from putting under a magnifying glass London surrounding the birth of a yellow press obsessed with serial killers and elephant men, Ripper Street sets its day-to-day (or episode-to-episode) turns around profane and current issues such as marrital break-up, workaholism and brown-noserism, police and public administration corruption, drug and violence addiction, war trauma, even PTSD and of course, prostitution. Issues all drama series should touch, wrapped in the most best-selling genre of crime-fiction.

la generación blanco y negro

Por un breve instante volvió el blanco y negro a la pantalla. Pero no el blanco y negro de un ciclo retrospectivo de cine de los años cuarenta, sino el blanco y negro que en su día Wim Wenders reanimó de entre los muertos con "El cielo sobre Berlín" (1987) y ya antes el Maestro Woody Allen con "Broadway Danny Rose" (1984). Noah Baumbach y Greta Gerwig han podido haber confeccionado lo que a mi parecer es la voz de una generación y no lo digo esto desde una perspectiva cinéfilo-filantrópica, más bien lo digo bajo la perspectiva de esa generación. Si la historia del cine me dará la razón, únicamente el tiempo lo dirá.

Bruno Ganz y Peter Falk delante de un Imbiss

En el Düsseldorf del 68 Wenders pertenecía a una generación de alemanes nacidos tras una guerra que destruyó todo y crecidos en un lugar extraño, la reconstrucción, la presencia de los americanos, la ignorancia del pasado más próximo… sin duda un tiempo único y definitorio en el momento de hacerse mayor. Puede que por ello esta generación haya tardado más en crecer y no hasta los 40 busca Bruno Ganz respuestas a preguntas hacia su propia identidad en una estrella del cine americana (interpretada por Peter Falk).

Que Woody Allen creció en el mundo de su propia imaginación ya nos lo viene demostrando desde Bananas (1971), pero es Danny Rose quien intenta ganarse la vida como representante de bailarines de claqué cojos.

Danny Rose convenciendo

La fantasía que caracteriza la filmografía de estos dos cineastas no es fantasia SFX, sino la fantasía que nace de la imaginación, lamentablemente no caracteriza el cine de mi generación. Ahora nos toca hacernos mayores sin los surrealismos de Buñuel, ni la irresponsabilidad juerguista de John Huges.

Para Frances el final de los estudios y el camino hacia su sitio en la vida viene principalmente motivado por la decisión de su amiga del alma y compañera de piso durante la carrera, de mudarse con su novio… de repente el trabajo que ayudaba a completar la beca familiar no paga el alquiler, ni las conversaciones después de una fiesta ayudan a cumplimentar los papeles de declaración de la renta, el trabajo voluntario no reporta contactos suficientemente productivos y las borracheras aportan únicamente las miradas avergonzadas de los comensales que te acompañan. Por mucho que Frances con 30 años se aferre a su vida anterior es la vida quien la pone en su sitio y no es el que ella se había imaginado. Las buenas noticias es que resulta que es su sitio y el hecho de llegar a el sin estrategia ni premeditación, es el correcto, el que tiene que ser.

Frances se hace mayor

Frances, Greta y yo tenemos algo en común a parte de 1983, me gustaría saber qué es de sus vidas y que les va bien, porque así sabré que a mi también me irá bien.