Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 04/19/25

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, April 19, 2025

Belle Époque (Fernando Trueba, 1992)

Miriam Díaz Aroca, Maribel Verdú, Penélope Cruz, and Ariadna Gil in Belle Époque

Cast: Jorge Sanz, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Maribel Verdú, Ariadna Gil, Penélope Cruz, Miriam Díaz Aroca, Gabino Diego, Agustín González, Chus Lampreave, Mary Carmen Ramírez, Michel Galabru. Screenplay: Rafael Azcona, José Luis García Sánchez, Fernando Trueba. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Film editing: Carmen Frías. Music: Antoine Duhamel.

A sexy romp with a body count, Belle Époque is perhaps most remembered today for the speech director Fernando Trueba gave when he accepted the Oscar for best foreign language film. "I would like to believe in God so I can thank him, but I just believe in Billy Wilder. So thank you, Billy Wilder." What Trueba's film has in common with Wilder's oeuvre is a certain cynical edge. Even Wilder's funniest movies, such as Some Like It Hot (1959), get their edge from a recognition of the violence underlying comedy -- that film's cross-dressing protagonists, after all, are fleeing for their lives after the St. Valentine's Day massacre. And so the sensuous idyll that takes place in the Spanish countryside starts with the deaths of two policemen arresting the protagonist, Fernando (Jorge Sanz), during a period of comparative peace before the full outbreak of the Civil War. It continues with Fernando making love to Clara (Miriam Díaz Aroca) on the riverbank at the very spot where her husband drowned. And it reaches its conclusion just after the suicide of a disillusioned priest. Sex and death have rarely been more closely linked in what is intended as a romantic comedy. Trueba is not as skilled as Wilder was at maintaining the lightness of tone necessary to fend off the darkness, but he's pretty good at it.