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

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Showing posts with label Jordi Mollà. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jordi Mollà. Show all posts

Monday, September 8, 2025

Sound of the Sea (Bigas Luna, 2001)

Jordi Mollà and Leonor Watling in Sound of the Sea

Cast: Jordi Mollà, Leonor Watling, Eduard Fernández, Neus Agolló, Pep Cortés, Ricky Colomer. Screenplay: Rafael Azcona, based on a novel by Manuel Vicent. Cinematography: José Luis Alcaine. Art direction: Pierre-Louis Thévenet. Film editing: Ernest Blasi. Music: Piano Magic. 

A stranger comes to town and wins the hand of a young woman, but when he's lost at sea and ruled dead, she marries a rich man. Then after several years the stranger returns and meets secretly with the young woman, but they're discovered and the rich man takes his revenge. There's not much more to the plot of Bigas Luna's Sound of the Sea than that, although it's dressed up with some trappings of myth: The stranger is named Ulises (Jordi Mollà), evoking the Odyssey, and he woos Martina (Leonor Watling) with quotations from the Aeneid. But the characterization is sketchy: What drives Ulises to abandon Martina and their child and fake his death? What, other than a romantic urge, causes him to return? The film posits no retribution for the revenge by the rich man (Eduard Fernández). And it all concludes with a clumsy coda that seems to signify that love (or at least sex) survives death. It's often beautiful to look at, but not much more than that. 

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