There’s Life After Spock ….
Now that you’ve seen J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek, the prequel to the show that launched a thousand sequels, you might be wanting to see two films that have just as much imagination and far lower advertising budgets (left, Rudo y Cursi).
Star Trek is clearly a product that can be expected to be one of America’s stronger exports this year – not that there’s much competition. This flagship franchise of the “knowledge economy” that now seems invested with as much hope as money didn’t bring surprises. Nor did it economizes on explosions. There are enough of them to destroy the World Trade Center or any other iconic location more times than you could count. And there are some glittery new faces playing earlier versions of the old faces that you know from the television show. Yes, Leonard Nimoy is back as an old sage. The script is about family and loyalty. And it’s making lots of money. Surprised?
Family is also a theme in Revanche (revenge in French), from Austria, which opened this week, but director/screenwriter Gotz Spielmann finds an odd way into it. Unlike Star Trek, whose merits I still don’t get, it’s neither sanctimonious nor celebratory. At first it seems like an Austrian Badlands, as ex-con brothel worker Alex (Johannes Krisch) falls in love with the Ukrainian prostitute Tamara (Irina Potapenko) with whom he’s been having wild sex. Naturally, we get a look at the sex industry in Austria and other countries where East European women are a seemingly inexhaustible source of cheap and exploitable labor. It’s one of Europe’s many immigration scandals – as present in Paris and London as it is in Vienna. His composure collapses when he sees her beaten by a thug at the orders of his boss — he sneaks her out of a hotel, and decides to rob banks to give them something to live on. It’s Bonnie and Clyde, although this Clyde’s only functionality is sexual, in the most ordinary of Austrian settings.
Yet as they’re driving away from his first heist at a small-town bank, when a policeman has taken them by surprise, the policeman shoots at the car and kills Tamara.
Alex heads off to his elderly father’s farm, where the nearest neighbor happens to be the policeman, Robert (Andreas Lust), who just shot Tamara. Robert and his wife can’t conceive a child, and his anguish over killing the girl doesn’t help. Alex can’t endure the fact that Robert won’t pay for killing his girlfriend. He plans revenge as he moves in with his sickly pious father (Hannes Thanheiser), who can’t hide his contempt for his failure of a son.
Spielmann’s drama is languorous and tense at the same time, with Alex stalking Robert to punish him, and the police trail running cold on the bank robbery. There’s a heavy dose of Dostoyevsky here as guilt corrodes both men, not to mention the guilt felt by Robert’s lonely wife, Susanne (Ursula Strauss) when she initiates an affair with the coarse Alex . There’s also plenty of darkness, too much of it for Revanche to have had any hope of winning the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for which it was nominated this year.
Lighter, but just as discouraging in its view of human weakness is Rudo y Cursi, the soccer movie that reunites Mexico’s top two young actors, Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna. Each character is a star in his rural town, and each is looking for the ticket out of town offered by a sharp professional scout, played magnificently by Guillermo Francella – Jerry Maguire with a killer instinct.
Both boys rise to success as pros, but success, with all its money and fame, isn’t good enough. Rudo (Gabriel Garcia Bernal)is determined to be singing star, and Cursi (Diego Luna) never met a gambling table that he didn’t like, not to mention gold diggers lurking around every television camera. The boys head toward their fate as if this film fable were a telenovela with an ending that the audience knew by heart. At first you try to think which athletes’ lives the screenplay is based on. Then you recognize that this fate, which fits athletes like a uniform, isn’t anything special. What’s special is the way that each of the actors keep you engaged with a story that plays every day on the gossip pages.
Both Gabriel Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna are actors with comic gifts, and Rudo y Cursi plays like a comedy of errors – one of the most glaring is the ridiculous mustache on Luna. (It’s a fortunate role for GGB, who was seen at the Berlin Film Festival in the lead role in the dismal Mammoth, by Lukas Moodysson.)
Rudo y Cursi is a welcome event for another reason. The film is entirely in Spanish. Given the popularity of its stars, it should be able to transcend the balkanization of Latin American commercial cinema to reach all territories south of the border. But watch how it performs commercially in the US, where some 40 million people speak Spanish and won’t have to read the subtitles.
The director and screenwriter of Rudo y Cursi is Carlos Cuaron, the brother of filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, who produced the film along with Guillermo del Toro. Besides journeying to Hollywood to make Harry Potter and Hellboy, Mexican filmmakers are nurturing their own. It’s a model other countries should adopt.
