Marshland La Isla minima

Excellent Spanish movie Marshland (La Isla minima) is playing all next week at Cinema du Parc.

(No I have no deal with them! I just love the movies they show.)

Saw Marshland last night and was mightily impressed. Set in 1980 in southern Spain, the film is in a certain way a standard "whodunnit" but in the midst of the aftermath of a post-Franco government where nothing is what it seems and everyone has something to hide.

Filmed very beautifully with this aspect of nature that one rarely sees in Spanish film, the atmosphere is stifling, reflecting the small isolated town where it's set. When two sisters go missing, two police officers from Madrid are sent to investigate and they discover a series of young murdered women going back years. A plethora of red herrings and deliberate obfuscation part and parcel of all crime thrillers, but you're at the edge of your seat for much of the movie (and a few perfectly terrifying scenes).

The background is just as interesting though it's very understated (which seems to be the trend in these kinds of movies or TV shows where directors and writers make these broad political suggestions by simply planting a few clues about social things happening in the background): in the immediate aftermath of the death of Franco and Spain's slow transition to democracy, the past is still something people aren't willing to come to terms with and fear is a major part of the average person's response to any figure of authority. This colours, of course, our heroes' investigation and when one partner hears of the nefarious past of the other, it's not clear how this will end up.

Marshland has won a whole slew of awards and is widely acclaimed as one of the best films to come out of Spain in a few years (I love Spanish writing but their films rarely hit the mark except for the odd Almodovar film here and there). The film plays at Cinema du Parc all week next week. If you're a fan of crime thrillers, of the TV show True Detective (you can see the influence of that show on the movie), or of recent Spanish history, it'll be an interesting ride.

The South by Colm Tóibín

It's Colm Tóibín's first novel, dating from 1990, and it was a lovely read. The South tells the story of a young Irish mother living in a village outside Dublin in the 1950s who suddenly decides to leave her husband and young son from whom she is disconnected.

She goes to Spain, sets up with a Spanish painter and begins painting herself, becoming marginally embroiled in the politics the new Franco regime. Michael, the Irish man who lives there at the edges of the arts scene in Barcelona at first unsettles her (he claims to be from the same village she is from), acts almost as an internal voice in sections, mediating the exotic, passionate and often chaotic world of these artists who had put so much effort into defeating Franco. But Michael also acts as a foil for her Spanish artist, Miguel, in that he represents the constrained and restrained emotion that the Irish aren't given license to express (as openly as the passionate, fiery southerners). That said, Michael is more open than Katherine. He allows himself to be carried away by passions, by love of art and beauty in a way that's new to her.

What I like about Tóibín as a general rule is how straightforward his story-telling is. He doesn't get bogged down with long, lyrical passages or ornate descriptions of scenes or feelings. He tells the story in a very matter of fact way, though there is inordinate beauty in this as well. The beauty of Tóibín comes from small details. In a scene set at Katherine's mother's place in London after she has left her family, her mother (who many years before had left Katherine and Katherine's father, too, to follow her own identity) has some friends over, friends who've never been told about Katherine (or that she had any children):

     As they stood in the kitchen when the guests had gone, Katherine asked her mother why she had told her friends that she had no children.
     "I put that all behind me."
     "It feels funny being written off like that."
     "Yes, like walking out of the cinema, leaving it all behind, the big picture."
     "Don't make jokes."
     "Katherine, don't tell me what to do."
     "Did I ever exist for you?"
     "I got out of that place, and I put it behind me. It's what you're going to do, isn't it? Your father wouldn't come. I don't think you've consulted your spouse. Incidentally, he telephoned twice today."
     "Tom?"
     "He'll telephone again tomorrow. I told him I had been in touch with you and I would tell you."
     "Tell him I've left," she said, and turned away.

It's such a simple scene on the surface: the emotion is very controlled. Neither wants to acknowledge the pain they have inflicted on others but both want their own pain acknowledged. Another writer would have dealt expressively with how Katherine was feeling, what she needed to get from her mother. But we get that only under the surface, only be reading between the words. The beauty is in the way they talk past each other, in that final detail when Katherine "turns away," which sounds almost biblical in its ability to both be understated but be quivering with emotion just under the surface.

In his more recent works, Tóibín still avoids dramatic scenes (and when there is something dramatic happening, it's often something that happens on the edge of the details we are given). In this day and age where every feeling and emotion is catalogued and analyzed, I love reading this kind of restrained sense of personal feeling.

Patrick Friesen's A Dark Boat

I've been loving this little book of poems by Patrick Friesen, called A Dark Boat.

Full of striking imagery and haunting lyricism, the book explores common every day themes (travel, working, nature) but with a dark twinge to them. This one, for example,

TULIPS

two tulips bent
like gravity a death
a third defiantly
yellow

the room wants
to leave through
the open window

a widow walks
the hallway
looking for a way
back in

she catches her breath
there is no one to
touch her ever but
the yellow tulip
where she sat
at the sill rain falling
on her hands

It's so simple on the surface: tulips growing juxtaposed against the notion of widowhood, but then the poem delves into a complexity with unusual phrasings like "the room wants to leave through the open window." There are passing references to Lorca (and a poem addressed to him) insofar as Lorca believed that "the timelessness of a poem depends on the quality and coherence of its images" (citation). Though on another side, there is a universality to these images and a debt to Lorca since the book seems to take the form of a kind of travelogue through Spain, made up of all the infinite number of moments or passing experiences that happen when we travel. And how can a poet travel through Spain and avoid nodding to Lorca?

ALMOST 60 OUTSIDE PEÑA DE LA PLATERÍA

the alley is as long as anyone's life
it bends like anyone's life
you sit on a cold stoop in the dark
waiting for the song you've waited for
gypsies walk by in black
guitars slung over their shoulders
laughing out of the east like a memory
the moon tilting into the courtyard
drunk with age and ancient youth
and tonight the rain is thirsty
tonight you are finally visible

tonight the rain is waiting to fall
filled with its longing for earth
a mongrel sidles near and stops
raising its snout to howl
then slowly lowers itself
looking up at you or the moon
you extend your hand
and it eases its weight fully
into the buckled cobblestones
and you don't know your age

you hear the heat
somewhere over the wall
somewhere in that courtyard
the staccato of black shoes
hand claps and a familiar guitar
and yes the rain is thirsty
and the stone gutter waits
for the running water of music
and tonight you will return
to your room on horno de oro
awake to the splattering rain
on the street outside the window
to the rain that falls
on a tile roof on a cedar tree
the rain that falls through you
in your sleep

tomorrow you'll
listen to the darro rippling by
in the shade you'll watch
christ swilling sangria
with a spanish thirst

The shifting back and forth between images of thirst and water, of dryness and wet splatter, then, again, the occasional odd juxtaposition or phrasing: the dog backing up when the protagonist extends his hand and that perplexing line, "you don't know your age" (some kind of reference to not acting one's age?) and then the ending imagery of Christ drinking sangria (which, of course, has the same root as the word blood). The complex images and the simple language give these poems such a charming accessibility and I find myself repeating certain phrases over and over (it also makes me long for Spain).

Occasional photographs (taken by the author?) allow the poems open up somewhat when sitting alongside an image of a quiet street in Granada or boys swimming in a river. I really love this book.

Formerly of Winnipeg Friesen now lives on Vancouver Island. He's written many volumes of poetry and is also a translator and playwright.