Image courtesy of Festival del Film Locarno
The Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939 left a lot of scar tissue on Spanish society. So much so that even a Spanish director born in 1975 still uses the medium of film to get to terms with that past. The inspiration for this film lies in the grandfather of director Daniel V. Villamediana. In his speech before the screening he talked about the mysterious years of his grandfather during the civil war in the deep south of Spain, Andalucía. He refused to talk about those years that fuelled the mystery and speculation in the family. La vida sublime is a loving tribute to his grandfather's generation who after the Civil War never got a chance to fulfill its dreams, unlike the director's generation.
In La vida sublime Victor, a young man in his early thirties has a dialogue with a relative on the vast wheat plains of Valladolid in the Castile region about his grandfather, nicknamed El Cuco, who just like the directors grandfather went to the South and returned to never speak about that period again. This is the first of a series of delightful dialogues with different characters throughout the movie. The dialogues are extremely long but never dull, because one can sense that most of it is improvisation. Indeed, when I asked the director at the Q and A if this was so, he confirmed that the lead only was told what to talk about whereupon the other actors and amateurs, as I discovered, would respond as they liked. This technique really makes dialogue more realistic and makes one feel to be a silent partner of the conversation, like a child listening to the grown-ups in a sense. At one point he says to his relative that he needs a passion in his life. This passion translates in a sort of road movie where in Victor follows the footsteps of his grandfather on his journey to the south of Spain. He even goes as far as imitating certain things his grandfather did. Dangerous things, like eating 90 sardines, because granddad did so in a bet years earlier, and bullfighting. Passion and danger is what Victor needs. During a dialogue with a bullfighter in Seville he actually says that a man has to expose himself to danger to make life sublime. The bullfighter nods.
El Cuco takes on mystical proportions in the mind of Victor, but there is an undercurrent in this mystification. Victor has a long, political talk with Pepe, a relative in Seville, in which it becomes clear that El Cuco was an anarchist during the Civil War years. Pepe goes to great lengths to explain why Victor shouldn’t be so proud about this fact. One learns a great deal about recent Spanish history while watching this film, and how Spanish people nowadays deal with that tormented, divided past.
Another delightful feature of this film is the way it portrays two different regions in Spain: Castile in the North and Andalucía in the South. Castile consists of endless fields of wheat and just one color: ochre. It’s so monotonous that Victor says that as a child he used to dream in ochre. Few people are seen. Andalucía on the other hand is vibrant and warm in it’s color scheme, Seville is crowded and the shots of Cadiz even more to the south than Seville, show us nothing but white buildings blazing in the sun and the azure blue of the sea. At one point the image of Cadiz from the sky gets all distorted and hazy as if we, the viewers, are suffering from sunstroke. Heavenly organ music is heard as if to emphasize the almost saintly qualities of the landscapes that Villamediana obviously loves.
This is a film Hemingway would have loved. A man on a quest for passion and danger, discovering the Spanish soul on his search. Elvis sang Well, I’ve never been to Spain. Neither have I. But after seeing La vida sublime I can’t wait to go.
Rating: ***
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