Review - Thirteen Among a Thousand (Trece Entre Mil)

January 19, 2017

Thirteen Among a Thousand (Trece Entre Mil) – Spain, 2005

On the day I sat down to watch Inaki Arteta’s 2005 documentary Thirteen Among a Thousand, four Israelis died in a suspected terrorist attack. A day earlier, there had been a shooting at an airport in Florida which left five people dead and six injured; over the same two days, news feeds brought multiple reports of carnage in Syria, as well as suicide bombings in both Iraq and Turkey. Death, it seems, is everywhere, yet all too often the frequency of attacks and the constant focus on the number of deaths can have a numbing effect on those not directly affected by the attacks, so much so that reports on terrorism can be broken away from in the name of advertising dollars without viewers even stopping to think about the implications of a society that is able to go from a report on a deadly bomb attack to the latest automobile commercial without any difficulty whatsoever. I was partly drawn to Thirteen Among a Thousand as a way of forcing myself to combat this mental passivity, for when you recognize the fact the numbers are desensitizing you to the very things you should be irate about, it’s necessary to do something about it.

The subject of Thirteen Among a Thousand also intrigued me. ETA is an organization that I had heard about in news reports, yet the reports were almost always on tragic events that had just happened; they rarely focused about the individuals affected by those events. In a way, I understand this. The news is immediate; it is sensational. For many, a story about how someone is doing ten years after a family member was assassinated simply does not carry the same sense of urgency. Perhaps it should.

Wisely, Thirteen Among a Thousand is not a historical documentary. It does not begin by explaining the origins of ETA or try to explain the group’s politics or aims. Its stated goal is to show viewers how terrorism affects individuals and families, and it accomplishes this by focusing on thirteen families, all of whom lost someone - in some cases more than one person - in the struggle with ETA. Through their stories, I imagine, it is hoped that people will be able to put a name to a number and not forget about the people that are left behind after the media moves on to the next news item. The film asks us to linger a bit longer and to recognize that pain does not always go away.

The film give us ample evidence of this. Parents whose loved ones were needlessly taken from them at a young age. Spouses whose partners never made it home from such innocuous places as supermarkets. Children who watched a parent’s assassination. I could go on. The film shows viewers archival footage from news reports and then switches to the present, and we see that the survivors have not moved on. In two of the accounts, the families speak of the dead in the present tense. As emotional as this part is, another aspect of the film is equally horrifying. In almost all of these cases, justice remains elusive. Time and again, we hear testimony that the guilty remain free. Some are celebrated as heroes; one even works at the school of a survivor’s child. And then there are the whispers, the outrageous oft-repeated implication that the victims must have done something to deserve their fate.

To watch Thirteen Among a Thousand is to be reminded of mankind’s potential for cruelty. It is also to be reminded of the power of community. At times, the only support the survivors get is from fellow survivors, as long-time friends fade from the picture, perhaps as a result of not having any more empathy to give. There was not a moment of the film that was neither moving nor infuriating. In fact, my only complaint, other than the film’s overly optimistic ending, which took away from the film’s established tone, is that I wanted to hear more from some of the people featured in the documentary. That sentiment seems a bit selfish in retrospect, but it speaks to the power of the testimony contained in the film.

According to Wikipedia, it has now been five years since ETA’s last attack, so there is cause for guarded optimism. In circumstances like this, it is all too easy for documentaries like this to be kicked to the curb, as if they were no longer relevant. After all, focusing on past pain can sometimes be seen as impeding future progress. However, films like Thirteen Among a Thousand have a weight that transcends the specific horrors they depict. They shed a light on the experiences of so many other people around the world, of widows and orphans in Iraq, parents in Israel and Palestine, and classmates of victims of school shootings in the United States. Pain and sorrow are universal, and every now and then we need to be reminded of this. Thirteen Among a Thousand does that exceptionally well. (on DVD in Region 2)

3 and a half stars

*Thirteen Among a Thousand is in Spanish with English subtitles.

Review - Belle Epoque

March 17, 2016

Belle Epoque – Spain, 1992

Part of me feels that I will never get Fernando Trueba’s 1992 film Belle Epoque. I first saw it back in 1993 on VHS, and my reaction to it may have been the result of my having had expectations of it being nothing short of a masterpiece. Why else, I reasoned beforehand, would it have beat one of my favorite films of all time for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film? Anytime a film has such unrealistic expectations thrust upon it, it’s bound to come up short, often to no fault of its own. And so it should not come as a shock that Belle Epoque failed to impress me the first time around. In contrast, the film it beat for the Oscar, Farewell My Concubine, has risen in stature, continuing to perplex and move with its depth and poignancy. Over the years, friends and critics have insisted that I missed just how special Belle Epoque really is, so recently, I figured it was time to see if time had softened my objections to the film.

Belle Epoque is the story of a young Spanish soldier named Fernando (Jorge Sanz) in 1931 who deserts the army and eventually finds himself living in the house of a kind old man and his four ravishingly beautiful daughters. Given this set up, the film could easily have turned into an Almodovar-like comedy, replete with incidents of bed-hopping and infidelity. And while there is some of this in the film, it remains grounded by the time in which it is set, just five years before the Spanish Civil War, which would end with Francisco taking power. In the year in which the film takes place, Spain was in the grips of a power struggle. The military collapsed, and the king abdicated the thrown. This left the Nationalists, made up of those with power and affluence, to duke it out with the Republicans, make up of the working class, for control of the country. In other words, in the film, as it was in reality, Spain is at war with itself.

And the war is everywhere. In fact, it is what brings everyone together. It is what causes Fernando to flee his unit, what brings the daughters back to their father’s home, what likely pushed the old man’s wife to take her opera singing on an overseas tour, and what occupies much of the conversations that do not revolve around love, relationships, or physcial attraction. Politics is ever-present as well. It is agued about at the dinner table; it wakes people from their slumber, forcing them out of their homes and into public meetings. It is the elephant in the room, a bond between those with like-minds, and a wedge between those on opposing sides. It brings people together just as easily as it drives them apart. Perhaps more importantly, it is a harbinger of both great joy and heartbreaking tragedy.

However, this is not the main thrust of the film. What the film mostly focuses on is young, innocent Fernando’s multiple pursuits of love, and in one of the film’s most ingenious aspects, he is often on the receiving end of such pursuits. Throughout the film, Fernando goes from being the pursuer to being the pursued in a flash, and it is a role that he is not entirely comfortable playing – although to be honest, he doesn’t protest for very long. It’s not hard to realize that the last one will turn out to be his true love, and part of the fun of the film is in seeing just who seduces whom and trying to decipher their exact motivations. It’s also fun to note that the sisters are all aware of the other’s exploits, and at times, their conversations about Fernando resemble those of schoolgirls comparing notes.

Belle Epoque is frequently humorous in a way that only a Black Comedy can be, and each character is given interesting and heartfelt monologues to deliver. My favorite of these came from the family patriarch, Don Manolo (Fernando Fernan Gomez), whose lines are often so clever and absurd that they could easily have appeared in a Tarantino or Woody Allen film. Also memorable is Don Manolo’s wife, Amalia (Mary Carmen Ramirez), who announces her arrival in song. Later, she has a poignant scene with her daughters which is just so lovely that I couldn’t help wishing that I were part of the conversation. The acting is top-notch, the characters so well written that audiences will likely find themselves wishing that all of them could have their dreams comes true.

So did I like the film more the second time around? The short answer is yes, yet the film still keeps me at a distance. It still seemed oddly disjointed, fluctuating madly from scenes of screwball comedy to matters of politics and death in the blink of an eye. I found myself intrigued by the subplot, with its dark humor and exaggerated, Catch-22-like moments, yet when the film turned back to Fernando and the sisters, I became less engaged. At times, I was struggling to care just who Fernando eventually wound up with and longing for just one more scene showcasing the poetic wit of Don Manolo or the philosophical meanderings of the food-obsessed town priest. An entire film could have been made with those two characters as its anchor, and I would have absolutely loved every minute of it. I simply can’t say I felt this was about Belle Epoque as a whole, and this frustrated me. I wanted to love it, to see in it the qualities that made it triumph over Kaige Chen’s masterpiece. I just didn’t, and, unfortunately, I’m beginning to see that I never will. (on DVD)

3 stars

*Belle Epoque is in Spanish with English subtitles.