“I have electric dreams/ in which my father, when he can’t fix something/ blows it to the floor/ gets angry, shouts at me, insults me/ we shout at each other, sometimes with blows/ that’s how we are/ a horde of wild animals/ dreaming “With being human/ it sometimes takes several days to understand that/ the rage that runs through us does not belong to us.” I have electric dreams It is, in addition to being a film about domestic violence, one about poetry, but in which everything circulates around a single poem: the poem about the high tension cables that hang between Martín, his daughters and his ex-wife, but also between balcony and balcony from all corners of San José de Costa Rica.
Literary works within films have proven to be a thorny resource. Most of the time they are deliberately minor or seem to be surrounded by a quality and glory that they do not deserve. For example, Discovering Forrester (Gus Van Sant, 2000) and that apotheotic essay that Sean Connery reads live, making everyone present believe that he wrote it, and then revealing that the true author of the text is a disciple of his on whom a lot of prejudices hang racial and social. The tone of the scene tries to make that writing, once its true author is revealed, acquire the role of irrefutable proof of greatness, but it is not necessary to be a great reader to realize that what is recited is nothing more than a vain succession of images and grandiloquent words that would hardly surprise the horde of academic sleuths who listen to him attentively.
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Something similar happens with Stranger than fiction (Marc Foster, 2006): Will Ferrell, after discovering that his entire life is being narrated omnisciently and in real time by a contemporary writer, learns that his fate is sealed by the planned death of the protagonist he plays. He contacts a literature expert who tells him, after reading the writer’s final draft (in which the protagonist dies), that that tragic ending would close a fascinating and definitive work, something that will remain in the annals of literature. Thus, the character played by Ferrell surrenders as a martyr to that great destiny, except that the ending would not be far from what could be found among the discount books of a spa store. Offering your life for bad literature doesn’t seem like a good deal.
Writing well is always difficult, but the other reason that would seem to make one opt for these lower-class works is the fear that the fictional work will end up overshadowing the same work that contains it. There are exceptional examples where this happens, such as the theater samples that are mounted within Children of Paradise (directed by Marcel Carné, but with the unmistakable script by Jacques Prevert) or the entire musical compendium of Hedwig and the angry inch (which in reality is nothing other than a great rock opera written by its director, John Cameron Mitchell), but in general they tend to opt, almost knowingly, for lower quality materials that do not compete with the containing fiction (the banal of the film you want to make in The American nightby François Truffaut).
The most glorious exception to this (at least among the recent material) is Patersonby Jim Jarmusch, one of the most beautiful and sincere films ever made about the poet’s true craft: writing sought and found in the dissemination of its inspiring minutiae, but devoid of artistic pathos, more concentrated on the beauty of the discipline and patience.
Even with artistic suffering involved, there is a lot of this in that final poem of I have electric dreams. The beauty runs not only through the poem itself, but also through how it fits perfectly with the personality and hand of someone like Martín, a guy who lives his life as if he were balancing on a tightrope, which is more than a tightrope. a bare high voltage cable. The scene at the beginning, where he parks and gets out of the car to hit his head against the metal of the garage, seems to perfectly present not only the bipolar nature of his personality, but also this idea of something unsaid that at the same time is shown with treachery and fierceness (with the car windshield acting as a screen, a stage where that scene is staged for the family).
It would be easy to point out Martín as the great beast that awaits at the end of that labyrinth of family dysfunction, but little by little we see how a series of practices and gestures survive among the members that are linked together like the inherited traces of a common instinct, a palimpsest of silent violence: the eldest daughter who reproduces the test of endurance of paternal pain with her younger sister, the violence towards and between animals and that untimely, almost unconscious gesture of the mother of hitting her head against the wooden table in middle of a discussion. They are, indeed, a horde of wild animals that dream of being human, but also one that experiences violence that does not belong to them. Feral love, acidic and dirty love, of pissed and sweaty mattresses, of fingers smelled after scratching, of that wall marked with the touch of so many bare feet supported with relaxation and indifference.
Valentina Maurel has the greatness of managing to portray, in those details, the tenderness of that fierceness (or the fierceness of that tenderness). The entire relationship that exists between the girl and her father’s friend could be reproduced from a sordid approach and yet she retains a strange warmth, reminiscent of that which existed between the protagonists of Fish Tank, by Andrea Arnold. And Martín’s relationship with literature could be presented as pathetic or elegiac and it is neither of the two things; a poem at the height of his pain and madness, but without the fireworks that people usually imagine around the pain and madness of poets.
It’s difficult to gauge how much to comment on a movie without overexplaining or ruining the experience for those who haven’t seen it. However, it is inevitable to point out in a text like this the penultimate scene, in which Martín and his daughter look at each other from different patrol cars, upon discovering that the Yelina to whom so much graffiti was dedicated in the neighborhood is one of the police officers who escort to the station. That small moment of family brotherhood, that smile that navigates the two meters that separate them between armored glass and that in one fell swoop dissolves so much sadness and terror. A scene that alone justifies an entire movie, just as one verse can justify an entire poem.
I have electric dreams, directed by Valentina Maurel. 113 minutes. Belgium, France, Costa Rica, 2022. In Cinematheque.
2023-09-28 09:17:54
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