Dir. Jaime Rosales, Spain , 2003, 110 mins, subtitles
Cast:
Alex Brendermulh, Agata Roca, Maria Antonia Martinez, Pape Monsoriu, Vincente Komero
Abel (Brendermulh) exists in the claustrophobic mundanity of his everyday life. In a quiet suburb of Barcelona, he lives with his widowed mother but is trying to find an apartment with his girlfriend. Each day, he argues with the assistant who works for him in the family business, a fashion boutique, about the amount of redundancy pay she should receive should the shop be forced to close due to poor sales. In between, he listens to and sees the failure of his best friend's get-rich-quick schemes. With his debut feature, director Rosales is an objective interloper, presenting the viewer with a dusty, hot Spanish backdrop, played out almost in realtime. This is everyday life; boring, stifling, and oppressive. The slow pace and the long camera takes emphasise the slow monotiny, whilst the framing techniques demonstrate how the characters are trapped in their little worlds. Brendermulh gives a low-key yet tense performance as the man who appears both resigned yet quietly angry about the circumstances of his life. He is the consummate disaffected antihero and, whilst the viewer is unable to fully identify with Abel, they can sympathise. In such a way, they are drawn into reflecting their own experiences on to the character - Abel is an unhappy everyman. However, the viewer's expectations are turned upside down when, without prior warning (except for the air of unease that Brendermulh and Rosales create almost imperceptibly) Abel suddenly attacks and kills a female taxi driver. A random act of a frustrated man? No. Abel kills again, more brutally and viciously. Neither act is explained, and their enactment is all the more realistic in contrast to the ordinariness of the rest of the film. Nor does Rosales present the killings as a social comment. Instead, it is left to the audience to question what provoked the acts and, as in their initial judgement of Abel, they may well be wrong, projecting their own feelings instead of practising the objectivity of the film's director. Based on a story from the Times newspaper in 1998, The Hours of the Day has been likened to Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing, and is a disturbing and challenging addition to the serial killer canon. Jean Lynch |
