Dir:
Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, Spain, 2006, 123 mins, Subtitles
Cast: Carmelo Gómez, Judith
Diakhate, Celso Bugallo, Vicente Romero
Review by Dave Hal
This extraordinary debut feature from
writer-director Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo is an ambitiously
structured, viscerally tense thriller that shows how a single
act of shocking violence affects and compromises the characters
involved. As a thriller it's never less than compelling,
but like the sunflowers of the title, there's a lot more
going on beneath than just the eye-catching surface.
The film opens with the discovery
of a young girl's body in a field of sunflowers near the
rural Spanish village of Angosto. In a motel room, a travelling
salesman watches events unfold on TV. Above the village,
a dour geologist, Esteban (Gómez), his troubled wife Gabi (Daikhate), and the
geologist's assistant arrive to explore a cave system that
locals hope will attract the tourist Euro to their area.
There follows a random and brutal assault, which draws soon-to-be-retired
police chief Amadeo (Bugallo), and his deputy and son-in-law
Tomás (Romero) into the story, along with two old-timers
from a nearby abandoned village, Cecilio and Amós.
From the very start, the main characters
are all in various states of loneliness or desperation,
and their actions, violent or morally compromised, stem
directly from there. The traveling salesman alone on the
open road, the geologists buried beneath the earth have
nothing to distract them from the existential; meanwhile
police chief Amadeo is on the verge of retirement having
recently lost his wife, and Tomás, though newly
married, is already feeling trapped (in a striking shot,
we see him framed against the vertical bars of his bedstead
with flowery wallpaper behind: a scented prison). Even the
old-timers Cecilio and Amós, left behind in an otherwise
decaying village, have little more than old records and photographs
or an always-on radio for company – when they are not
fighting and bickering with each other, that is.
Sánchez-Cabezudo has described his film as rural
noir, and certainly the characters spend much of their time
in the shadows. But there is more going on here; the film
periodically shifts from one character's viewpoint to another
in the telling of its story, using rewinds and overlaps to
create unusual shivers of irony and dislocation as each new
character moves centre stage. Multi-perspective narratives
have been used before of course, but uniquely Sánchez-Cabezudo
employs the technique to create the giddy sensation of magic
realism. An otherworldly energy continually threatens to
break through: one of the village's old-timers speaks to
the dead in an abandoned graveyard, and in one almost subliminal
scene, we see an apparently dead man walking out into the
night. Although the film remains otherwise rooted in reality,
DoP Angel Iguacel's use of washed out, muted exteriors, and
interiors suffused with sunflower yellow add to the dreamy
atmosphere.
Rich though this mix is, not everything
here works; the female characters are sketchily drawn,
and mostly little more than ciphers (the dysfunction in
this film is predominantly male). And a second scene of
violence is turgidly staged, so much so that the film almost
stalls midpoint; Sánchez-Cabezudo
might have intended this, for bathetic effect, but the loss
of energy here is almost fatal. The director is soon back
on track, though, in what at times feels like an Iberian
riff on a Coen brothers' thriller, though much less rigidly
stylised. The lack of communication between generations is
subtly interwoven, as are the death of the rural lifestyle
and the ghosts left behind. And a key scene takes place in
ancient woods, where the arrival of a car is made to sound
like the growl of an approaching predatory animal: with prehistoric
caves and fire in the dark featuring as regular tropes, primal
passions and how they drive us are also part of what informs
this skillfully layered film.
Original, subtle and compelling, Night
of the Sunflowers introduces Sánchez-Cabezudo as
a director to watch.
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