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"INTACTO"
JUAN CARLOS FRESNADILLO MAKES THE FILM THAT REVEALS OUR
CONDITION IN THE AFTERMATH OF GEORGE W.BUSH'S WAR AGAINST
SADDAM HUSSEIN
Review by Jocelyn Braddell
It is the 12th
April, 2003 and the pervading sense is that a crime of
international dimensions and an ill prepared political
gamble has occurred in the Middle East and that, so
quickly, that it has become difficult to realise as time
past and passing. Children and women dead or brutally
wounded today were only 20-odd days ago at play, at work,
and all unable to imagine the vile evil of carnage that
has descended on them. Two weeks, three, is such a short
time in any life, how many of us can get our heads round
this devastation that has a long term future for so many
thousands of people? This evening I went to see a film,
the Spanish “INTACTO”. It is the first
film by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, an extraordinary and
certainly a political debut.
This film can be read as a metaphor for the time that we
live in, and its ending as the frail hope that we have
that Chance will liberate us. Taking this war into
consideration, and the immediate after-effect that we now
read about – who cannot see that this real life is
the story of a political fantasy; a programme of
political gambling; gamblers main chances directed
through violence, and the clear pathological, manic
nature of certain national governments today. It is quite
clear that George Bush lives in such a fantasy world and
that his gamblers chances hinge on an associate. I am not
inferring that associate as Tony Blair who is only a
handy pistol man who in some cases forgets to lay down
plastic on the carpet before terminal shots. No the
associate is the King of Chance who has his Casino in a
desert – the “jew”.
“INTACTO” is essentially about
man’s incredulous belief in the source of Luck....
Good Luck. The Casino’s jewish owner survived as a
child in a nazi camp, holding in his hand a photo
of another child. This photo had been given to him
by the last of a group of children decimated by the
enemy, of which just one, himself, survived when the
Americans arrived at the concentration camp. These
memories had become obsessions in a child’s mind
around which he modelled his entire subsequent life. A
gambler’s chance.......not to get into the
history books – the endemic political story –
but to create a file, the proof that chance could be
controlled.
This “King of Chance” maturing, with his
marvellous casino out in the desert, adopted a child that
he rescued after an earthquake and educated him as a
control freak – who, when any gambler in the Casino
had a streak of Luck would approach and touch that man or
woman’s left hand and steal his/her run of Luck.
This boy Federico, in manhood lost this belief. Or
maybe feeling a claustrophobic lack of freedom,
he decides to leave his “father”. Before
leaving, he has to endure an embrace from his father
which the old man believes would retrieve his Gift of
Luck and cast off as faulty goods his “fool” of
a son. To complete the job he orders his henchmen beat
Federico up and leave him on the road. The main part of
the film now starts seven years on from this event.
Our man, Federico, whose insurance business can be
understood as the remote symbolic linkage to his past,
suddenly becomes involved, through airline insurance
cases, in a crash of which there is only one
survivor. The insurance award is enormous – but it
doesn’t necessarily have the expected arousal of the
covetous in Federico, instead it reawakens his
dormant belief in Chance, the memories of his
humiliation, and the desire for revenge.
At this point the confusing pace and sidetracking of the
film suddenly sharpens up and young Tomas Savas (a
bankrobber), the survivor, is brought in to play and
fulfil a plan. Tomas is being sought by the police but
diverting him into Federicos’ gambling plans is also
quite difficult to achieve – as this young fellow
sees at once that a fantasy has been set in motion, out
of which only Chance or quick wits for escape can see him
survive. However his daring characteristic that led him
into the Bank robbery in the first place, has not
diminished, and the action rather than the money appeals
to him. Also the absurd games that men and women,
desperate to live for gambling money, indulge in. Also he
knows the police are on his track and he thinks this
crazy and morbid gamblers life will hide him. It would
not be kind to divulge any more of the plot; however the
manipulation of every facet of life, even tearing
photographs to gamble with imagined “souls”
completes the religious and political metaphors.The final
shots panning the desert familiarise the moments of
present Time and the political landscape.
May I urge everyone to see this film for it is these
manifestations of distorted memory (national history, or
the strictures of inheritance) that lie behind the
conflict within which we find ourselves today.
jocelyn braddell,©2003.
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