Arrebato (Ivan Zulueta, 1979)

 

Ivan Zulueta's Arrebato is a wildly singular film, its inspiration so boundless and multi-faceted that one could imagine a lifetime of energy and blood being poured into it (Zulueta's otherwise sparse filmography sadly supports that general impression), possessed by a startling unifying conviction. Although to attempt a plot summary is even more hopeless here than it usually is, the film contrasts the personal and artistic efforts of Jose, a professional filmmaker stuck in the horror genre, and Pedro (the indelible Will More, a stand-out among a uniformly relishable cast), a way-outside-the-system visionary in search of his notion of cinematic rapture (which he often expresses in terms of finding the right "rhythm"). Through mechanisms carrying elements of mysticism, hypnotism, vampirism and whatever other -ism you might want to nominate, Jose becomes consumed by Pedro's personal journey, his own life (largely made up of drug-taking and sparring with his girlfriend, vivaciously played by Cecilia Roth) dwindling away. The film teems with movie-love, from the physical tangibility of cameras and projectors and film stock to the related culture of posters and memorabilia (there are some nice shots of marquees displaying then-current attractions such as Superman and Phantasm), and has passages of giddy playfulness, but it's all tinged with a delirious hopelessness, a sense of a cinema that demands complete submission whatever that might entail, or else that one go crazy in the attempt (Pedro's mother, insisting among other things that a black and white film on TV used to be in colour, further adds to the sense of a medium mutating beyond human control). Zulueta's brilliant last shot, with the sound of gunfire suddenly erupting on the soundtrack, somewhat reorients everything that's gone before, suggesting that the film's silence on political matters was perhaps, all along, a deeply despairing form of engagement.