Rosales moves in the direction of greater austerity: no dialogue


Rosales' Bullet in the Head (Tiro en la cabeza) is in his words shot more or less "in the working style of wildlife documentaries" about an apparently "normal guy"--specifically a tall, somewhat heavy-set middle aged Spanish guy--who appears to be going about his existence, hanging out with friends, using the ATM, having sex with a girlfriend, buying a newspaper, chatting with a shopkeeper, listening to music in a CD store, attending a dinner party, making a call from a pay phone. Then he goes on a drive with another guy from Spain into France. There, abruptly, he and the other guy run out of a cafeteria where they are eating with a woman, chasing two young men. They trap them in their car and shoot them. Then they split up, the main guy with the lady friend stealing a car from a woman and taking it to a woods where they leave her tied to a tree.

Rosales was inspired by a news story last year about three members of the Basque separatist group ETA who killed two policemen in France in "an accidental encounter."

The festival blurb describes Bullet in the Head as "a claustrophobically intense, avant-garde thriller. We ...see and hear everything from a distance," the blurb goes on, "forced to assemble the movie's disparate narrative pieces for ourselves as we go along, like detectives on the trail of a dangerous conspiracy. Who is this man and who are his associates? And what are they plotting? A mystery movie in the purest sense, the remarkable Bullet in the Head will keep you pinned to the edge of your seat from its beguiling opening frames all the way to its startling conclusion."

Though admirers of the director--who won prizes in Spain for his fly-on-the-wall approach in Solitary Fragments/La Soledad last year--may find favor here again, this is a concept film that fails to live up to its festival blurb, and therefore leaves some viewers feeling chaeted. To begin with, there is one little detail this description leaves out. Though the film has lots of ambient noise, there is only one moment in the whole thing when there is any dialogue. That's when the two men run out to the parking lot after the two young guys they've spotted: one of the men says "f---ing cops!" That's it. "Forced to assemble the movie's disparate narrative pieces for ourselves"? We cannot. We never learn who any of the people are. This film, very quickly becomes numbingly boring to watch. It's like seeing through the eyes of a surveillance camera. But even that is not done convincingly, if these are meant be seen as the observations of, say, a detective. It is all shot in good looking 35 mm. Though the main character is seen from a distance, the positions from which he is observed are not particularly plausible for a detective doing a surveillance. It's just weird long-lens camerawork, without sound. You could make up a series of stories about the people and the protagonist's activities, but why bother? Anything would work. There is no "mystery" and there is no solution. It all leads up to a senseless act. Rosales says that in the news story the ETA men killed the police "in an accidental encounter." That doesn't quite fit with what happens here--or maybe it does; it depends on what you mean by "accidental encounter." Evidently the ETA men think the two young men--who could be cops--are following, or watching them. But then the cops--if that's who they are--leave the cafeteria. In fact they're sitting not too far from the ERA guys, eating and chatting normally. Odd behavior if they were following the ETA guys. So if the ETA guys go out and kill them, it's sheer paranoia. So the events are not so much mysterious as inexplicable, and this is not the way a thriller or a mystery works. This is more like a conceptual art piece that might be exhibited in a museum, though somehow it would seem pointless even in that context.

Not every film that is "different" is so for any purpose. Those who come to see this in a festival will feel cheated. That happens sometimes, perhaps because occasionally the blurbs for festival films are written by people who have not seen the films, or who have overactive imaginations. For Spanish viewers, who might detect Basque undertones, it might be more exciting. But that is speculation. For the general viewer, it seems a cheat, something that may be fun to debate for a while, but nothing you'd want to recommend to anyone--unless they made liberal use of the Fast Forward button. Remember how Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac, "That's not writing; it's typing"? "This isn't filmmaking', some will say; " it's filming. Bullet in the Head has some conceptual interest, but seems a dead end.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.