Lies my father keeps telling me

Noel Vera

Victor (Leonardo Sbaraglia) is on his way to a Paris hospital to
visit his mother, Marie (Geraldine Chaplin), and sick father, Max
(Fernando Fernan Gomez). Max is suffering from what seems like
delusions--he feels he's being kept in the hospital against his
will, that he has to get a message to someone boarding the train,
that he has to escape this "city without limits." Is he lying or is
he telling the truth? Was there a conspiracy formed around him to
prevent him from leaving the hospital--or is he imagining it all? At
one point Max wanders about, muttering to himself that "everything
has been changed." It's a moment of helplessness terrifying both for
the fact that you don't know what he's talking about (what exactly
has been changed?) and the fact that, in a deeper sense, you do: we
have all felt hopelessly lost and disoriented some time in our
lives; we have all had someone we loved dearly that we have somehow
lost, failed, or betrayed, at some point in our lives.

The first half of Antonio Hernandez's "En la ciudad sin límites"
(City of No Limits, 2002) threatens to be a dark and superbly
realized version of what Philip K. Dick used to do with his novels,
extended symphonies of terror and paranoia where you find that not
only were your darkest suspicions true they were, in fact,
inadequate. Director Antonio Hernandez is able to use the trappings
of noir--the shadowy hospital corridors, the sinister conversations
behind glass--to evoke unsettling emotions.

The second half devolves into something less bizarre (that "city
without limits" turns out to be some kind of philosophical metaphor
and not a literal science-fictional conceit) and more conventionally
poignant (Dick would have known how to sustain both the poignancy
and bizarreness). The noir stylishness subsides accordingly, though
by this time we know the characters well enough that we'll actually
agree to keep quietly seated until we find out what had happened to
them.

It's all pretty well done, though you wish you understood the
characters more, particularly the father and mother--why did the
father do the things he did, why did the mother do the things she
did? Understandable that knowledge has to be withheld at certain
points for the whole thing to work, for the plot to have the
revelations that it has…but no less an authority than the master of
suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, gave his opinion on the subject:
basically, he'd rather give the audience all the facts early on or
as early as possible, and trade the surprise of having an object (a
box, say) suddenly reveal itself to be a danger to the hero (a bomb
inside the box) with the suspense of knowing all along that the
object is a danger. By having the audience know more than the
protagonist, the filmmaker in effect is granting the burden of
knowledge to the one who will benefit (through direct action) from
it the least…

In this case the hidden facts represent not so much a danger as an
act of injustice committed long ago, unpunished; we only learn of
the act (or at least its true nature) at the last minute, and
instead of being able to digest it, or explore its consequence fully
and dramatically, we're left with trying to put all the pieces
together in their full and proper context way after the movie has
ended. Which makes the film, after all is said and done, merely an
interesting melodrama, rather than a profoundly thrilling
psychodrama.

(First published in High Life Magazine, July 2005)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)