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Review by Simon Bell |
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DVD SPECIAL FEATURES: Star and director filmographies; Scene selection;
Tom Dawson film notes; Original theatrical trailer; World Cinema trailer reel;
Region 0.
A SWIRLING dust cloud fills the screen to the sound of a brewing tempest.
Then suddenly she appears: The inferno-on-legs; a magnificence of red hot
passion. It is La Spagnola herself, kicking and screaming like a fighting
hellcat as she attempts desperately to desist her husband's final fling towards
freedom.
The film's meant to be Australian, but the Antipodean landscape is merely
a backdrop to this story of Spanish and Italian immigrants trying to make
a life for themselves on the fringes of a smoke-spewing oil refinery on the
outskirts of Sydney, circa 1960.
It's not long before we see the new life the errant husband Ricardo (Simon
Palomares) is headed for: It's one he'll share with his blonde mistress and
the family savings (in the form of a sleek new set of gleaming wheels).
Meanwhile, Lola's left behind, pregnant, starving and with a 14-year-old despondent
misfit of a daughter (who likes pigeons) to bring up. Desperate and destitute
in a region she doesn't like or want to like, her quest for revenge begins…
Scripted by actor-turned-writer Anna Maria Monticelli, La Spagnola draws upon
its author's own childhood experiences. The attention to detail is welcome.
There's jokes aplenty, more often than not about animals and food... whether
barbarically skinning goats on the kitchen table, massacring a coop full of
squabs for supper, or using phallic vegetables for things God may not have
intended, this is both a very gastric and olfactory picture.
There
are moments that don't gel and, at times, it feels as though director Steve
Jacobs leaves matters to their own wayward devices. But this supposed lack
of control just adds to the overall anarchic eddy of the film whole.
Its black comedy with hints of the surreal and the supernatural, but not perhaps
as dark and inventive as, say, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. (Although there is a Delicatessen-style
mad butcher shop scene in which a woman is hysterically beheaded and her body
parts thrown to a baying crowd of bloodthirsty oddballs.)
Lola Marceli - in the title role of Lola, The Spaniard - would get Indielondon
along to any movie with her name in the credits (and not just because we want
to have her babies). And in the end, its absurdist humour and wild melodrama
just proves too infectious to by-pass.
