Films such as Dominique Abel's wonderful "Poligono Sur" are helping make the American Cinematheque's 11th annual Recent Spanish Cinema series the strongest in several years.
"Poligono Sur," also known as "The Three Thousand," opens with an arresting shot: a view out a fourth-floor window in the Gypsy housing project -- shared by a donkey. Called the Three Thousand (but home to as many as 40,000 people, many of them displaced from the riverside Triana neighborhood, which was settled 500 years ago), the project is rife with the heavy drug trafficking that has become the curse of Gypsy youths who already have trouble finding jobs. One man laments the loss of traditional values. "We used to settle for a donkey and a pot of potatoes," he says. "Now everyone wants a Mercedes."
Such observations emerge in conversations between friends that punctuate terrific flamenco singing and dancing numbers. "Poligono Sur" is a concert film cleverly disguised as a documentary, in which several flamenco artists comb the area for fellow performers to appear in an upcoming open-air concert to benefit the neighborhood. The film climaxes with several numbers at the concert, but hearing and seeing all the other songs and dances performed in people's homes or outside around a bonfire provides a rich, intimate context.
Achero Manas' vibrant, impassioned "November" stars Oscar Jaenada as a brooding, tousled-haired young man who comes to Madrid to enroll in acting school and rebels against its traditional dictums to form his own troupe to perform in the streets of the city. Jaenada's Alfredo, darkly handsome and charismatic, flat-out wants to change the world through street theater. These outrageous mime skits are filmed documentary-style before an unsuspecting public and inevitably end in arrests because the November troupe refuses to get permits for their performances. In time they command serious attention from theater professionals, which sparks conflict within the group.
"November" ends with a truly stunning coup de theatre, but the getting there is sometimes choppy. Manas frequently cuts away from the action to a series of talking heads, actual actors well into middle age, who are presented as former members of November. These actors are actually veterans of the radical '70s troupe Piojo Picon, upon which the film is based, and while eloquent these "witnesses" are in fact largely redundant, and the time spent with them could have been better spent developing character and relationships within the November troupe. Even so, "November" is compelling and energetic, helped immensely by a moody, spare jazz score and featuring Tom Waits' "Tom Traubert's Blues."
