Reviews

Nadie hablará de nosotros must have been in the right place at the right time. Otherwise it is hard to understand how it could have won so many Goyas. In some ways it seems like a ripoff of Pulp Fiction: a sympathetic character finds a way to steal some money from gangsters; one of the gangsters' hired guns has some second thoughts about his métier; beatings and shootings abound. The key difference is that Tarantino's story is so stylized, with the fragmented storytelling style and cool soundtrack, that the violence is as shockingly laughable as it is just plain shocking. Díaz Yanes' story, instead, includes a bunch of details that might add a more direct social message: Victoria Abril's character is a recovering alcoholic, working as a prostitude in Mexico City, whose husband is a comatose bullfighter, whose mother in law is a former political prisoner and torture victim of the Franco regime, and who thinks nothing of going back to prostitution when she cannot find respectable employment in Madrid; the killer who goes to Madrid to get her has a terminally ill daughter and thinks God may be punishing him for his sins; his partner is a gourmand who loves to cook and introduce people to new taste sensations. All this makes for a jumbled mess of a movie; there is adequate tension and interest, as a crime thriller needs, but it does not push the boundaries of the genre and does only a mediocre job of fulfilling them. Including graphic scenes of violence, physical and psychological, against Victoria Abril does not qualify as groundbreaking, entertaining, or even interesting.

"Asignatura pendiente" is the José's way of referring to his and Elena's relationship at the beginning of this movie. For him, the Franco regime's cultural policies prevented Spaniards from having a healthy attitude toward sex, hence preventing him and Elena from having a fulfilling relationship in their youth. When they meet over ten years later in 1975, José proposes taking care of this "unfinished business"--literally, an asignatura pendiente is a course that one has failed and must make up at a later time. Director José Luis Garci does a good job of representing the giddiness of a new, joyful relationship. As the movie goes on, there are suggestions that the relationship is nourished by its implicit contrariness to the Franco regime, and the Caudillo's death thus signals a change in the relationship as it does in the country as a whole. Like Fernando Colomo's "Tigres de papel", "Asignatura pendiente" gives an interesting, often funny account of the psychological effects of the transition to democracy. Plus, we are treated to a sequence of documentary footage and a dramatization of the frustrations that went along with the sense of impending change and liberation. For this representation of the times and the appreciation of the complicated nature of mature love, "Asignatura pendiente" deserves to be called a classic of Spanish cinema.

José Luis Borau's experience as a director of spaghetti westerns shows in his skillful construction of hunting scenes, his choice of eerily beautiful soundtrack music, and his loving depiction of wooded Spanish landscapes outside of Madrid. Borau once told an interviewer that he wanted to make a film about the forest, and one of the most compelling aspects of the film is the cinematography. Overall, the story plays like a cross between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's idyllic story of criminals (Ángel the poacher and his girlfriend, Miraglos, a runaway from a boarding school) and Psycho's freaky mother-son relationship, with a handsome ex-boyfriend renegade and a group of doltish Franquist functionaries thrown in to the mix. Charming and weird and visually riveting.