 |
||
 |
> The Great Bear Minus Two. By Miguel Marías > Taken from the book "Miradas para un nuevo milenio. Fragmentos para una historia futura del cine español". Hilario Rodriguez > Cahiers du Cinema. By Jara Yañez > The last ballad of a sniper. > Elusive smoke over blue sky. > Documented madness. Ana Castaño. Memeber of Escuela Lacaniana de Psicoanálisis. Madrid. > Abdelfatteh FAKHFAKH. Magazine “Le Cinephile". Túnez.
|
|
|
||
|
LA OSA MAYOR MENOS DOS Accustomed as we are to mental illnesses being treated in conventional cinema with frivolity and/or flamboyance (see, or rather, read Imágenes de la locure. La psicopatología en el cine , by Beatriz Vera Poseck), seeing a documentary like this can convulse and shake more than one foundation. David Reznak, born in Madrid , with a broad international academic education and co-founder of the independent cinema La Enana Marrón , doesn't mince his words in his first feature-length film, presented in the official documentary section of Barcelona 's XII Festival of Independent Cinema. The challenge, because we have to speak in those terms, was to spend a year and a half with his camera, without trembling, in the Leganés psychiatric hospital, one of the champions of the 1987 reforms applied to this type of institution. La Osa Mayor menos dos divides its endeavours between two units in this clinic: the residential unit, with elderly patients whose high level of deterioration and hopelessness requires permanent attention; and the rehabilitation unit (RU), whose residents are in their thirties and can still see the end of the tunnel. In fact, the average length of stay in this unit is six months although, as we see in the documentary, there are patients who have been there over two years, as is the case of Isabel, who converses with the moon and the stars (she even says that the sun calls her a whore) and whose fabulous, poetically insane speech allows Reznak to intersperse the only symbolic images (passing clouds, aseptic subway stations, shadows of steps on the floor) in his work. Except, that is, for the beautiful, repeated image of a plane crossing the blue sky and leaving a fleeing slipstream, perhaps that of an escaping lucidity that impregnates, or impregnated, the film's protagonists. Although the panorama is almost always bleak, there is a glimpse of hope in its atmosphere. Like that offered by one of the young people, who dreams of resuming his musical vocation as a concert horn player in civilian life. And there are even touches of humor, like that excursion by some elderly folk to the Valle de los Caídos, another refuge of ghosts and voiceless echoes. An exceptional witness to the mechanisms of memory, intermittent or stagnant, La Osa Mayor menos dos inevitably recalls films such as Después de tantos años (1994, Ricardo Franco) or Monos como Becky (1999, Joaquín Jordá and Nuria Villazán) with a bonus of naturalism and objective exploration that increases its strength and value.
|
|
 |
 |
 |