A load of bull: "El árbol de la sangre" [2018 Spain]

And they end up being as attention-gathering as only a Julio Medem can manage (apart from Bigas Luna, of course). While the bulls and cows in his latest drama, "El árbol de la sangre" [Eng. Title: The Tree of Blood] might bear special cultural significance to Spaniards, others with a lesser acquaintance will nevertheless discern the passionate undercurrents these creatures will come to represent in this pheromone-fuelled family saga.













Rebeca (Úrsula Corberó) and boyfriend Marc (Álvaro Cervantes) are staying at his stepmother's idyllic farmhouse in the Basque country to try and piece together their extraordinary family tree, while opening up to and coming to terms with secrets and betrayals within their own relationship. They begin by recounting the early lives of their respective mothers.

Rebeca is the child of Macarena (the beautiful Najwa Nimri), conceived during her mother's wild rock star years. As a baby, Rebeca had to undergo life-saving organ transplants that'll deeply affect Macarena for the rest of her life. When one of Macarena's fans, Victor (Daniel Gra0), expresses his love for her, she decides to get married and settle down, and Victor eases into the role of Rebeca's doting stepdad.

Marc's single mother Nuria (Maria Molins) is a publisher who befriends and has a fling with writer Amaia (Patricia López Arnaiz). Young Marc first set his eyes on Rebeca at Amaia's wedding; the groom being Victor's brother Olmo (Joaquín Furriel). When Amaia introduces Olmo to Nuria, she recognises him instantly as the person with whom she had a brief sexual encounter that led to Marc's birth. As the complex relationships within this coincidental family take shape, murkier details of the brothers before they entered Rebeca and Marc's lives come to the fore, with unforeseen  consequences...

Even with a long run-time of 135 minutes, the narrative is pretty fast-paced; blink and you'll likely miss a plot point, so this might require more than one viewing. As a keen follower of maestro Medem's films, I find this screenplay his most ambitious and convoluted yet; instead of neat patterns exemplified in Lovers of the Arctic Circle and Sex and Lucia, we have strands that twist, branch off, and occasionally intertwine.

And then we have the pervasive symbolism of bulls and cows as facets of conflicting but coexisting qualities between the various characters; be it moral, political, or sexual. They make an appearance in unexpected places, which might be off-putting to those used to more 'plausible' story lines, but they're there for a purpose. As in many of Medem's films, sex is an important ingredient that drives the narrative.

Several of his trademark motifs that depict elementary forces also make an appearance in the film. Right from the exquisite cinematography, background score, choice of shots and editing, we see glimpses of the vintage Julio Medem that we love and miss.  If only he could make films more frequently! Performance-wise, the slightly under-used Najwa Nimri, and an ever-elegant Angela Molina playing the brothers' mother stand out, and the rest of main cast give a decent account of themselves. On the whole, while this adequate Netflix production might not have scaled the heights of gems such as Tierra and La ardilla roja, it is still a full-blooded Medem in all respects, which on any day is Highly Recommended Viewing..!

Blu-ray Disc Purchase Link [PAL]

 

The Nudity: Lucía Delgado, Joaquín Furriel, Patricia López Arnaiz, Maria Molins, Úrsula Corberó, and Álvaro Cervantes



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Grow more pineapple! "Der Geschmack von Leben" [2017 Germany]

No, this is not a new UN directive concerning public nutrition (though it might be a refreshing idea), but it might increase demand for pineapple if Roland Reber and his vlogging protagonist Nikki's advice to drink more pineapple juice is taken seriously by men across the world.

In his latest film "Der Geschmack von Leben" [Eng. Title: Taste of Life], the maverick filmmaker and his co-conspirators Antje Nikola Mönning and Mira Gittner toast to the life-quality-enhancing properties of 'cum' (ok - semen, for the exasperatingly prude), and extol the benefits this symbiotic exchange would entail for men and women alike.












The film's title illustrates the evolution of Nikki (Antje Nikola Mönning) in the classical image of The Road to Homo Sapiens, accompanied by a soundtrack that's a knowing wink to Paolo Sorrentino's 'The Young Pope' theme song (Devlin's Watchtower). The montage culminates with Nikki armed with an iPhone attached to a selfie stick. As you might've guessed by now, this is a comedy, with some serious Reber-style bits from his previous films thrown in.

Nikki is an ebullient vlogger, filming and sharing freely her dogging-style sexual encounters, and interviews with random people who readily open up to her. Barely dressed most of the time, she drives through the countryside in a vintage Land Rover looking for 'victims', while espousing to the viewer through an in-car camera, her philosophy of sexual living without the restrictions of conventional love and coupling.

Nikki's interviewees include women of all sorts; some suffer from religious guilt, some jaded in love, some are still waiting for the right man, and some of them, kinky. Nikki's advice to all of them is to enjoy the 'taste' of life in order to be happy. Morality for her is about accepting and rejoicing in sexual pleasure. "My Jesus is a kind Jesus and pleased when I suck dicks", she'd emphatically claim.

The thrust of the narrative is however Nikki herself; living life to the full and 'feasting' on cum on her own terms. When a 'victim', hoping for some kind of compliment after generously splashing his cum on her, asks if he was good, Nikki dismissively tells him that as far as she was concerned, he was just another blow-up doll who could come, and to add insult to injury, forewarns him that his 'cumming' days are numbered.

Since the dawn of cinema, we've had vampires (Nosferatu, Dracula) as an implicit metaphor for women's need for emancipation, equal rights etc. Later, and as a reaction to feminism, came films depicting women either as oppressors of men in a dystopian future, or as vampires themselves. Reber and Mönning seem to have taken a rather vegan, live-and-let-live approach to post-feminism - no one needs to get killed (and no souls harvested by the devil). What's more, they're also promoting pineapple juice, and much like Carla Juri's pizza-toppings (Feuchtgebiete, 2013), introducing culinary to unusual ingredients, even though they will remain an acquired taste for some.

Male secretions apart, what struck me was the quality of the film's production. Mira Gittner's cinematography, colour-grading, and editing is significantly superior to previous efforts, and it shows. The film is funny for most of its duration - in fact it begins with a scene that self-deprecatingly parodies one of Reber's own earlier films. But what I like most about the film is that it is not pretentious; it doesn't seek approval for what it is, it doesn't compromise, and it farts in the general direction of unwritten film convention. Amen to independent cinema, and Recommended Viewing..!

Amazon.de Blu-ray Link | Amazon.de DVD Link [PAL]

 

The Nudity: Antje Nikola Mönning, Norman Graue, Iris Boss, René Müller, Alex K, Agnes Thi-Mai, Ute Meisenheimer, and others
Antje Nikola Mönning is naked or partially naked, well, for most of the film, and participates enthusiastically in two explicitly filmed oral sex scenes that few porn veterans, let alone Maitland Ward would equal - Ms. Mönning even explains it all in this interview. René Müller and Alex K are her willing 'victims'. Norman Graue plays a hilarious naked Jesus. Iris Boss is the hitchhiking young girl who goes skinny dipping with Nikki, and is later groped in a sex bar while performing striptease. Agnes Thai-Mai who kinda reminds one of Alizee if she were younger, voluptuous, and of course naked, spends the entire duration of a song in the nude, begging to be whipped. Ute Meisenheimer briefly appears topless as a mature housewife. Other nude men and women appear in walk-on roles.



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