{"id":17817,"date":"2022-02-02T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-02T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=17817"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:13:11","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:13:11","slug":"the-twisted-mind-games-of-arrebato","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-twisted-mind-games-of-arrebato\/","title":{"rendered":"The Twisted Mind Games of Arrebato<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Early on in Arrebato, <\/em>we watch a scene, played in reverse, from one of several films within the film, of a female vampire emerging from a flaming coffin. The footage itself is evidently schlocky, but it conveys a heavy sense of foreboding that will come to make sense later on \u2013 for what follows is a vampire story of a very different sort, one in which the bloodsucking monster at its center is celluloid itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Released in Spain in 1979, Arrebato <\/em>is the second (of two) feature length film from the late Iv\u00e1n Zulueta. Aside from Arrebato<\/em>, Zulueta is best remembered for his work in Spanish television and as a graphic designer. He designed the posters for a couple of Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s earliest movies, and it was the latter\u2019s championing of<\/a> and involvement in Arrebato <\/em>(he hilariously provides dubbing for a supporting female character) that\u2019s helped the film maintain a cult status within its native country, even as it\u2019s remained mostly obscure in America. But now that\u2019s set to change, thanks to a brand new 4k transfer, Blu-ray, streaming and limited theatrical rerelease courtesy of Altered Innocence\/Anus Films. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arrebato<\/em> is one in a long line of films about characters crossing from one plane of existence to another by way of a celluloid (think Young Sherlock<\/em>, Persona<\/em>, The Purple Rose of Cairo<\/em>, Videodrome<\/em>, and, why not, Last Action Hero<\/em>), as well as possibly the first in the subgenre of horror\/psychological thrillers about characters who stumble upon mysterious films and descend into obsession and madness, although even with its vampire motif and eventual turn towards the unexplainable, it has less in common with full-on supernatural versions of this story\u2014Ringu<\/em>\/The Ring<\/em>, Cigarette<\/em> Burns<\/em>, V<\/em>\/H<\/em>\/S<\/em>\u2014than it does the more ambiguous versions, like David Cronenberg\u2019s Videodrome<\/em>, David Lynch\u2019s Lost Highway<\/em> and Michael Haneke\u2019s Cache <\/em>(we may as well throw in John Darnielle\u2019s novel Universal Harvester<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Madrid, movie director Jos\u00e9 Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela) is exhausted and depressed over his latest picture, a Z-grade vampire film he can\u2019t stand. His despair is abetted by an increasingly serious addiction to heroin and cocaine, as well as prolonged breakup with girlfriend Ana (Cecilia Roth), a once promising actress now fighting her own losing battle with addiction after getting hooked on junk by Jos\u00e9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One night, after leaving the edit bay and cruising the boulevards of his city, where the A-list motions picture being advertised by the glitzy movie houses\u2014Superman<\/em>, Bambi<\/em>, Quo Vadis<\/em>\u2014seem to mock him, Jos\u00e9 returns to his seedy apartment to find Ana passed out in his bed and a mysterious package waiting for him. The package contains a reel of film, as well as an audio cassette tape, from Pedro (Will More), the cousin of an ex-girlfriend with whom he shared a strange bond several years back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Pedro is a beautiful but abrasive wastrel stuck in arrested development. He spends his days making time-lapse recordings of his surroundings on his cherished Super 8 camera, searching for footage that will give him a sense of \u201carrebato\u201d (rapture). Despite his antisocial nature, Pedro and Jos\u00e9 find themselves drawn to one another over their shared love of cinema, as well a taste for narcotic powders and an obvious homoerotic attraction (Jos\u00e9 is ostensibly straight, whereas Pedro is openly bisexual). But Jos\u00e9\u2019s interest in Pedro goes beyond kinship and lust, the latter seeming to hold some magical abilities that are never explained (for example, he is able to conjure both Jos\u00e9 and Ana\u2019s favorite childhood toys seemingly at will).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been a couple of years since the two have last seen each other, and at first, Pedro\u2019s film seems to be a simple diary of those years, a chronicle of his descent into debauchery and addiction (he provides raspy narration via the cassette tape). However, a more overtly sinister presence announces itself by way of Pedro\u2019s camera, which he claims attained some kind of sentience and has been filming him as he sleeps. As if this weren\u2019t strange enough, the footage, once developed, is blighted by red frames, moments in which time itself seems to disappear into some kind of void. These red frames increase every time Pedro develops a new reel, and so too does the sense of arrebato he feels upon waking, even as his mind and body are clearly wasting away (the physical effects resembling those of heroin withdrawal). As he watches the footage, the mystery of the red frames hooks Jos\u00e9, leading him down the same path of horror and wonder that has swallowed up his friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the years, Arrebato<\/em> has brooked inevitable comparisons to other films, particularly the aforementioned Videodrome<\/em> (a screening I recently attended had them playing on a double bill). This is understandable given the way their plots and themes cross over (it helps too that Poncela has a very Spanish James Woods vibe, even if he more closely resembles actor William Fitchner). But this comparison is somewhat misleading. For as original and graphically singular a film as it is, VIdeodrome<\/em> is still a pretty straightforward work of sci-fi\/horror, while Arrebato<\/em> is something a bit harder to define. It feels closer to the deeply unnerving, exhaustingly decadent psychodramas of Nicholas Roeg (Performance<\/em>, Bad Timing<\/em>, Insignificance<\/em>) and Leos Carax (particularly Pola X<\/em>), as well as the transgressive melodrama of\u2014who else?\u2014Pedro Almod\u00f3var. In terms of Cronenberg, Arrebato<\/em> is tonally more akin to Dead Ringers<\/em>, thanks to its slow burn examination of narcotic psychosis (a subject Zulueta knew well from first-hand experience, as a long-time heroin user himself).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But while it may not be a traditional genre film, Arrebato\u2019s<\/em> heady blend of psychotronic horror, arthouse homoeroticism, druggy chic and metatextual mindfuck make it a must-watch for the midnight movie set, while the way it captures the (sometimes destructive) pull of cinema and the mysterious je ne sais quoi<\/em> of analog technology\u2014entirely absent in today\u2019s digital era\u2014convey a sense of dark rapture worthy of its title. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A legendary (but not often seen, at least in the U.S.) Spanish cult film finally makes its way to our screens, and it is a scorcher.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":17819,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-17817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17817"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22060,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17817\/revisions\/22060"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}