Death of a Cyclist (Muerte de un ciclista)

 

Director Juan Antonio Bardem

Lucia Bosė

DEATH OF A CYCLIST (Muerte de un ciclista)       A-                                                              aka:  Age of Infidelity                                                                                                             Spain  Italy  (88 mi)  1955  d: Juan Antonio Bardem

After 60 years, Spanish cinema is politically futile, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically valueless, and industrially paralytic. Spanish cinema has turned its back on reality and is totally removed from Spanish realistic traditions as found in paintings and novels.     —Juan Antonio Bardem, in Salamanca, Spain, 1955

An interesting relic from the Franco era in Spain that is memorable on several counts, as the writer/director Juan Antonio Bardem is the uncle of modern day actor Javier Bardem (Vicky Cristina Barcelona, No Country for Old Men, Before Night Falls) and the film won the Fipresci prize at Cannes in 1955, a time when the director was actually serving time in prison for political offenses.  Public outcry led to his release, but he was arrested several more times in his lifetime.  The director was a Communist and ardent anti-Fascist who never left Spain during the Franco regime, so certainly this social realist film may be seen through his politicized eyes examining the complacency of the Spanish bourgeois society under Franco, where fear is a common denominator that keeps people silent and in lockstep, and might be seen as his version of Buñuel’s THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962), filtered through the psychologically paranoid lens of Hitchcock, giving it the feel of a horror film.  It features beautiful Italian actress Lucia Bosé, the winner of Miss Italy 1947 (which included other contestants Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano, Eleonora Rossi Drago and Gianna Maria Canale) and star of Michelangelo Antonioni's THE STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR (1950).  Her beauty alone is striking and is central to the film as she plays María, a pampered and spoiled socialite who is comfortably married to a rich industrialist Miguel (Otello Toso) whose wealth allows her to live a life of extravagance and luxury while she is secretly having an affair with an unambitious assistant college professor Juan (Alberto Closas), whose influential family arranged for his position.  Their wealth gives them the ability to hide their secrets. 

In the opening scene, on a flat country road that extends endlessly across an empty landscape, a lone figure on a bicycle is struck by a car driven by Juan and María who quickly decide to scurry away like rats rather than help the man, Muerte de un ciclista (J.A Bardem, 1955) [HD] | FlixOlé YouTube (1:52).  The rest of the movie revolves around this single event, where the two choose to conceal their affair rather than save a man’s life, a decision that haunts them when they learn the man died on the side of the road.  In one of the strangest possible changes in mood, they immediately find themselves at a swank, upscale party where the mysteriously strange piano player, Rafa (Carlos Casaravilla), claims he saw her with Juan on the road that day and seems to relish the idea of playing a song entitled “Blackmail,” where the interplay between the two of them is choreographed like a song.  The subsequent dread at the thought of being exposed and “losing everything,” which plainly means their privileged position in society, starts gnawing away at each of them, but in a different way.  Juan visits the working class village where the dead man lived, a striking contrast of Italian realist poverty to the protected palatial estates of the wealthy, and in this manner seems to reconnect to the world around him, perhaps seeing for the first time the role social divisions play in Franco’s society, while María is seeking protection from the man she sees as an extortionist, growing more hysterical at the thought of what she stands to lose, especially from a vile bottom feeder like Rafa, who is a repulsive, Iago-like figure that dwells in a cave-like world of rumors and “dirty little secrets.”  Also an art critic, he seems perfectly at home in the dreamlike atheistic dissonance of modern art, where he finds nothing remotely peculiar or understandable in the harsh abstractions or formless expressions, but his blood curdles at the idea of always being treated as an outsider, so using devious, underhanded means to expose the hypocrisy of the rich comes natural to him, as this represents a new breed of Franco citizenry that spies on and exposes the moral ills of society, keeping the public safe from itself. 

This all comes to a head in a superb nightclub scene of Flamenco singing, where Rafa, drunk from liquor, seems to be setting the trap whispering in people’s ears, while María grows more frantically suspicious by the second, becoming a feverish montage of close ups shown with a maniacal energy that suggests madness or delirium, 🚩 Recordando a JUAN ANTONIO BARDEM YouTube (5:58).  The film benefits greatly from unusual cuts and a modern sound design, not to mention faces accentuated by white light, turning Bosé’s face into a highly fragile porcelain figurine.  Bardem elevates the hysteria of fear to unseen heights, turning this into a Hitchcock homage to horror, as everything that follows slowly unravels from its hinges, as Bosé’s María turns into a woman-in-black femme fatale who senses only the darkest ulterior motives.  It’s an unusual bit of movie hysteria, all shown in a taut 88 minutes, where the finale was altered due to the concerns of the national censors, where we’ll perhaps never know the original intentions of the director.  Shot by Alfredo Fraile, the clarity of the image is superb, where it has been suggested Bardem may have had the only 35mm camera in all of Spain.  As it is, it’s a startling social critique using sharp jagged edges shining the light on some of the darkest days in recent Spanish history, using a scathing noirish melodrama to expose how the wealthy will cling to any corrupt or immoral means to hold onto their privileged status in life, where greed and selfishness are their birthright, and supporting Franco allowed their opulent lifestyles to continue unabated.   

A Sense of History

 

Director Mike Leigh

Jim Broadbent caricature

writer and actor Jim Broadbent

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A SENSE OF HISTORY – made for TV                  A                                                                   Great Britain  (26 mi)  1992  d: Mike Leigh

If anything should happen to me I DO want this film to be shown.                                           —23^rd Earl of Leete (Jim Broadbent)

Made after Life Is Sweet (1990), still very early in Mike Leigh’s career, shot the same year he made NAKED (1993), yet this rare, hilariously inventive film short feels more like an outlier, like nothing else he has ever done.  Going back to 1970, something traumatic happened when he was directing an amateur production of Brecht’s The Life of Galileo at the Bermuda Arts Festival, which Leigh described as an “atrocious experience,” vowing to never direct anything other than his own material ever again.  This project, however, conceived by longtime friend and collaborator Jim Broadbent, changed his mind, drawn from the arduously strict Leigh style of inventing and developing a character, initially shown as a Channel 4 TV comedy drama, this turns into a one-man show that unfolds as a virtual monologue.  While Broadbent is known primarily for his acting on stage and screen, he also wrote several television projects going back to the early 80’s culminating with this scathing satire on the British aristocracy, conceived at the end of the conservative Thatcher government rule when the rich got richer and the poor got poorer (Margaret Thatcher Ruined Britain), with this film delving into the psychopathic mindset of the aristocracy, where preservation of self, maintaining one’s social position, takes precedence over and above all other things, avoiding legal consequences while abiding by a set of rules that exist only for themselves.  In a completely unexpected aside, Broadbent spent a good part of his career doing hand-carved, wooden sculptural work (Jim Broadbent: Gallery) that reflects his ceaseless interest in creating characters, which are largely extensions of himself, much like the Michelle Williams character in Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up (2022), where the artwork she creates are little pieces of herself.  Directed by Mike Leigh but written by and starring Broadbent, still in his early 40’s but playing an elderly man looking back on his life (accurately resembling his appearance 30-years later), where he looks like one of his sculptures, ragged and frail, teetering on the edge, with fuzzy, facial hair growing out of his cheek, not noticed at first, but a symbol of the grotesque, offering a window into his wretched soul.  This film was included as a bonus feature on Criterion’s TOPSY TURVY (1999) release, but can also be seen on YouTube.

Shot by longtime Leigh cinematographer Dick Pope on location at Highclere Castle in the middle of a freezing January 1992, this has a witty air of spontaneity to it, with surprising camera angles and a drop dead, brilliant script that takes a turn into the extreme, where this is simply not what anyone expects, much darker and funnier than anything else Leigh ever did, feeling more alive and refreshing, where this vile, dastardly underhanded character has such a pompous air of smug, self-satisfaction, yet the heinous acts he describes feel as ordinary to him as a cool breeze on a summer’s day.  Inventing a completely fictitious scenario, Broadbent introduces himself as the 23^rd Earl of Leete, a distinguished member of the British upper class, seen standing before his family’s immense estate, which he acknowledges he has a duty to maintain, at all costs, and to expand.  In order to tell his story for future generations, he decides to hire a professional film crew to shoot him in the style of classical BBC documentaries, recounting his personal story as he takes the viewer on an outdoor tour of his estate, never venturing inside, and tells of the progress of over 900 years of family history extending back to the 11^th century, speaking directly to the camera while striding around the grounds with a walking stick (which he amusingly uses to sit down at one point), faithfully followed by a black dog, yet it’s his tweed suit and balding head that stand out.  Though the format is easily recognizable, the content is shockingly confessional, acknowledging being beaten repeatedly by his appalling father, a brute of a man who nearly drove the family into financial ruin, yet what’s so savagely comic is the matter-of-fact tone he uses as he very precisely provides the ghoulish details of how he murdered his wife, children, and “homosexual” brother, sparing no details, claiming it was a necessity to preserve his standing in the upper class.  British filmmaker Nicholas Ahlmark has long championed this movie as “the best short film ever made.”  While that is disputable, it is nonetheless a highly original and provocative piece of Shakespearean fiction that traces the growth and enduring appeal of a class of people whose values might seem archaic, but constitute an essential part of the fabric of British society.

For all practical purposes, the Earl is an affable man who speaks in an erudite manner that reflects his position, where the words literally flow out of his mouth in perfect elocution, yet he’s a sneering, bigoted man of privilege who reeks of arrogance.  Horrifying and sad, growing progressively more audacious as it goes along, this takes us back to the Magna Carta, the first written constitution in European history, which was conceived to protect the various property rights of barons and other powerful aristocrats against royal encroachment, suggesting the king and his government were not above the law, having little to do with peasants and the working class.  The protagonist of this film speaks as if that is the only rule of law that matters, as inherited land passed down through the generations is the property right of his family, and anyone who undermines that net worth or hinders the ability to expand is viewed as suspect, where all bets are off, as the only thing that matters is maintaining his position of wealth at any cost, even if that means resorting to extreme methods to protect the family interest, sounding very much like THE GODFATHER (1972).  When we realize the extent of his homicidal behavior, it is both darkly chilling and absurdly hilarious, especially considering the casual manner in which he speaks, offering no regrets or remorse, instead what’s emphasized is that he considers himself first and foremost a member of his class, realizing at the age of seven that he is the only rightful family caretaker, as if chosen by God, and he simply did what he had to do.  While there are macabre elements of a mockumentary, Broadbent’s persona is so well crafted that he actually comes across as sympathetic, even though it’s clear he has no regard for anyone except himself, but it’s a beautifully realized work without an ounce of sentimentality that feels unmistakingly naturalistic.  To quote one of the characters at the end of Leigh’s Secrets and Lies (1996), a significant line about family relationships, “We’re all in pain!  Why can’t we share our pain?”  Firmly rooted in the intelligence and humanism of Jean Renoir, Leigh is a brilliant observer of the human condition, paying close attention to the mundane details, hoping to better understand the world around us through carefully crafted characters, where ordinary and everyday life is examined with an acute eye.  Most especially in Leigh’s films, England is presented in miniature.   

A Sense of History (1992) BluRay by Jim Broadbent & Mike ...  Mike Leigh film with Jim Broadbent on YouTube (26:26)