Pasajes, the name of a town in the Basque country which can be translated as 'Passages', is 28-year-old Daniel Calparsoro's first Cannes appearance. The latest demonstration of the commitment of Agustín Almodóvar's El Deseo production house to young Spanish directors is unspooling tonight in Directors' Fortnight.
Calparsoro's 1995 Salto al vacío (Jumping into the Void) was an impressive low-rent debut with a low-rent theme: life on the wild side as lived by young kids with no future. Salto was selected for Berlin in 1995 and won awards in Bogotá and Cadiz, to add to those which Calparsoro had garnered for his earlier shorts and music videos.
Shot over six weeks at the end of last year, the dark and oddly haunting Pasajes is about, um, life on the wild side as lived by young kids with no future. But look again and you will see that it is also about the power of imagination as a means of survival in a brutal, uncaring world. The film's antiheroine Gabi (perceptively portrayed by Calparsoro's wife Najwa Nimri) is a young thief with wide mascared eyes, lots of nervous twitches and a Max Wall walk. She is part of a gang, played by an unknown 20-something cast, fizzling with enthusiasm, which is being hounded by the police. The entire cast numbers 10 in total, and Calparsoro used the Stanislavski method during rehearsals.
A natural-born loser herself, Gabi gravitates towards her element. She inhabits a world that is designed to look like a Technicolor Eraserhead: a bleak dockland area, from which all signs of hum-anity are strangely absent. By means of a powerful imagination and the ability to manipulate people - Calparsoro describes her as "a capitalist of human relations" - Gabi is able to convince her friends that they are heroes who can help her to escape.
Central to this process is Carmina (veteran actress Charo Lopez breaking new dramatic ground here), an alcoholic cleaning woman, who wears the green, marbled shoes which are Gabi's private road to Xanadu. Carmina ends up becoming Gabi's lover, cohort and mother.
"Which world do you live in?" a character asks Gabi during the film. "Mine," she quickly replies. The world that Calparsoro has carefully created - Don Quixote meets Last Exit to Brooklyn - is similarly his own.
Jonathan Holland
Prod Co: El Deseo, S.A. with the participation of TVE and Canal+(Spain)
Prod: Agustín Almodóvar
Dir/Scr: Daniel Calarpsoro
Ph: Kiko de la Rica
Art dir: Julio Torrecilla
Music: Alberto Iglesias
Ed: Pepe Salcedo
Cast: Nawja Nimri, Charo Lopez, Alfredo Villa, Ion Gabella, Arsenio Luna, Carla Calparsoro
Running time: 86mins
International sales: El Deseo, S.A.
