You might be forgiven for thinking that Basque-born director Julio Medem makes National Geographic videos: his third feature Tierra (Earth) is a film about soil and the lice who live in it and his previous outings include Vacas (Cows, 1992) and La ardilla roja (The Red Squirrel, 1993).
At 37, Medem's track record is exemplary: Cows won Best New Director awards in Tokyo and Spain, while The Red Squirrel won the Audience Award for Best Foreign Film at Cannes.
The ambitiousness of Medem's movies strikes fear into the hearts of journalists who are worried that they might have missed the point. The air at press conferences rings with questions like - "Julio, what is the metaphorical significance of the woodlice?" or "How transcendental is the pesticide, exactly?" Medem himself complains of the number of people who ask him questions beginning with 'Why'.
His films ask us to think; they are like beautifully-coloured question marks, but you don't have to approach them on the philosophical level at all, if you don't want to. There are enough lovingly-crafted shots in there to satisfy even the most jaded audio-visual junkie.
A synopsis of Tierra shows how wilfully Medem steers clear of convention. The film tells the story of Angel, played with conviction by Carmelo Gómez who, like Emma Suarez, featured in Medem's previous features. Angel is a lonely 30-something soil fumi-gator with a split personality who talks to himself a lot. "He is looking for a balance between his mental world and reality," explains Medem.
Angel, who is basically one can short of a six-pack, visits a rural area, Cariena, in Aragón, to rid the soil of the woodlice that have spoiled the local wine by giving it a soily flavour. Angel's white van, with its strange contraption on the back, looks like a threat to the unremitting red hues of the wind-swept landscape, defining the film's look and feel.
Angel's first moments are spent talking to a shepherd who has just been struck by lightning. Angel himself is then struck by two coups de foudre, two lightning bolts of love: firstly, by uncertain, shy Angela (Emma Suárez), who is married to Patricio (Karra Elejalde) - more animalistic than the wild boar he hunts - and secondly by Mari (Silke), a 19-year-old who only knows how to relate to men through sex. Both of the women appeal to different parts of Angel's character.
The film charts Angel's uncertainty when confronted with the two women, a band of gipsies who are working for him and the violent attentions of Patricio. Medem underscores the storyline with a subtext - questions about duality, about the physical versus the metaphysical, about imagination, about the importance of death, and perhaps, most importantly, about perception, weighing up a universal view of life (the planet Earth) against the ability to find meaning in details. Oh, and it is also a love story, with a conventional ending that is the weakest part of the film; it's impossible to tie up so much, so neatly.
Medem is a meticulous framer of scenes, and is as good at catching a fleeting expression as he is at providing a sense of the curvature of the earth, or indeed the curvature of Silke's bottom. Though the pace is leisurely - Tierra is a little over two hours long - subtle accumulation of dramatic detail and entirely convincing character portrayals mean that by the time the last reel rolls around, the tension is humming.
Surely a film with so many shots of the stars drifting by, with so much playful, postmodern camerawork - right down to slo-mo bullets, with such elegiac sentences - "the clouds are the surf of the universe", with so much sheer beauty - within the first five minutes, we watch openmouthed as a tree explodes magnificently under the impact of a lighting bolt, cannot be expected to be coherent as well? "The process starts with an image," Medem exp-lains. "I see something around which I can build a story…then I develop it, and it could go anywhere." Lots of art movies look as though the process stops there, "but then," he goes on, "the other part of me comes in. The controlling part, the part which pays attention to detail."
This is what gives Tierra its special cohesion: the fusion of a strictly personal and wide-ranging world view with tight control. It is this control and clarity which redeems Tierra from art-house pretentiousness; that and a superb technical team.
Jonathan Holland
Prod Co: Sogetel, Lola Films in collaboration with Canal+ España and Sogepaq
Prod: Fernando Garcillán
Dir/Scr: Julio Medem
Art dir: Satur Idarreta
Mus: Alberto Iglesias
Ph: Javier Aguirresarobe
Ed: Ivan Aledo SFX: Reyes Abades
Cast: Carmelo Gómez, Emma Suárez, Karra Elejalde, Silke, Nancho Novo
Running time: 125mins
International sales: Sogepaq International
