A ghost may be a memory that refuses to die, or that, as Lacan said, reality is the support for the ghost of a neurotic. Although, perhaps, the peculiarity of the characters of “Bodegón with Ghosts” is that they are not neurotic, and that their ghosts live with what we call reality, although this is so prosaic, so anachronistic, so extravagant, that it does not seem real.
This feeling of estrangement, that the debut in Enrique Buleo’s length shares with the cinema of Chema García Ibarra, comes just from a staging that integrates the Batiné’s gathers, the wallpaper, the rubber tablecloths, the formic furniture of the kitchen and the DuralEx dishes (excellent artistic direction) with the normalization of supernatural appearances.
What “sacred spirit” did with the sects and UFOs, “still life with ghosts” does it with the ectoplasms and cases of the mystery ship. They do not misunderstand: the tone is deliberately lighter, less disturbing than in the excellent film of Ibarra. There is the same fascination with a habitat (a people of La Mancha) and its people, the living and the dead, although their film -ómnibus character condemns a certain (and logic) irregularity.
In the five stories that configure the film – which one imagines directed by the Manolo Summers of “The girl of mourning” if this, in the sixties, would have believed in the sensory – the unusual wishes abound: for example, that of the father That, once dead, he wants to be remembered as the woman who never was in life; that of the old lonely one who would like to be possessed by the spectrum of a neighbor; or that of classic ghosts, with built -in sheets, which claim the opening of limbo to a priest who doubts his faith.
They are minimal stories, which do not need great themes because they align with a tradition that flirts with a mixture of hope and costumbrismo very typical of Spanish cinema, in which natural actors attached to their text are shining without ironic distances, and a sense of humor between black and endearing, without cynicism.
- The best: His approach to comedy is not exempt from melancholy, and there is no condescension or cynicism.
- Worst: Perhaps some of the stories have not enough entity to hold beyond the anecdote.
