- The opening image of Anguish
Since invoking Spanish genre entertainment in my review of Non-Stop, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bigas Luna (Jamon, Jamon), the Spanish writer-director who passed away last year at the age of 67. Luna excelled at the flamboyant stylization that I associate with a particular strain of Spanish filmmaking, coupling deliberately outlandish plots with deliberately show-offy camerawork. “Luna’s point,” Fred Camper wrote of his 1998 film Chambermaid on the Titanic (released in the U.S. as The Chambermaid), “is that one can enjoy [overblown] fantasies and still acknowledge them as false,” a sentiment conveyed by all of his work. Here was a filmmaker who worked hard but didn’t take himself too seriously—even the shallowest movies of his I’ve seen have made me smile.
Eventually fantasy and reality blur, as a crazed gunman starts preying upon the theater’s employees and patrons. In light of recent tragedies, I imagine no theater would want to program Anguish anymore—today the film’s “reality” is closer to reality than Luna could have predicted in 1987. But I bet the effect of a wide-screen frame within a wide-screen frame looks especially cool in a theater, like some sort of M.C. Escher doodle come to life.
