THE CITY OF MARVELS (1999)
"I'm evil. But the world is worse."
2.5 out of ****
Original Title: La Ciudad de los Prodigios; Starring Olivier Martinez, Emma Suárez, François Marthouret, Tony Isbert, José María Sanz; Directed by Mario Camus; Written by Camus and Gustau Hernández, from a novel by Eduardo Mendoza; Cinematography by Acacio de Almeida;
Like too many movies adapted from complex novels, THE CITY OF MARVELS wears its literary source on its sleeve: you can see the scriptwriters labouring to translate prose into film, and failing. There is a crucial transitional moment when a woman goes from a state of happiness to melancholy to insanity to dementia--all compressed into about three seconds of screen time, thanks to the marvels of voice-over narration. Long expository narrations book-end the film, serving as a kind of duct tape to patch together pieces of the movie which would otherwise seem even more disjointed than they are. Voice-overs shoehorn in background details which could not be integrated into the script.
It's a shame, because when the narrator keeps his mouth shut and lets events speak for themselves, the movie is often superb. The titular "City of Marvels" is Barcelona, in the years before and after the Universal Exposition of 1888. Olivier Martinez stars as Onofre, a young man who comes to Barcelona in search of the wealth of experiences offered by the city. He finds it harder than he thought it would to be find gainful employment, and he ends up spending much of his time at his boarding-house, where he is befriended by the owner and his daughter Delfina (Emma Suárez).
Delfina introduces Onofre to an anarchist group. Thanks to his memories of a father who left for the Caribbean to seek his fortune and came back an abject failure, as well as his own disappointments in the city, Onofre is sympathetic to the anarchists' goal of equality for the workers. He joins the cause, but the anarchists' theoretical ideals are opposed by the strong-arm pragmatism of the local police. After surviving a harsh example of police injustice, Onofre becomes disillusioned and gives up the anarchist cause as hopeless.
He is then bribed by one of the city's wealthy powermongers and forced to join the ranks of the very people the anarchists are dedicated to overthrowing. But once he's within the establishment, Onofre finds that the shoe fits. He works at first as a hired thug, a bodyguard, a street-level operative, but he has ambitions. He initiates a cunning and far-sighted play for power within the savage--and often fatal--world of Barcelona politics.
The momentum of Onofre's obsessive quest for power and the corrupting effect of his realpolitik compromises make for fascinating viewing. It is here that the movie really hits its stride, at times possessing something of the elemental force of grand tragedy. Onofre exists in a world of brutality and treachery. He manipulates and schemes and betrays in order to further his own aims. He makes and breaks secret deals in shadowy cobblestoned alleys. He is a study in moral decay, and perhaps a symbol of Spain's own failings; his tactics bring to mind, for example, the rise of Franco and fascism in the years preceding World War II.
Onofre is a convincing villain, but the movie wants him to be more ambiguous. The cruel thrust of his ruthless political expediencies is ostensibly balanced by the fact that he does it all for--what else?--the love of a good woman. The good woman is Delfina, the woman who introduced him to the anarchists. She loved him, once, but after he rapes her and, later, manipulates her father into committing murder, she understandably professes to despise him. In a turn of events that could only have been written by a man, she admits, years later, that she still really does love Onofre, even though by now he is a rapist, thief, and murderer many times over. The two find happiness together (sort of).
The love story is misguided, to put it mildly, and it's no coincidence that the best thing about the movie is the lengthy middle section after Delfina moves to France, when the focus is squarely on Onofre's rise to power. Delfina's change of heart occurs only after Onofre has obtained wealth, power, and privilege: in this movie, even the noblest of human souls comes with a price tag. Just as the villainous man nurses a secret love in his heart through the years, so the virtuous woman is secretly seduced by the lure of status and luxury.
The contradictions inherent in Onofre and Delfina's personalities are intended to embody the contradictions of their age--the concluding narration helpfully explains this to us, in case we missed the point. And it is indeed, like all eras, contradictory: the heady possibilities of technology and industry clash with the rigid class divisions, political repressions, and authoritarian violence. Onofre is supposed to encapsulate the best and worst of it. But except for his brief stint as an idealistic anarchist, he does not embody the best of anything, except perhaps the cutthroat mentality of the born survivor. He represents the sins of his age and none of its virtues. THE CITY OF MARVELS would have us believe otherwise, and so founders under the weight of its own contradictions.
Subjective Camera (subjective.freeservers.com) Movie Reviews by David Dalgleish (daviddalgleish@yahoo.com)
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews