Chaotic Ana

This movie feels like a passionate dance, full of emotion, adventure, highs and lows, life and death, love and abandonment. It is about hypnosis and the past lives of the main character Ana. It is about the masculine and feminine. About war and violence, sexuality and love. A unique and artistic movie, I love it.

The last scene was a bit weird for me, but I think it is not a scene to take literally, but with a deeper, almost archetypical meaning.

Ana feels somewhat archetypical to me, like the sensual, passionate, free, open feminine. Really good actress, I love her facilial expressions, her deep emotions, the way she looks and how free-spirited she is.

You know how sometimes a movie really reminds you of another movie you saw, not because of obvious reasons such as plot similarities, duplicated characters, suspiciously identical quotes etc. but because of another reason, a little less evident but existent nonetheless. I associate Chaotic Ana with "Stealing Beauty", a romantic drama by Bernardo Bertolucci that made Liv Tyler a household name. seemingly one has to be slightly hallucinated to associate Stealing Beauty with a fantasy/occult movie and like I said earlier, the reason is subtle but it still exists. Ana (the mind-blowingly beautiful Manuela Vellés in a good performance) is a painter who lives with her father in a cave (seriously, an actual cave) when one day, she is spotted by an artists' patron (Charlotte Rampling ) who immediately identifies her talent and asks her to join the artists greenhouse she runs in Madrid. Ana who is very close to her father is a little reluctant at first but ultimately decides to cultivate her passion for art, preferably in a modern day dwelling. Ana is acquainted with other artists that share her artistic vision and propensity to avoid coherent statements (I will elaborate about that later on) but one man draws her attention, Said (pronounced Sa-Id), an enigmatic painter who grew up in a rural area of a north African, trauma ridden, country. How he got from there to the artists' house is anyone's guess. Ana and Said fall in love and conduct a passionate and highly explicit romance. One day, though, Said disappears for no reason. At the same time, Ana discovers that her dreamless sleep and peculiar visions originate in a startling fact in her past. To avoid spoilers, I will not elaborate too much on that fact but like I stated earlier, this movie deals with the occult so if you hate the sixth sense because you're too old to believe in ghosts, this movie is probably not your cup of truffles-juice (no tea in this movie, it's way too normal to be consumed)

Ana, aided with the French patron and an American "occult professional" (Asier Newman Who unfortunately, struggled too much with his coarse Spanish to give a good performance), decides to search her destiny in light of these revelations. These revelations are abundant with cultural references, Flashbacks, scenery shots etc. but they all lack one crucial ingredient- sense.

Sense is usually a missing ingredient in the films that deal with the occult but the sense I refer to is not the fact oriented sense. It's the sense of the characters state of mind and disposition that makes them genuine. The endless theories about the nature of men and women might seem offensive to some or ridiculous to others but to me they seem the clear cut symptom of the film's artificiality. Hearing the characters lay out their philosophies, listening to them converse, and watching them react to certain situations, make you wonder in what bizarro world this code of conduct is considered common or even acceptable. And if that's not sufficient enough to depreciate the film's cinematic worth, the blunt and redundant sex scenes as well as the stereotypical background stories deteriorate the film to good guys/bad guys dichotomy usually common in Road runner cartoons. By "stereotypical stories" I mean the stories that are too clichéd and metaphorical to be authentic, for example: Said that was abducted from his family by soldiers, Ana's friend, Linda that was abandoned by her father, the encounter American official who "made" the war (no, I don't know what that means either) and the list goes on and on.

I feel a bit reluctant to criticize a film that was made from such a personal and painful viewpoint (the director made this movie in his deceased sister's memory and incorporated her paintings throughout the film). I can't think of a more difficult task to translate personal loss to the big screen. I have no knowledge or skill to determine whether the character of Ana is based on Hulio Medem's deceased sister but I can say with a great deal of confidence that the world depicted in this movie doesn't fit to the planet we all live in.

If you recall (which I doubt it), I mentioned that this film reminded me of Stealing beauty, Liv Tyler's big breakthrough. That film was highly acclaimed at the time so I rushed to see it and ended up bitterly disappointed. I believe that many critics who wrote in glowing terms of Stealing beauty's behalf, spent the movie mesmerized by Liv's infinite charm and sex appeal and overlooked the film's overall qualities. Manuela Vellés has the same undefinable quality and I can only assume her name will be known to many in the future.

Hopefully in more coherent films.

4 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter.

I have been lucky to see Julio Medem's films at several film festivals over the years and he always manages to captivate his audience. I was fortunate enough to attend the UK premiere of his new masterpiece Caotica Ana at the London Film Fstival recently. He is arguably one of Spain's all time most important film makers, for example Stanley Kubrick said that Medem's "The Red Squirrel" was one of his all time favourite films and Steven Spielberg offered Medem the chance to direct "Zorro", which he later turned down to spend more time developing his own movies.

Caotica Ana is one of Medem's best films to date, beautifully filmed, beautifully acted and with an intensely captivating story of reincarnation and never ending love. Manuela Velles as Ana is enchanting and lights up the screen, Charlotte Rampling turns in a good performance in her first ever Spanish speaking role, Bebe provides much laughter and Asier Newman is simply hypnotic, exuding vulnerability and charisma. Sequences are at times "Chaotic" as per the title but are necessary to build emotional attachment to the story. The change between chaos and calm being personified in many ways through Ana's final journey to New York by boat, travelling on stormy and more tranquil waters. Overall a must see movie, very different to anything you have ever seen before and a real homage to the importance of women in society throughout the ages.

If you don't know Medem - and it seems the history of film has largely bypassed him, much like Raoul Ruiz - he's magical, with stories about stories sliding into memory and yearning. Love is his theme. His camera paints with music. Fiery duende. He's a more deeply felt Ruiz in this way. He had made two more successful films leading up to this that you should absolutely see, then come to this.

It starts in a slightly clumsy way with a father and daughter living remotely in an island, then schematic in an artistic commune where she goes, but soon you see what he's capable of. From about when she meets the Berber boy until she arrives at New York he soars. This part incidentally mirrors his previous two.

It starts with the scene of their meeting in painting class; her painting clearly a sparrow in a corner of her painting that he painted elusively as just shape in his, his texture of the painting as primal as the desert he comes from, the inexplicable urge that takes over her, you can see Medem soar here. The whole is about tumultuous urges in the soul that rush to the surface, carrying with them memory, image, contact, consciousness of something larger. It is about having known him in a cosmic way, before this specific affair started, as having always suffered for him, this is how deeply Medem portrays.

And it always starts again from the middle, with him always already gone from her. Medem employed a similar device in Lucia. It's halfway in that we get this, the cinematic device that gives the story its specific shape of sliding visions. She's being hypnotized to remember. The thing to glean is that she's the one swimming into urges that heave around her, has been since the very first scene. We get the searching for him (he has mysteriously vanished) as searching across different lives, dying innumerable deaths. Selves within selves.

This has always been Medem's force; the ability to take love, make love so deep, it becomes what this life has always been about since the very start, meeting this person. Before and after blend. Urge rushes out both ways from a center in the middle. No one does deep love better, not even Malick.

But then something happens and it slips from him. You'll note quite clearly - we shift from this affair, from love shuffled by chance time, to broader elegy of womanhood. Fiery, quietly enduring the ills of mankind. Man is now more than this Berber boy she met one day, it's a child she had taken from her in the desert, a father who took off on a boat, an Indian chieftain who slayed her. That was also the time of the Iraq war so we get an angry vignette against the warmongers.

But now every new allusion jars, falls apart. It takes breath of life out and puts symbolic motif in - the woman as goddess and as mother of humanity. It does away with love we might have known and gives something broader but without anchor.

The film is dedicated to his sister Ana, then recently departed. The set of paintings we see throughout are hers, from an exhibition she was about to stage. It may be that he had already started work on this as one thing (or the story idea pre-existed) and it morphed to something else.

Ana, (Manuela Velles), is a young hippie living in a cave in Ibiza with her father, painting pictures which she sells to tourists. One day Justine, (Charlotte Rampling), happens by and takes Ana off to her colony of artists in Madrid where she meets the handsome Berber Said, (Nicholas Cazale). Julio Medem's "Chaotic Ana" aims to be a kind of dark fairy-tale with a heroine whose life is more chaotic than it first appears. Under hypnosis it seems she lived several lives before this one.

The problem is Medem's film can't quite make up its mind what it wants to be; a psychological study of a young woman with multiple (past) personalities, a cool thriller about a kind of cult, a political movie about refugees and Middle-Eastern politics or a movie about performance art? As Ana, Velles is certainly a blank slate but it's a blankless lacking in personality and unfortunately Ana is actually quite boring and she's the film's dominant character, (Rampling flits in and out, saying and doing very little), and at around two hours it's very long. This is a film with too many ideas that never amount to anything and is ultimately a lost opportunity.