Director: Arturo Dueñas Herrero
Writer: Arturo Dueñas Herrero
Cast: Arturo Dueñas Herrero, Greta Fernández
Running time: 1hr 13mins
I looked forward to watching Pessoas, the latest submission from the Spanish indy filmmaker, Arturo Dueñas Herrero, for a couple of reasons.
I had reviewed and been very taken by Built Lands Herrero’s 2022 film biography of the Castilian landscape painter, Félix Cuadrado Lomas – a fine piece of work by a talented director.
The other reason is more arcane. For some time, I have had a somewhat unhealthy interest in the funerary arrangements for the late Cuban dictator, Fidel Castro. My obsession had begun when I discovered that Jeremy Corbyn, an authentic socialist and fervent admirer of Fidel, had ducked out of attending the obsequies for the beloved leader. Corbyn had somewhat miraculously been elected to lead the UK’s mainstream social democratic party. Wary of being pilloried by our delightful right-wing press, Corbyn sent one of his colleagues to Havana as representative of the British Labour Party – a smug bourgeois careerist named Emily Thornberry. I just had to find footage of Thornberry pretending to mourn the passing of an incendiary revolutionary. I spent a fruitless evening searching the net – spoiler alert – there is nothing to be found – any film that might have existed has disappeared. Thornberry – the spectre at the last rites of Fidelism.
My interest piqued when I discovered that in Pessoas Herrero makes a journey of self-discovery to Cuba which involved taking in the anniversary commemorations of Castro’s demise. Great – off to Havana we go.
Pessoas looks stunning. The cinematography from Almudena Sánchez is superb. Every frame seems to say I could stand alone as a still photograph. Pessoas is right up there with the best of indy films that I have reviewed for the quality and continuity of its imagery.
The conceit of the movie is that Arturo (played by the director), a professional photographer in Valladolid, becomes fixated on the image he shot some years past of a young woman at a festival in the city of Santiago di Cuba. The photograph hangs in pride of place in his living room. Arturo decides to embark on a Quixotic quest to find the woman. Arturo confides his plans to his daughter Greta (played by Greta Fernández). Greta in her late teens/early twenties sees more of her mother, Arturo’s estranged wife, than Arturo – we learn, early on, that the relationship between Greta and Arturo has its difficulties. In a well-crafted surprise, Greta turns up at the airport as Arturo is about to take the flight to Havana and announces to him, and us, that she is coming with him. Next shot they are at Havana airport and about to set out on a road trip around the island. The director uses the road trip device to give the audience some insight into the father/daughter relationship and sketch out a picture of a middle aged man failing to come to terms with divorce and the ageing process. We begin to intuit that the search for the girl with or without the pearl earring is a metaphor for the impossibility of remaking the past.
The opening sequence of the movie is breathtaking. Against a black screen, Arturo delivers a monologue telling us how he took up photography. As a child, he borrowed a camera from a neighbour to take some pictures for his family of his brother who was dying from tuberculosis. As the story is narrated, we see a close up image of what at first seems a flower but as the shot ever so slowly pans away the image resolves itself as an open camera lens. Again, our view broadens out and we see a young man holding the camera ready to shoot – again we move out to see a young woman next to the man, a deux. The image is extraordinarily powerful with its allied resonance of the emotional impact of the death of a child – the intent is for it to stay in the audience’s mind as the story unfolds – we realise we have seen Greta’s father and mother in their beautiful youth and, in Arturo’s mind, what might have been. The director then shows us Arturo walking a Valladolid street on their phone, harassed, talking to Greta. What is fabulous about the scene is it is shot from the other side of a busy road so our vision is constantly interrupted by passing traffic – as Arturo loses control of his phone conversation the passing vehicles seem to be elemental forces – disturbances of Arturo’s equilibrium and place in the world.
The first ten minutes of Pessoas are wonderful cinema and augur well for the rest of the movie.
And yet.
The actuality of the road trip footage works well – aided by the marvellous cinematography. The couple hire a car and Herrero rises to the challenge of how to build the mise-en-scène to portray the ultimate boring reality, two humans sitting in a vehicle. We are given shots of Greta and Arturo from the side, from the back seat, from the front seat – the variety helps to hold our attention.
The reality of the Cuban cityscape and countryside is well caught. We see all the resonant emblems of the socialist revolution – the 50s American cars, the propaganda messages plastering the walls of the cities and the sides of the highways, the farmers still using horse-drawn carts. Helpfully for non-Spanish speakers, the filmmakers provide translation sub-titles of all the slogans we see – a thoughtful approach to inclusivity. Herrero employs a clever device to enhance the feeling of life in a socialist command economy – the car radio plays a constant stream of revolutionary exhortations from state radio stations. Are there any independent radio stations on the island? I am assuming not as the regime seems to grasp the importance of control of the Three Means – of production, of persuasion, and of coercion.
I liked Herrero’s approach to the soundtrack – he uses only two songs – both ballads with a male voice accompanied by guitar. The first is one that Greta plays to her father on her phone – titled Greta – the song brings back shared memories of the past and helps father and daughter to find some common ground. The second comes during the end credits and was commissioned for the movie, presumably, to prompt the audience to reflect on the meaning of the film’s fantastical ending. Both songs work tremendously well – less is most definitely more here.
The problems.
We are with Arturo and Greta on the road trip for around an hour of the movie’s running time. I am unsure whether Fernández and Herrero are related in any way – but Fernández puts in a tremendous performance as a young woman at times bored with their parent, at other times wanting to challenge them, and sometimes simply hoping to connect. However, the boredom constantly wins out in Fernandez’s portrayal – her body language shouts – I am so bored. As the couple are on screen for an inordinate amount of time, the feeling of ennui permeates through to the audience – even your steadfast reviewer was checking their watch – we become so bored. Trapped in an observation of boredom, I began to question whether I could be bothered to relate to the director’s intention to evoke empathy for the couple. Sad to say, I failed – in the grand design of human misery, Arturo’s and Greta’s issues, divorce, alienation, seemed curiously quotidian.
Arturo. It was a bold decision for Herrero to take on the part of ‘Arturo’ and portray a version of himself – regrettably, for your reviewer, it seemed a wrong call. Presumably, it was Herrero’s intention for their fictional self to come across as repressed, humourless, and deeply unsympathetic. To have such a character onscreen for the entire movie will almost inevitably cause you problems as to the audience’s engagement.
‘Arturo’s’ lack of empathy is particularly striking in regard to the Cuban people that we meet. Despite Herrero’s obvious engagement with the ideals of the Castro revolution, ‘Arturo’s’ interactions with the inhabitants of the island positively reek of colonialism and demonstrate a presumption of the power of the centre over the periphery.
There is a very strange sequence where people, the director means us to presume are hitchhikers, appear in the back of the hire-car in a series of interviews. ‘Arturo’ seems to be uninterested in the interviewees as fellow human beings and only concerned with how much information he can appropriate. The interviews could have come from a How Not Guide For Anthropologists. ‘Arturo’s’ working assumption is that everyone in Cuba would jump at the chance to leave the country. In one case, he repeatedly asks a young person if they have thought of going to Europe to make a living. The young person, somewhat non-plussed by the persistence of the questioner who finishes with a “why not?”, replies with passion “because I love my country.” In a sense, a fine piece of cinema but, again, it reminds us that we are stuck with this twit for the rest of the movie.
The ending. I suspect any hardy IFL viewerwho made it through to the end of Pessoas would, like your reviewer, feel a bit cheated by Herrero’s conclusion to the movie. We have made all the tough yards of examining the minutiae of Arturo’s and Greta’s relationship and watched an endless series of vignettes of the road trip – and then what happens? Herrero throws the deck of cards up in the air and gives us magical realist turn – presumably in an attempt to leave us stunned as to the director’s audacity. Unfortunately, the device fails risibly. The sequence felt like a desperate attempt to tie up loose ends and give a deeper sense of meaning that the previous hour or so of the movie had failed to provide.
I realise the above will come across as a pretty harsh critique, but it reflects my disappointment that a gifted filmmaker such as Herrero could get things so wrong.
As to how Pessoas might have been crafted more successfully – my personal recommendation would be to retain the beautiful opening sequence, drastically cut the road trip and ditch the ending. Rather than going for a documentary/relationship drama style – why not go for magical realism throughout? The resulting slimmed down movie would come in at about 30 minutes and I am sure engage an audience far better than the current submission. Watching the present version, meant going through the particular hell of having to look through a distant acquaintance’s holiday snaps except the torture had been made more exquisite by the snaps morphing into a beautifully filmed video.
A last call would be to advise Herrero to think carefully before making a future film where they are the main subject. Our lives are invariably less interesting than we think they are.
On a personal note, I am indebted to the director. After watching Pessoas, my obsession with funerary arrangements conducted by the Communist Party of Cuba has vanished. Thanks for the healing.