This beautiful Spanish film, written and directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, uses luck as a link among several disparate characters. In its distinct world, luck is passed from person to person – some people, sort of luck vampires, can steal another’s luck, and while they then improve their chances of success at twisted games of chance, the victim is doomed. Federico, robbed of this gift, recruits a young man, Tomás, who’s survived a plane crash, to play for him in a small, creepy coterie of these luck suckers. Sara, the policewoman chasing Tomás, becomes ensnared as well. In the background is the shadowy, tragic figure of Samuel, a Holocaust survivor believed to be the luckiest man of all.
Max Von Sydow, who plays Samuel, is outstanding. Though he has little screen time, his melancholy infuses the rest of the movie, and he provides one of two heart-wrenching scenes (the other comes from Mónica López as Sara). Leonardo Sbaraglia (Tomás) is also terrific (and cute!), as is the Spanish William Fichtner, Eusebio Poncela as Federico.
I’m not sure everything makes sense, but I got caught up in the atmosphere. I guess I give Fresnadillo the benefit of the doubt: if he’s come up with such an inventive idea, he must have thought it out, and the things that seem not to fit must have been intentional. What a skewed idea of luck these characters have – for example, is luck being the only survivor of a plane crash, or not getting on the plane in the first place? Is it still luck if you cheat at a game of chance? How can anyone say that a Holocaust survivor is lucky? Anyway, part of the fun of the movie is poring over it afterwards, trying to figure it out.
This isn’t for everyone, but I think some of you will really enjoy it.
And an
audience rant, because this supremely pissed me off: the
theater was mostly empty, maybe 20 people in a 150-person capacity
room.
Across the aisle from me were an almost Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Wolfe?
couple – at least, the woman was (the man seemed pretty
easy-going).
She vituperatively accused him of purposefully choosing seats where she
wouldn’t be able to read the subtitles if someone sat in front of
her.
She was one of those people whose gripe is more valuable than a
solution
to the problem – she complained that he wouldn’t let her sit in the
aisle
seat, where she’d be able to see; he offered the seat to her; she
snapped
that she didn’t want to sit there. Anyhow, after all her whining
about how she hates when someone sits in front of her because she can’t
see (and keep in mind that, at this point, no one was sitting in front
of her for 5 rows), she gets up and, of all the 100+ empty seats,
chooses
the one directly in front of me. It was just so stunning
that
I couldn’t pick one of the many, many possible things to say to her.
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