El Mar

Starring:Roger Casamajor, Bruno Bergonzini, AntÃ²nia Torrens, HernÃ¡n GonzÃ¡lez, Juli Mira, SimÃ³n Andreu, Ãngela Molina, David Lozano, Nilo Mur, Tony Miquel Vanrell, Victoria Verger, Sergi Moreno, Lorenzo SantamarÃa, Maria del Mar Bonet, Blai Llopis, Nicolau Colom, Carles Cuevas, Sebastia Rossello, M. Angel Jimenez, Toustrog
Director: AgustÃ Villaronga
Studio: Picture This Home Video
Product Type: DVD

Description

Unrequited homosexual yearning explodes in a coastal hospital just after the Spanish Civil War. Parental advisory: graphic violence and sex. Set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, El Mar tells the story of three young friends, Tur, Ramallo, and Francisca, who witness a brutal killing when a classmate avenges his father's assassination upon another schoolmate, and then kills himself shortly thereafter. This secret will haunt Tur, Ramallo, and Francisca for the rest of their lives. Years later, the muscled, womanizing Ramallo reunites with his childhood friends when all three find themselves quarantined in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Ramallo, hiding a secret rent-boy past, bristles against the mandatory isolation. Tur, now thin and pale, leans on religious fanaticism to avoid acting on his sexual urges towards Ramallo. Francisca, now one of the nuns, helps ease the pain of the dying. Together again in this lonely outpost by the sea, they revisit their dark childhood and quickly become tormented by death, religion, and sex.

Customer Reviews:

Intense and Poetic.......2007-04-09

[...]"El Mar" is a dark but extremely satisfying movie. Dealing with the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, it is a vengeful look at wartime. It is the tale of three young children who witnessed firing squads and their own friends killing each other.
It is a harsh and cruel look at war. Ramallo (Roger Casamajor) and Manuel (Bruno Bergonzini) are the main characters in this drama and as they are witness to the tense and traumatic development, they succumb to a homosexual relationship. They play their roles with delicateness and sensitivity not usually seen in films of this nature.
I understand that those of us who do not know about the Spanish Civil War have no idea of the atrocities that were committed. The movie is a violent attack on all of the senses. The film is nothing short of a cinematic masterpiece which is brilliantly moved along by intense images of war. When the film opens the characters we see are children who act out what they have seen in the world of adults in which they live. We later meet them as adults when they in a sanatorium trying to deal with what life has wrought upon them. One of them is a recluse who is sexually repressed. Another is a hustler who has become ill and the third is a nun working there to heal the ill. What ensues is an allegorical look at how violence affects the psyche in three different ways.
The climatic scene is astounding but not easy to watch. It is profound and a logical climax to what we have seen on the screen. In the film we have a glimpse of Spanish history which takes us back in time.
It is a rough and stark view as it traces the profound effects of war and thus becomes one of the finest anti-war documents we have--the end result has a far greater impact than the reality of the present.
When the three main characters meet again at the sanitarium they slowly reveal the secrets and the scars of their childhood experiences with war. The sanitarium is the ideal location for them to meet again as it represents a graphic plane where there is a thin line between life and death, between love and lust, and between devotion and destruction. It is here that the impact of the film is the strongest. There is a great deal of graphic sex and male frontal nudity and the viewer should prepare himself to see every time of brutality known to man. These scenes are not gratuitous--they are absolutely necessary and the director Agusti Villaronga is to be congratulated for having the wherewithal to make this astounding film. This is a hard film but a necessary one for those of who do not know about the terrors that war can bring about.
Religion, sickness, love, violence and sexuality are present throughout the film and what is created is a tension filled and intense cinema experience. It is a sad movie in which people get hurt and bleed and sometimes a movie, in order to work, must make the viewer uncomfortable. I found "El Mar" to be poetic in its retelling of the sadness and horrors of war and haunting with its violence. It is over the top and restrained at the same time. It is charged as well as understated and the finale is a fest for the eyes. It is probably one of the finest films I have seen so far. It left me speechless as it wove an intense web that forced me never to take my eyes off of the screen as it swept through the history of the characters. There is nothing about the film that I did not love and I feel that those that see it will feel exactly the same.

Rather Pointless.......2006-10-03

I had heard nothing but good things about this film, and when it showed up in the "gay" section of my local video store, I purchased it, fully expecting a superior viewing experience. I'm afraid I was terribly disappointed.

I like art films and foreign films as much as the next person - about 20% of my large video collection (1,800 DVDs and growing) could be labeled as such. But I just couldn't get past the movie's major shortcomings.

To begin with, the plot was not only rather thin, it was terribly confusing. The entire opening sequence had me scratching my head wondering why certain people were being killed, and how such small children (no matter how jaded or exposed to the harshness of war) could possibly be so cruel and violent. And the premise that all three principal characters meet later at a TB sanitarium was a little far fetched. Yes, I understood that the story was intended to show how children who witness life's cruelties can grow up to become truly warped human beings, but the motivations and actions of the main characters were not really explained at all. The main character, Romallo, was so cruel, violent and unpredictable that I found it impossible to have any sympathy for him, and the character of Tur was just plain strange. The title ("The Sea") seems to refer to one short (and rather pointless, when you get down to it) speech by Romallo, and it never really came up again.

But my biggest objection was one I have voiced before - and that is the marketing of this DVD. It is being aggressively marketed to a gay audience, even though the plot and characters have nothing overtly gay about them. Once again, the distributors are attempting to lure gay male viewers with a sexually provocative photo on the box, and the promise of "male nudity" and a "graphic gay rape scene". They act as if gay viewers couldn't possibly be interested in a film UNLESS it has a naked hunk or two and some sort of graphic gay sex. I, for one, find this presumption insulting. I buy documentaries to be informed, comedies to laugh, and dramas to be challenged, entertained and intellectually stimulated. When I want porno, I'll buy porno, and the presence of a pretty face / body in a movie will not get my attention for that fact alone.

And, unlike some reviewers at other sites, I did not think this film was a step up from the director's previous film, In A Glass Cage, which, although far more twisted and bizarre than El Mar, had an element of creepy suspense that at least kept my interest. The plot of El Mar was actually rather boring, and the fact that the characters actions made little sense did not help.

I will say that El Mar is beautifully filmed, and the acting is really very good. But that just wasn't enough to save it for me.

Death by the Sea.......2006-09-26

Some films impress you with the cinematography and the finely honed camera skills of the director. Other motion pictures stun their audiences with shocking scripts and intense, brilliant acting. El Mar manages to impress, stun, and shock its viewers with a really daring, intrepid and brutal precision. This is not a movie you'll soon forget!
This is not something to watch if you're looking for light entertainment. It is violently bleak and nhilistic. The director used his camera as a great poet would his pen.
It is a really fine film, but I cannot honestly say I liked it. I was surprised at the integrity of the story. You can be sure this is a script that was true to its roots. It certainly wasn't edited in a way to appeal to a mainstream audience. Yet, as others have noted, the script proved problematic for me because it proved the weakest thread in the tapestry. Some of the actions of the characters, for example, didn't really seem plausible and were rather extreme. Also, there are some films where you get the feeling the writers were just being dark to the point of being ghoulish. I half expected the poor nun to hang herself from the cord hanging from the window at the end of the film just because it appeared the most extreme action she could take.
I think any other director would have made this film unwatchable. I look forward to seeing more of this director's work.

About the dvd.......2006-07-24

If you want to know about the movie you can read the previous reviewers, who give a very good idea of what you can expect.
I thought I'd add that the dvd image is anamorphic and very good quality. Although I'm pretty sure this is a PAL to NTSC conversion, it's the best I've seen. The image remains sharp and the colors strong. The only thing that gives it away is that it's not progressive and the running time.
It may seem absurd to you but this movie is not available in Spain so that's why I'm here.

Good Acting, Good Locales, Disconnected script.......2005-11-21

El Mar is a Spanish film about the toll the Spanish Civil War has on a group of young children who witness a mass murder and subsequently witness and/or participate in the murder of another child.

El Mar (The Sea) tells the story of three children: two boys (Andreu and Manuel)and a girl (Francisca). They grow up in a remote village where corruption from the Civil War still reaches them. The father of one of their friends is a corrupt official who murders those who would oppose him or fight in the resistance to the government. Their father of their friend, Paul, has been murdered by this man, so they determine to torture their friend as payback (and as only the mind of children can work) by forcing the boy to drink castor oil. However, things go wrong when the boy - Julia - taunts them and tells them that he just might have his father kill their fathers or them. Paul becomes enraged and eventually kills Julia - a feat that all the other children witness.

Paul cannot live with his guilt - so at the tender age of 10 - he commits suicide.

Flash forward ten years... The remaining children (Andreu, Manuel, and Francisa) all end up in the same location at the same time - a Tuberculosis Clinic set way in the countryside. Manuel has been there for some time as a patient, while Fancisca has been there for a while - but she is there as a nun/nurse. Andreu shows up as a patient shortly thereafter.

The rest of the story follows Andreu as he attempts to connect with his old friends AND disassociate himself from the crime lord for whom he has been not only a mule for stolen goods, but also a forced lover.

The attempts to show us the breadth of the corruption his crime lord has and how it is all but impossible for him to escape it. But it also takes us down an odd path, where we learn that Manuel has been in love with Andreu since they were children and Manuel has turned to religion to fight these sexual urges - and has maintained his virginity in the process.

Andreu is the driving force of the story, but the script lacks a cohesiveness to make us believe that this story is anything more than a character study. Is this about the effects of the war on these adult children? Is this a crime story? Is this a story about redemption lost and found? It doesn't effectively demonstrate a clear thread of synergy to provide us with a clear cut answer.

The acting is quite good and the settings sufficiently oppressive and realistic. This and another Spanish Civil War based film - The Devil's Backbone - give us glimpses into a child's mind with regard to the war and its effects - but they don't really tell the story in such a way as there is a complete resolution that satisfies.

El Mar more sufficiently resolves its storyline, but it isn't satisfying, because it doesn't make the connection between the children's past and their ultimate fate at the movie's end.

Gregg Araki deals with the emotional toll on children as they become adults much more effectively in Mysterious Skin. Although these two films have subject matter far different, the emotional framework is not that far apart.

In the clinic, Manuel has a pet cat that he dotes on. In a fit of anger Andreu kicks the cat almost to death (this is a particularly cruel scene and one I did NOT like in the least). Manuel sees this take place and does nothing - he says nothing - and he sheds not a tear. It doesn't fit with this emotionally fragile man, who constantly reads the Bible). It further doesn't fit that he would give the dying animal back to Andreu to put out of its misery, nor once Andreu does, that Manuel, upon burying the animal, is quite lighthearted.

Villaronga would have done well to show us a more consistent emotional thread for these children. Maybe it's an American's emotional expectations being cast on a film that reflects only a Spanish emotional demonstration...I doubt this though, since my best friend is Spanish and is sufficiently emotional in all areas. No, I think this is just a glossed over area of the script of a film that should have been far more emotionally engaging.

Average customer rating:

Coming Together

El Mar de Lucas
Starring: Antonio Bax , Betiana Blum , Teresa Calero , Fernando Caride , and Graciela Castinñeira
Manufacturer: Grupo Video Espanol
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0000DC13C
Release Date: 2004-03-30

Customer Reviews:

Coming Together.......2004-04-06

EL MAR DE LUCAS (Lucas' Sea) is a beautifully constructed Argentinean film conceived, written, directed and starring Victor Laplace. The story deals with issues that are the results of the influences of families broken by divorce. In keeping the story simple and honest, the concept of men accepting their responsibility and vulnerability after leaving a young family to 'see the world' is, in Laplace's hands, a very moving and powerful statement without even coming close to banal!

As the story opens in Buenos Aires, Juan (Laplace) is celebrating his 50th birthday by graciously cooking individual personal favorite dishes for his fiends, the patrons of his restaurant. It seems there is nothing this generous man will not do for his confreres. A young woman (Manuela - in a role that indicates the star power of Virginia Innocentti) appears with a 2 1/2 year old boy (Lucas) and announces that Lucas is Juan's Grandson. Taken by surprise that he has a grandson when he has had little contact with his son Fecundo (Pablo Rago), this newly discovered extended family sets the story in motion. His son and family seem to have been less important to Juan than his own self-centered, though beneficent, life. Now he heads off to The Wisterias in a stolen bus where he slowly gains acceptance into his son's life, discovering the joys of fatherhood and grandfather hood and making up for his self-imposed distance by aiding his son in realizing his dream - a 'sea' (lake) resort in the wilds of Argentina which will not only serve as a living for the son and his family but also for the tender little town of The Wisterias which adores their champion. There is a coming together with Juan and his ex-wife (Ana Maria Picchio) and through capers both funny and tender the family unit finds restoration in more ways than one. At the end of the film the 'sea' named for the grandson Lucas promises to become a reality.

Customer Reviews:

Intense and Poetic.......2007-04-09

Rather Pointless.......2006-10-03

Death by the Sea.......2006-09-26

About the dvd.......2006-07-24

Good Acting, Good Locales, Disconnected script.......2005-11-21

Average customer rating:

Las Huellas Que Devuelve el Mar
Starring: Antonio Dechent , Cayetana Guillen Cuervo , Armando del Rio , Alex O'Dogherty , and Marian Aguilera
Director: Gaby Beneroso
Manufacturer: Venevision
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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