To cut right to the painful part: I had my worst-ever movie-going experience yesterday, comprehension-wise. Martha and I went to see an Argentine film called El Vestido (The Dress) and that is about as much as I can tell you about what I saw. Not only did I fail to parse the simplest connections between characters, I even managed to miss the fact that two of the main characters were from Spain, speaking with heavy Spanish accents, while the rest of the cast was Argentine. (Notice how I run to arch and posey English locutions like "parse" and "locutions" so you'll know that even though I'm an idiot in Spanish, I can still be pretentious in at least one language.)
It's a slow arty film with tons of wordless scenes, which you would think would make it easy to understand, but no. The dialogue was curt and elliptical and most of it flies by with no context to grab onto. I understood many of the phrases, but couldn't hang them onto any sort of coherent through-line. Afterward Martha explained to me that we had seen two versions of a story, one about the Spanish gentleman and the other being written by the Spanish gentleman. This was signaled by the lead actress being sometimes blond and sometimes raven-haired (I had, at least, noticed that much.) His father died recently (I got that) leaving behind his gay lover (Oh, so that's who that older guy crying was) and his sculptural white-wall labyrinths (I saw them, but thought they were the Spanish guy's, not his father's.) The Spanish guy's ill-fated romance with Ana is constructed and reconstructed and the same Satie-esque piano riff plays over and over, while we see a lot of white walls, flapping white curtains, and that white labyrinth. And there's a dress.
I'll add in my sheepish defense that I saw an excellent thriller this weekend (El secreto de sus ojos; The Secret of His Eyes) and although I missed a lot of the streetwise dialogue, I did manage to follow the plot quite well. And I was alone, so I didn't have Martha there to explain afetrwards (OK, I did have to search the Internet for one important whispered sentence that I missed. Happily I found a chat board where someone else had missed the same sentence and several viewers obligingly explained. You can find anything on the Net these days.)
I'm discouraged by The Dress, of course, but I suppose the best thing to do is get back on the horse. Only the horse is going to look pretty silly in a dress.
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I feel for you on this one - every now and again we go see a more "artsy" film and Henry has to explain half of it to me. I'll second, however, the recommendation for El secreto de sus ojos - loved it (though it took a bit of discussion afterwards to understand, not the dialogue or characters, but some of the political/social background to the piece that made the story plausible). Another new Argentine film out, which if you haven't seen while you're here, you must, is Anita - excellent, and quite followable!
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