SIFF presents the Festival of New Spanish Cinema–a 10-film compilation–beginning tonight at SIFF Cinema in McCaw Hall. A full-series pass is $60 ($40 if you’re a SIFF member).
The Opening Night film, screwball comedy With or Without Love (7:30 p.m.), includes a post-film reception at Ten Mercer with complimentary hors d’oeuvres and Spanish wines. For that, it’s $25 ($20 for SIFF members). If you’re just interested in the film, it’s the usual $10.
Colombian star Angie Cepeda is “expected to attend,” which should be a treat. The English translation of the title is the only thing clunky about With or Without Love, which packs about six hours of zany romantic comedy into 97 minutes.
The marvelously expressive Cepeda plays self-interested raving beauty Claudia, who is upset by her lover-on-the-side Pablo (Quim Gutiérrez) deciding to take up with a girl who’s actually single (Miren Ibarguren from the Spanish TV show Aída). Claudia enlists her theoretically more demure, grounded sister Monica (Juana Acosta from the TV mini-series Carlos) in a harebrained scheme to separate Pablo from his new love interest, and there is also singing and dancing, except for that one time Claudia is trying to talk and yells at the music to shut up.
It’s something like if Howard Hawks had decided to rewrite and direct an Umbrellas of Cherbourg set in Spain and the Canary Islands. Stay far away if you dislike gorgeous people, rapid-fire dialogue, general hilarity, and picture-postcard settings.
At 9:30 p.m., you get a distinct change of pace in the melancholic Every Song Is About Me, a first-novel of a film about a young couple who separate after six years, only to find that not only is the grass not greener, but it’s really difficult to figure out how to get back to the old patch of grass.
Your guide is Ramiro, who seems like your typical late-20s humanities major, working in his uncle’s bookshop and feeling put upon and out of joint re: the world at large. You may read that the movie is Woody Allen-esque, but if so, it’s Woody from his Bergman phase. More accurate is that it’s an homage to the French New Wave.
If you stick out the lugubrious first 20 minutes, with Ramiro in a gray, downcast mood about separating from Andrea, his self-involvement lessens and you begin to glimpse his world: his friends, their social lives, and how destabilizing that moment is in life when adulthood beckons, and a fraying post-graduate social circle begins to pull apart. Since Ramiro spends a good deal of his “moping” sleeping with very attractive women, your sympathy for him and his picaresque tale may be strained, but there are moments of quiet truth here.