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Intacto
**
Cinema
Reviews - Week of April 25, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. Spain.
108 minutes. Directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Written by Juan Carlos
Fresnadillo, Andrés M. Koppel. Starring Leonardo Sbaraglia, Eusebio
Poncela, Mónica López, Antonio Dechent, Max von Sydow, Guillermo
Toledo, Alber Ponte, Andrea San Vicente.
This is a movie about luck. Not about luck in
terms of randomly beating the odds, but about luck as a supernatural commodity
that some are more likely to possess than others. These special people can
have their gift taken away, if someone else of their kind lays hands on them
in a certain way. And if they so desire, the lucky people can use the same
trick to take away the little luck of ordinary people and absorb it for
themselves.
From overheard snippets of conversation and sideway
glances at reviews, I gather that a lot of people think this is a great idea.
And "Intacto" starts like it could be a very good movie. Max
von Sydow plays a strange overlord, sitting in a bare room somewhere in a
casino hotel. He has been lucky for a long time, and he likes to play a game
where people shoot a gun at him. There is one empty space in the chamber.
The challenger shoots first. If the gun doesn't fire on von Sydow, then it's
his turn. Von Sydow never loses.
We learn that von Sydow has a longtime associate
played by Eusebio Poncela, who is now being disposed of. Poncela's gift is
taken away by his boss as he hits the road, and so the guy hooks up with
Leonardo Sbaraglia, the sole survivor of an airplane crash. He tells the
kid they can make each other rich, and leads him to gatherings where underworld
communities of lucky people gamble for high stakes, through weird games like
running through trees with blindfolds and trying not to bump into anything.
This is weird enough; matters are complicated by the fact that Sbaraglia
is wanted for bank robbery, and the cop on his case is another one of these
people blessed with mystic luck.
I thought "Intacto" was going to be a sly, merciless
thriller, and there would be a terrific payoff with von Sydow, who lurks
in the background and reveals little. But although it does sort of have designs
on being tense, and von Sydow is involved with the ending, the movie doesn't
generate a lot of energy. It is dark, brooding and slow, and takes its central
idea way too seriously. I believe in the supernatural, especially at the
cinema, but the idea of chance as a supernatural force is not very interesting
as anything other than a gimmick. Luck is just luck, right? The characters
in "Intacto" sit around in awe of it, sometimes silently grimacing under
its power, at other times conversing about when their luck will run out,
or whether they carry stronger forces than their opponents. This isn't moody,
it's ridiculous and boring.
The movie is also just plain hard to follow. I'm
not talking about the opening passages, which are strong and commanding in
the way they reveal the main concept with odd, oblique gestures. What creates
a problem is the middle of the movie, when the cop starts getting involved
-- there are a lot of unexplained characters in her scenes, and I could never
tell what she was doing, or where she was in relation to Sbaraglia, or whether
she was planning something on the side. We get plenty of shifty glances and
dramatic questions, but not a lot of explanation.
"Intacto" has enough sleek shots and twisty turns
to become a cult hit. The director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, is a young and
obviously clever guy, who is perhaps conscious of the fact that flashy nonsense
will attract attention and propel his career somewhere better. Fair play,
but I can do without this movie. It might be smart, but not smart enough
to know when it's missing opportunities and going off in directions that
the audience has no way of following. If you can tell what the hell is going
on here, and better yet, find it interesting, consider yourself one of the
lucky ones.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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