Chaotic Ana

Ana, (Manuela Velles), is a young hippie living in a cave in Ibiza with her father, painting pictures which she sells to tourists. One day Justine, (Charlotte Rampling), happens by and takes Ana off to her colony of artists in Madrid where she meets the handsome Berber Said, (Nicholas Cazale). Julio Medem's "Chaotic Ana" aims to be a kind of dark fairy-tale with a heroine whose life is more chaotic than it first appears. Under hypnosis it seems she lived several lives before this one.

The problem is Medem's film can't quite make up its mind what it wants to be; a psychological study of a young woman with multiple (past) personalities, a cool thriller about a kind of cult, a political movie about refugees and Middle-Eastern politics or a movie about performance art? As Ana, Velles is certainly a blank slate but it's a blankless lacking in personality and unfortunately Ana is actually quite boring and she's the film's dominant character, (Rampling flits in and out, saying and doing very little), and at around two hours it's very long. This is a film with too many ideas that never amount to anything and is ultimately a lost opportunity.

This movie feels like a passionate dance, full of emotion, adventure, highs and lows, life and death, love and abandonment. It is about hypnosis and the past lives of the main character Ana. It is about the masculine and feminine. About war and violence, sexuality and love. A unique and artistic movie, I love it.

The last scene was a bit weird for me, but I think it is not a scene to take literally, but with a deeper, almost archetypical meaning.

Ana feels somewhat archetypical to me, like the sensual, passionate, free, open feminine. Really good actress, I love her facilial expressions, her deep emotions, the way she looks and how free-spirited she is.

After the wonderful "Lovers of the Arctic Circle" and his masterpiece "Sex and Lucia" (the last almost seven years ago) my expectations on Julio Medem's follow up movie were very high and for that reason I rushed to see "CAOTIC ANA" at the Toronto Film Festival. To my disappointment, this movie is just as its title CAOTIC. A sad demonstration that some interesting or even original ideas by no means end up as a good movie.

Ana is a young painter living in IBIZA with his widow father. One day she meets Justine (the great Charlotte Rampling) who offers education and economic support to perfect her artistic skills if she moves to Madrid. Ana starts "feeling" the big city and the new life (it is a sensorial feeling; she is be far from shy or at least she has no problems in being nude for art's sake or to take a bath in the ocean or for many other reasons). One of her new "feelings" is Said; a young Arab and fellow student which Ana gets involved and obsessive in love (like Lucia in "Sex"). In short time, Ana starts having strange daydreams and seizures until a professional hypnotist finds out she had lived many previous lives and all of them ending with terrible deaths at a very young age (around 22 years old). This discovery plus something said by Ana (she speaks different languages while hypnotized) causes Said to run away without any explanation. In order find out what happened with Said she accepts being part of a hypnotic treatment, trying to investigate her previous lives (and deaths). The only condition, she does not want to remember anything about the session, unless is related to Said. Many more things occur and for reasons that do not make a lot of sense she ends up in USA where she is submitted to the last "session" to find out the truth. Even when the idea looks interesting; the unrealistic chain of events, many of them too forced, harms the narrative. No character in the movie (which includes very well known European actors like Rampling or Luis Homar) has any deep or definition. They are mostly pieces put there to generate a situation or a dialog; we do not get to properly know Ana since her only motivation seems to be finding Said; and even this mystery (which drives the movie ) is easily predictable. Medem (like Bergman in his own way) has a personal concept about love and human relations and all his movies make reference to the stupid choices and things people do and consequences in everybody's lives. He never really made a lineal or realistic story; just a chain of events aligned to show his theory. This concept worked fine in previous movies; because in some way everything (albeit not always logically) got connected and made sense; which is not the case here. Many ideas seem to be thrown in the mix (not all of them really good or original) but like water and oil did not blend at all. Cohesion is missing in many moments (like the missing reels in GRINDHOUSE). The perfect example is the scene with the USA government functionary; a scene many people will probably enjoy (aside for the disgusting) but has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It is really sad because technically the movie is excellent; the paintings and the animations are outstanding, the locations are pure beauty but while Ana had many souls, this movie has none.

If you don't know Medem - and it seems the history of film has largely bypassed him, much like Raoul Ruiz - he's magical, with stories about stories sliding into memory and yearning. Love is his theme. His camera paints with music. Fiery duende. He's a more deeply felt Ruiz in this way. He had made two more successful films leading up to this that you should absolutely see, then come to this.

It starts in a slightly clumsy way with a father and daughter living remotely in an island, then schematic in an artistic commune where she goes, but soon you see what he's capable of. From about when she meets the Berber boy until she arrives at New York he soars. This part incidentally mirrors his previous two.

It starts with the scene of their meeting in painting class; her painting clearly a sparrow in a corner of her painting that he painted elusively as just shape in his, his texture of the painting as primal as the desert he comes from, the inexplicable urge that takes over her, you can see Medem soar here. The whole is about tumultuous urges in the soul that rush to the surface, carrying with them memory, image, contact, consciousness of something larger. It is about having known him in a cosmic way, before this specific affair started, as having always suffered for him, this is how deeply Medem portrays.

And it always starts again from the middle, with him always already gone from her. Medem employed a similar device in Lucia. It's halfway in that we get this, the cinematic device that gives the story its specific shape of sliding visions. She's being hypnotized to remember. The thing to glean is that she's the one swimming into urges that heave around her, has been since the very first scene. We get the searching for him (he has mysteriously vanished) as searching across different lives, dying innumerable deaths. Selves within selves.

This has always been Medem's force; the ability to take love, make love so deep, it becomes what this life has always been about since the very start, meeting this person. Before and after blend. Urge rushes out both ways from a center in the middle. No one does deep love better, not even Malick.

But then something happens and it slips from him. You'll note quite clearly - we shift from this affair, from love shuffled by chance time, to broader elegy of womanhood. Fiery, quietly enduring the ills of mankind. Man is now more than this Berber boy she met one day, it's a child she had taken from her in the desert, a father who took off on a boat, an Indian chieftain who slayed her. That was also the time of the Iraq war so we get an angry vignette against the warmongers.

But now every new allusion jars, falls apart. It takes breath of life out and puts symbolic motif in - the woman as goddess and as mother of humanity. It does away with love we might have known and gives something broader but without anchor.

The film is dedicated to his sister Ana, then recently departed. The set of paintings we see throughout are hers, from an exhibition she was about to stage. It may be that he had already started work on this as one thing (or the story idea pre-existed) and it morphed to something else.

Having now seen all six of Medem's DVDs in his Spanish released "Collection", I was worried that this last one, would be rubbish. Other reviews and reviewers hint at such but I found it utterly intense and mesmerising.

Anyone having seen more than one of Julio's films knows that logic often disappears and an adult fantasy awaits. Beautiful sexuality, strange and exotic visuals, stunning landscapes and a chequerboard of interlocking story pieces that sometimes sort of connect. I loved not knowing what was going to happen next, or who Ana's next incarnation was going to be.

Instead of trying to make sense of it all, just light a candle of two, turn out the lights and let it overwhelm you. This is a director of immense imagination and he has the guts to follow them through and onto film. The ravishing paintings done by his late sister alone are worth seeing.

Here in the U.K., I've not seen any of the regular actors of Medem's in any other director's films. So, it was nice to see the reassuring maturity of Charlotte Rampling and her character as the Patron of the Arts that takes Ana under her wing perfect for her and she plays it superbly, of course.

Chaotic Ana isn't my favourite Medem flick, The Red Squirrel is. All his films are quite long and meandering and it is this unpredictability and superb visual tapestry that makes me rate him so highly.