HOURS OF THE DAY
Spain, 2003, 103 minutes, Colour.
Alex Brendemuhl.
Directed by Jaime Rosales.
Encouraged by the information that this film won the International Film Critics’ Award for Directors’ Week at the 2003 Cannes Festival, you will immediately realise on watching the opening sequences that this is definitely a critics’ film.
The premise is provocative and fascinating: some killers lead very ordinary and mundane lives, indistinguishable from anyone else except when they are driven to do violence to another human being. Debut director, Rosales, wants to make sure that the life of his central character, Abel, is extremely ordinary. He lives with his mother but is not unduly mothered. He has a girlfriend and a seemingly ordinary relational life. His children’s clothes shop is losing money and he thinks he should sell it but finds it hard to find enough money to pay off his long-time assistant, he has friends and eats out with them. But the shots are long. At the beginning Abel shaves and then gazes (and gazes and gazes) at himself in the mirror. Most of the shots are long and static, frequently taken at an angle from an adjacent room. This artifice is naturalistic insofar as we watch the sometimes insignificant detail of daily life. It also distances us from Abel on the one hand but, especially after his first killing, we are watching him more closely, looking for clues to explain this inexplicable violence. We can only surmise. He is very introspective but seems very unimaginative, something of a loner, could have an obsessive eye for order and cleanliness.
And the film just stops, leaving us to reflect on what we have seen, an almost boring life. The murder sequences are both graphic and unsensationalised, very much along the lines of one of the most realistically ugly killings on screen, that in Kieslowski’s Decalogue and A Short Film About Killing.
The critics were right, Abel and the mystery of his repressed violence bursting out stay in the memory.
1.The nominations and awards for this film? A debut film for the director? Impact on critics, the audience?
2.The importance of the visual style, measured, the many long shots, the audience gaze on Abel? The audience participation in the ordinary life of Abel? The fixed camera, the quiet tone? The angles, filming from adjacent rooms? Car movements? The train? The musical score?
3.The title, the emphasis on ordinary routines, at home, the shop, the girl and his relationship, the break? The breaks in the routine and their effect?
4.The film trying to show the ordinary life of a serial killer: quiet, his irritations, frustrations, no outlets except obsessions with neatness, sudden outbursts and then back to the quiet life?
5.The graphic presentation of the killings, realistic, grim?
6.Abel, his age, background, at home, his relationship with his mother?
7.The shop, Trini, the agent and the sale?
8.Scheiner, the fiancée?
9.The incident with the taxi?
10.The man and the metro?
11.The girl, his treatment of her?
12.The impact of the ending – for Abel? Family? For audience moral judgment? The film just stopping?
