Halfway through Catalan director, Jaime Rosales‘ radical, avante-garde and experimental thriller, “Bullet In The Head” (“”Tiro en la Cabezaa”) we started to feel much like we did during last week’s stock market crash – we were fucked, but rather than and cut our losses and run, we figured we’d stick it out for the long haul and see if we could salvage what seemed like a wasted trip to the movies on a beautiful Fall day.
Highly ideological and intellectualized, the main point of ‘Bullet’ audiences need to be aware of is there is virtually zero dialogue in the film. Well, technically, there is some, but we don’t hear a lick of it as sound is the driving force (or rather anti-force) in the film. Posited as a mystery that we the audience have to solve, ‘Bullet,’ voyeuristic lens acts as constant surveillance camera that’s descends on a group of disparate Catalan people. We hear ambient sounds, the sound of everyday life, but we can never make out what people are saying so we’re forced to intently watch the visuals and slowly watch the “plot unravel.” Why are these people meeting and talking in random places? Why is he at this rendezvous? Is this his wife at his house that he’s having sex with? What do these other people have to do with this story? We can’t hear a thing other than the sounds of the street, so any conversations the characters have, we have to infer by their body language.
Nothing really happens and then around the one hour mark the stories converge and two men who have been shown at cocktail parties earlier, are shot dead by two of the protagonists we’ve been following (if we haven’t dozed off already, ahem…). Then we realize these people are part of the Basque terrorist organizations (ETA) in Spain that have been embattled in that country for independence since the late ’60s. A hostage is then taken captive. Will they do her in or will they let her go? That’s about all the “action” (meaning notable things that happen) we get.
While ‘Bullet’ does force you to engage the film on an intellectual level, you’re free to judge, sympathize, loathe or humanize these characters as you wish, the presentation is just too much for North American audiences frankly. It would take a highly tolerant filmgoer to fully find themselves thrilled and captivated by this film and its easy to assume the New York Film Festival organizers are some of those very few people (we think we’re a pretty tolerant bunch, but even by our standards, this was too academic and empty).
Challenging, unique and radical, ‘Bullet In The Head’ is truly a remarkably original experience, but not one that the major majority of film goers would be able to take (or at least not us). And they might not have to — the chances of this film getting distribution in the U.S are slim and if it does happen, it’ll be strictly the artiest of the arthouse.
Our overall assessment here is little trite, we realize, especially considering how deep one can analyze this picture cerebrally if one chooses but frankly were not that interested in going down that path. Rosales film was too distanced to draw us in and we’d probably enjoy discussing it more than we enjoyed actually watching it. Already controversial and polarizing in Spain, if North Americans have a chance at it, it’ll surely be discussed with fervor and poured over by some, but we’ll respectfully bow out of that debate and will let the super egg heads have it. In a classroom setting this film would probably really lit up the synapses in a lively debate, but on a Sunday afternoon we would have much rather been outside. [C+]