The Year
and the Vineyard/El Año y la Viña ***
Dir: Jonathan Cenzual Burley. With: Andrea
Calabrese, Fede Sanchez Garcia, Javier Saez. 75 mins. Cert: 15
Idiosyncratic indie
rover Jonathan Cenzual Burley here follows 2011’s droll road movie The Soul of Flies with an absurdist
diversion that might legitimately have been pitched as Bill and Ted’s Land and
Freedom: the tale of a beardy International Brigade recruit (Andrea
Calabrese) who tumbles through a rip in the space-time continuum and winds up
in latter-day Salamanca. In a pointed inversion of comic form, it’s the moderns
who prove more guileless, credulous Catholics who need reminding of their
country’s hellish past to better appreciate the present; meanwhile, the
blast-from-the-past wanders this striking landscape, haunted by frankly
gorgeous memories of a now-lost love. Burley’s gentle sensibility doesn’t so
much gnaw on the funny bone as nuzzle it affectionately: his latest reminded me
of Hal Hartley’s The Book of Life –
which had Jesus and the Devil show up in pre-millennial Manhattan – while
translating that film’s cool anomie into a fresh, playful, increasingly affecting
bonhomie.
The Year and the Vineyard opens in selected cinemas from today.
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