The Mutating Cell

 The eponymous Celda 211 (Cell 211) of the Prison Central Provincial in the Spanish city of Zamora has a certain reputation among the prison’s inmates. Its last occupant, Morao, who had a tumour in his brain ‘the size of a kiwi’, spent his last days in there in the throes of unimaginable pain, all the while screaming for help. But his cries were never answered by the prison guards. However, the walls were eager listeners, on which Morao, ignored, impaired, and in suffering, had inscribed barely intelligible words that bear testament to his agonising last few days. Possibly because of the way in which he died, the cell is now kept empty, but a sense of foreboding prevails within. Maybe, the vacancy is also explained by the fact that El Morao in Spanish means ‘he dwells’?

Though the above description is more befitting of a horror film, but Daniel Monzón’s eight Goya (the Spanish equivalent to the Oscars) winning Celda 211 (2009) is in reality an exceptional prison drama that unfolds against this setting. 

When the unconscious 33-year-old Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) finds himself being slapped back to reality in that very cell, he is quite oblivious of its morbid past. In fact, he is not supposed to be inside a prison cell in the first place. All he knows is that he has been employed as a guard at the Prison Central Provincial—a job he was supposed to join the day after. Leaving his wife, Elena (Marta Etura), who is six-months pregnant, at home, he had decided to pay his new employers a visit a day before his first working day, just to see ‘how things work’. He was being shown around by his two colleagues Armando and Germán, when an explosion occurred and he lost consciousness.

It does not take the groggy Juan too long to understand that he is in the middle of a nightmarish scenario—a riot, led by the raspy-voiced, bald-headed, life-sentence-serving Felipe Gonzalez, popularly referred to as Malamadre (slang for ‘bad mother’), has broken out. Before long, he is dragged in front of Malamadre (played impeccably by Luis Tosar). Juan realises, to his utter horror, that to survive, he has no other option but to win over the trust and confidence of Malamadre and his cronies by making them believe that he is one of them—a fellow inmate.

In a world where a handmade musket, built out of pipes and spring, is worse than its actual counterpart; where a spoon doubles up as a lethal weapon; and justice is often meted out with iron rods, Juan knows one false step, one wrong answer, one betraying expression could well be his very last. While thinking on his feet, he figures out that his only hope of seeing the outside of the prison walls is to keep his act together, and helping out the prison officials deal with the situation, at the same time.

As the prison warden Jose Roca and his colleagues wait for the SWAT team to arrive, the situation gets aggravated when Malamadre reveals his trump card in the negotiations that he will undertake with the officials. He takes three terrorists—members of the ETA, a Basque separatist organisation, who are holed up in the same prison but in an isolated ward—as hostage, threatening to kill them if his demands are not met. As the goings-on get more and more politicised, a federal envoy is sent in to negotiate, the SWAT team is kept on high alert, the local radio station breaks the news, TV coverage begins, and civilians start thronging the prison gates. Among the crowd is Elena.

Meanwhile, tension mounts within the prison walls. It becomes quite apparent to Juan that ensuring that the three ETA members are not endangered is more of a priority to the envoy than saving his life. With news of similar riots breaking out in other prisons filtering in, the negotiator reveals that giving in to Malamadre’s demands might not be possible for the simple fear of inciting the riots elsewhere. And Apache (portrayed by Carlos Bardem, older brother of Javier), a fellow Colombian inmate and the prison officials’ snitch, is growing more and more suspicious of who Juan really is.

Of all film genres, prison drama is, arguably, one of the most cliché-ridden. However, writer-director Daniel Monzón (who also wrote and directed the Hitchcockian suspense thriller The Kovak Box) has succeeded in steering clear of almost all the usual triteness in this riveting film. Instead of dishing out another story involving sadistic wardens, vicious guards, and impossibly ingenious escape plans, Monzón has opted to depict a subtle indictment of the prevailing Spanish incarceration policy—in particular, the Designated for Special Surveillance (DSS) part of it that is meant for ‘murderers, jail-breakers, and psychopaths’.

In Celda 211, Monzón has shown that the Spanish prison system, like most of its brethren the world over, is hampered by hierarchy, mired in bureaucracy, and burdened with political pressure. In a vital scene in the film, he voices how he believes convicts in Spanish prisons are treated, when Juan exclaims: ‘We’re trash, and what you do with trash is take it out before it stinks’.

While touching upon the core ideas of any film that deals with prison life, such as the process of dehumanisation of the convicts, defiance of inmates against inhumane treatment, and prisoners’ constant battle with authority, Celda 211 goes one step farther. It shows that the four walls of a prison cell is a law unto its own. Sometimes, an innocent man enters the space, albeit unwillingly, and gets transformed into a transgressor. 

Just who are the monsters here?

‘We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space’. — H G Wells

This sentence, from Wells’ The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, has, since the 1950s, served as the template for a sub-genre of science fiction films—the alien-invasion movie. Notable examples include: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came From Outer Space (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, remade in 1978, and re-remade as the inferior The Invasion in 2007), Earth versus Flying Saucers (1956), Independence Day and Mars Attacks (both in 1996), Men in Black (1997), Men in Black II (2002), and the superb District 9 (2009);  not to mention the attempts made at bringing that particular classic of Wells to the silver screen—the first in 1953 by Byron Haskin, and the next, an adaptation that came out 52 years later, helmed by a certain Steven Spielberg. The recently released Skyline (2010), and the upcoming Cowboys and Aliens (2011) starring the dynamic Ford-Craig duo and Battle: Los Angeles (2011)  make it apparent that screenwriters and directors are not yet ready to forsake this once-fertile sub-genre.

What is also common to almost all these aforementioned films is that in each case, the aliens seem to have a particular agenda—a hostile takeover of planet Earth. It seems we have all but forgotten that Wells had, in his writing also mentioned the words ‘unseen good’. It is true that Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (2010) does not delve into that particular aspect of an alien invasion; at the same time, it would not be incorrect to state that he has portrayed a scenario that makes the sub-genre almost come full-circle—back to The Man from Planet X (1951), where the visitor from outer space was not a belligerent foe but a benign extraterrestrial.

Six years prior to the incidents depicted in Monsters, we are told that NASA discovered alien life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s 63 moons. A deep-space probe was sent to Europa, which, however, crashed over Mexico during re-entry. Since then, new life forms have begun to appear in and around the area, so much so that half the country had to be quarantined as an ‘infected zone’. While the US and Mexican military are on continuous vigil against the ‘creatures’, a huge man-made wall has been erected at the US-Mexico border, while tall fences try to keep the tentacled aliens out of civilian-inhabited areas.

Our male protagonist, Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), is a photographer working for a magazine. Posted at San Jose, Central America, his intentions of following the story of his life suddenly faces a roadblock, when he is asked by his superior to take on a completely unrelated assignment—to escort the magazine’s owner’s daughter, Samantha (played by McNairy’s real-life spouse Whitney Able) to the US border. Thus begins a journey that will take the two of them through the dreaded ‘infected zone’.

The landscape is littered with evidences of large-scale destruction. Buildings have been turned into rubble, helicopters have crash landed by the road, an aircraft and a tank are seen sunk in water, and there are cars on trees. Curiously, amidst this bleak scenario, Sam and Andrew—as alien to each other as the creatures they fear might attack them anytime—start to drop their individual guard slowly but gradually, and begin to learn more about one another.

At the same time, they start gaining knowledge on the towering, tentacled tormentors. They are told by the group of armed men who are accompanying them to the US border that the creatures are amphibians—they stay mostly in water, crawl up to the land at times, and lay eggs in trees. They are also told that ‘If you don’t bother them, they don’t bother you’. Similar to the visitor from The Man from Planet X, who only turned violent after being confronted by an evil scientist, the creatures in Monsters are known to attack only when they are fired upon.

With a budget as low as $800,000 (some mention it to be even lower, at $500,000); a meagre three-week long shooting schedule; location shooting for the entirety of the film in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Texas; and while helming the quadruple responsibility of director, writer, production designer and special effects, the Brit Gareth Edwards has taken a route diametrically opposite to his American counterparts like Michael Bay. Just as Andrew and Sam, while standing at the US-Mexico border stare at the gargantuan wall and realise that there are not many occasions when Americans get an opportunity to look at their country ‘from the outside in’, Gareth, too, wonders at our penchant to shut out what we do not understand because we immediately reckon it to be threatening.

For those of us searching for it, there is an obvious political subtext to the film—that of immigration, but there are two other aspects that make this road movie nestled inside a sci-fi fascinating. One is that the aliens, unlike the overwhelming majority of their ilk that has been depicted on celluloid, are completely without an agenda. In fact, they are trying as hard as us to survive on this unfamiliar planet. And second is how the fact that the overarching theme that humans and the creatures are two life forms that seem to be unable to understand each other is reflected in the story of Andrew and Sam. They started off as strangers, and when they understood each other, they understood the ‘monsters’, too.

It is indeed an irony that we are sending signals to outer space in search of intelligent life forms, but have this penchant for shutting out anyone or anything that does not seem to conform to our preset notions, views, and perspectives. It is communication that broke the mental fence that Sam and Andrew had erected between themselves. But the US military did not follow suit, while dealing with the creatures. They opted to open fire instead, thereby vindicating the words of another doyen of science-fiction, Isaac Asimov, who had asserted in Foundation, ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’

A Truly Sweet Revenge

With the 83^rd Oscars—the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences’ annual tentpole event—barely weeks from now, it will now be a decade since the edition remembered the most by majority of Indians. That was when Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan failed to bowl out the rest of the competition in the ‘Best Foreign Film’ category. Equally disheartened across the globe that year, and since then, has been an ever-increasing number of cine-lovers, who just cannot fathom how Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s utterly charming Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain (aka Amelie) did not win enough hearts at the Academy to win the trophy in the same category.

A self-taught filmmaker, Jeunet belongs to a dying breed of directors—the ‘auteur’ (or author). A much-influential film theory that evolved in the 1950s in the seminal French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma, the auteur theory argues that just like authors use the pen to express themselves in literature; each film, too, should reflect its director’s own vision. One can view this as the filmic equivalent of expressionism in painting—with both putting emphasis on the creator’s (painter/filmmaker) subjective perspective.

The hallmark of an auteur is that it takes the viewer only a couple of moments to guess the director correctly, every time he/she views any instance from his/her body of work. In other words, an auteur leaves his/her signature behind in his/her films.

Jeunet’s signature is the way he digitally manipulates colour in every frame. Like a true auteur, he has stuck to his trademark visual aesthetic in his latest offering—Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009), which roughly translated into English, means ‘Non-stop shenanigans’.

Bazil (Dany Boon) is a thirty-something video store clerk, who can recite dialogue from films from memory. As a kid, he lost his father—a soldier—in Morocco to a landmine. While that particular weapon of war broke his heart, another product of arms manufacturers—the revolver—leaves behind a much more apparent scar. A stray bullet from a shootout that occurs right in front of his video store hits him right in the head and lands in his brain. Gauging that operating on Bazil might have fatal consequences; a surgeon decides to leave the bullet where it is.

Stripped off his job and ousted from his home, Bazil spends two months roaming the streets begging, till he meets Slammer, an ex-convict. Slammer, aware of the fact that the bullet could pop Bazil’s brain any second, tells him that he knows of a family who will still be willing to adopt him. Slammer introduces Bazil to a motley crew of individuals, who live in a junk yard. There’s Mama Chow—the cook, who is also in charge of recruiting; Calculator, a young girl capable of conducting complex mental calculations in an instant; Tiny Pete, who can create wondrous automatons using scrap metal; Remington, a former ethnographer from Congo, who speaks in old-world clichés; Elastic Girl, a contortionist; and Buster (played by Jeunet’s perennial favourite Dominique Pinon), a human cannonball. They spend their time salvaging defective stuff. No wonder then, they welcome Bazil.

One fine day, while collecting junk, Bazil realises, to his utter amazement, that the company that manufactured the landmine that blew his father into smithereens and the organisation that was behind the bullet that is now a ticking bomb in his brain, have their headquarters on opposite sides of the same street. Like Amelie, who decided to take matters in her own hands to teach the local vegetable vendor—who repeatedly ill-treated his dim-witted employee—a lesson; Bazil, does not get mad at the CEOs of the two companies. He, too, decides to get even, while being ably assisted by his family of six.

With the sombre topic of international arms dealing as the backdrop, and the morbid situation of the protagonist, who has lead in his head, Micmacs could easily have turned into a dark, brooding thriller. But similar to Jeunet’s characters, who never get bogged down by their circumstances, and his frames, which show the world in a different hue than usual, the film does a volte-face and takes on an amusing avatar. Akin to The Big Sleep (1946)—a film the adult Bazil was watching when we first see him on screen—which deals more with the process of a criminal investigation and ponders less on the results; Micmacs, too, is more about how the magnificent seven go about extracting revenge, than the final outcome.

It is obvious that like the protagonist of his latest film, Jeunet, too, is a movie aficionado. There are numerous references to other films strewn throughout Micmacs. Look out for Bazil begging inside a subway station, lip syncing to a female singer on the other side of a pillar, who is oblivious of his presence, in a direct homage to the Jean Hagen lip syncing to Debbie Reynolds sequence in Singin’ in the Rain (1952); the ode to Chaplin when an obviously hungry Bazil is restrained by his pride from approaching a woman, who is distributing food packets, and he feigns that he is waiting for a cab; the Buster Keaton-ish moment while cleaning windows and being caught snooping; the characters speaking about Scarface (1983) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971); the shot of Buster zooming through the air a la The Rocketeer (1991); the harking back to the famous Russian roulette sequence in The Deer Hunter (1978); split screens similar to De Palma’s Mission Impossible (1996); and at least two references to Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): a buzzing fly, and the way in which one CEO ends up on the shoulders of another in the same manner as Harmonica’s brother in Leon’s masterpiece. Not only that, in a particularly ingenious sequence, by using sound effects, Jeunet succeeds in fooling the two antagonists and the audience alike.

Other than the surreal tints, what brings Jeunet’s films alive is the quirkiness of his secondary characters. Micmacs, too, follows this tradition. So, we have a surgeon who flips a coin to decide whether to operate or not; a CEO who quotes poetry during his speeches; his rival, whose collection includes Marilyn Monroe’s molar and Churchill’s nail clippings; a security personnel, who has worn the same sweater for three decades…and the list goes on.

The only other filmmaker of this generation who is successfully delving in fantasy is the Spanish auteur Guillermo Del Toro (of Pan’s Labyrinth fame). However,

while Del Toro focuses on bringing out the macabre side, Jeunet highlights the  magical in the mundane.

Possibly, the most apt way to apprise Jeunet’s body of work is indicated by Elastic Girl during a conversation with Bazil. While Bazil dismisses her as ‘twisted’, she begs to differ. She exclaims, in return that she is just a ‘sensitive soul in a flexible body’.