El hombre de las mil caras (Smoke and Mirrors)

Cast adrift by the Spanish secret service, disgraced Francisco Paesa (Eduard Fernández) must find other ways to earn a living, his reputation for profound cunning immersed in subterfuge still resonating however, as a crooked formal national police commissioner seeks his admonishing aid.

A plan.

A forecast.

Subordinate reliability a troubling factor, as indelicate months pass and pressures mount, every detail of the plan covertly constructed, contingencies classified with hypothetical clarity.

Interminable patience required by all players, Paesa's foreseen a possible outcome, that leaves him assuredly stacked in the black.

Yet he remains loyal, faithful, truthful, subservient, theoretically, resolute calm submerged and breaching, extrajudicial outcomes speculatively splayed, thatched, patched, acrobatic burlap, either way he's set free, unless he winds up in prison.

For the rest of his life.

Interstitial estuaries.

Comet and cupid.

Compacted nerve.

Expeditiously invigorating cerebral texts and phalanxes, Alberto Rodríguez's El hombre de las mil caras (Smoke and Mirrors) keeps things smooth and steady.

It masterfully pulls you in and then harkingly hails in lockdown.

Penetratingly equipped with pertinent plights enabled, multiple primary and secondary familial and professional plot threads fading then reappearing with expert cinematic timing, thereby effortlessly attaching sub/conscious depth to its politicoethical imbroglio, El hombre de las mil caras is far beyond most of what I've seen this year, another outstanding film from M. Rodríguez.

Immaculately composed.

That's/He's still so much fun to watch.

Verifiable.

*Was into Spanish music last week. Damn it!

La isla mínima (Marshland)

Fastidious expediency, Mississippi's burning, clenched vicious smouldering license, eagerly applied, kept in check by stolid capacity, a team, an investigation, creepy crawlies eviscerating the night, extinguishing flames, chomping chomp chomp, youth and innocence curiously explore to their horror, the aged preying on them like craven vampiric necrocities, their tracks covered, their pastimes grim, flouting respectability with mechanized chagrin.

The monstrous hunting the monstrous by employing monstrosities to covet the truth.

Concealment.

Parthenon.

La isla mínima (Marshland) uses a sombre criminal text, employing politics and professionalism to smoothly and steadily increase local tensions, thereby critically examining post-fascist Spain, the survival of perplexing methodologies blended with contemporary romance to question means and bitter ends, crucially constructed, like hardboiled lucid dreaming.

Restraint abounds.

You get the sense that it could have been much darker, but level heads kept things neat to rely more on integrity than sensation.

It presents an ethical dilemma in terms of using violent policing methods to bring about social democratic ends.

I think what's happening in the film needs to be considered as a case, working within a system functioning on a case by case basis, still possessing many remnants of a society that applied such methods to every case, many of the cases likely involving peaceful people who simply didn't like Franco.

I want to see criminals such as the ones depicted in La isla mínima in prison.

But that doesn't mean I want to see every movement of the entire population monitored and scrutinized.

Pejorative panopticon.

Panoramically percolating.

If you monitor and scrutinize the entire population's movements then freedom itself becomes a prison.

If people can function on a case by case basis, while obviously still looking for recurring patterns of behaviour that forge a logical connection between crime and culprit, without employing them dogmatically inasmuch as each case is unique and individual, they will likely still catch many such villains, and learn to appreciate the distinction between reaction and restraint.

Isn't that what they often do already?

Know need for the CyberStasi.

If cooler heads prevail.