Post by Vits on Mar 1, 2019 19:20:14 GMT
The performances, directing and technical aspects in EL ARBOL DE LA SANGRE (THE TREE OF BLOOD) are good, but the story... Well, it's the kind where the audience discovers things about the main characters piece by piece through flashbacks. The kind that is intriguing while you watch it but, by the end, you may not feel like there's a lot to take out of it. The characters know most of these details from the beginning, so it's only a mystery to us, and the movie ends before they explore how the details they didn't know will truly affect their lives from now on. There are many actions and lines that would feel unnatural in real life. The most frequent one is having one character say a name to another one and immediately say their relationship with them. For example, "I was talking to JULIETA, your mother." Did writer/director Julio Medem though it would be hard to keep up with the amount of characters and the different timelines? It is a little bit, but that's because some characters are played by the same actor in all the timelines while others aren't. If that kind of dialogue isn't redundant enough for you, there's a point where REBECA (one of the protagonists) says "For the last 4 years, since I was 14..." Who talks like this?!
7/10
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REBECA's stepuncle OLMO moves in with her and her parents when she's 14. The movie immediately jumps ahead to when she's 18 and she says she loves him. In retrospective, the movie wasted time on scenes that didn't matter in the big picture, when it could've shown this development instead of bringing it up out of nowhere. REBECA & OLMO have a couple of moments in the following scenes where he doesn't make a move despite having the chance, but he also doesn't do everything he can to stop her from getting close to him (in person, at least). During the climax, he tells her that he loves her more than anything. Where did that come from?! And don't tell me that he was saying it like family love, because his body language indicated otherwise. They're not really related, but he practically saw her grow up. The fact that they don't see each other as relatives is messed up, but Medem doesn't portray it this way. OLMO is willing to sacrifice himself to save MARC (REBECA's boyfriend, whom he had just discovered is his son). That's noble, but weren't there more practical and less painful ways to do it than by running towards a wall and hitting it with his head? What if that hadn't killed him? Was the charging bull symbolism really more important to Medem?
Now, the flashbacks are told by the protagonists while they're writing a book and, from the beginning, it's hinted that they're embellishing certain moments. Does this excuse all the flaws I've mentioned so far? Not really. It's clear that all they do is use a highly dramatic vocabulary and that the events happened the way they tell them.7/10
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