AS WE left the cinema voicing our mutual enthusiasm for Vida y color, my wife said to me, "You could easily tell someone it's great, but what do you say if they ask you to summarize it? How do you condense a film like that into a few words? What exactly can you say it's about?"
Good question. An awful lot happens in the film's ninety minutes, and it features a teeming cast of characters that wouldn't be out of place in a Louis de Bernières novel, but the film isn't about anything, really, and stripping down the primary narrative among these delicately interwoven lives to a sentence-long synopsis would end up sounding weak and insubstantial. The best way to summarize Vida y color is as a small chunk neatly snipped out of the continuous stream of time, in this case a few weeks in a small Spanish neighborhood during the final throes of the Franco regime.
The protagonist in Vida y color is 14-year-old Federico (Junio Valverde), or Fede, who attends a local Jesuit school and routinely suffers the taunts and blows of the mean-spirited neighborhood kids in Las Islas. His unwanted nickname is Choir Boy, and his tormentors as well as the more amicable older boys in the barrio address him as such. There's nothing odd or mock-worthy about Fede; he's essentially a nonentity who becomes a punching bag at the whim of his peers. More than anything, he craves their acceptance.
The burden of this constant bullying is lost on Fede's parents, Sole (Ana Wagener) and Angel (Adolfo Fernández), as are Fede's obsessions with completing his Vida y color collectible sticker book and getting a color TV like the family down the road. They're much more preoccupied with their eldest child, Angelito (Pablo Vega), who has been incommunicado for days, and their daughter's upcoming wedding. Even Grandpa (Joan Dalmau), the aging republican who shares a room with Fede, is too busy willing Franco's death to notice that his grandson is harassed by the boys his age. "These are the happiest days of your life," he says, and to Fede this is the most depressing prospect he could imagine.
Fede pals around with sisters Sara (Nadia de Santiago), whose shyness hides an understanding warmth, and Ramona (Natalia Abascal), a girl with Down's Syndrome. While they spend their time hanging out near the jungle-gym and avoiding Marciano "The Martian" (Andrés Lima), the girls' mentally ill father, Ramona dreams of becoming the girlfriend of Javi (Miguel Ángel Silvestre), the good-natured, square-jawed mechanic and close friend of Mortadelo (Manuel Dios), a local gypsy. Unknown to Ramona, however, Javi has designs on Fede's attractive older sister, Begoña (Silvia Abascal), who is supposed by everyone to be marrying Honorio (Fernando Cayo). No one seems to think very much of Honorio, and when he finally gets his three-minute cameo, we understand why.
It's director Santiago Tabernero's deft touch that makes Vida y color such a compelling, enveloping film. Despite the multiple plotlines and large cast, we gradually find ourselves immersed in a rich and complicated story -- the life of an entire neighborhood, in fact -- from just a few well-placed strokes. This brief scene introducing (and expelling) Honorio is a perfect example. Casual comments from the characters have already filled us in on a long back story, and when he finally appears onscreen, his clothes, his tone of voice, his manner of eating soup, his thoughtless condescension toward his fiancee, all so subtly drawn and executed, reveal why he doesn't rate highly in anyone's opinion. Nor does Tabernero do this only with incidentals. Near the beginning of the film, when Marciano tears the bell from around the neck of a dead, stiff cat, his sinister joy that, "Ramona will love this" speaks similar volumes and sets up one of the darkest and most important events in the film.
In scouring the Web for still images, I've come across accusations of sentimentality against Vida y color, particularly in one all-lowercase review on IMDB. To me, sentimentality is precisely what Tabernero avoids, save for one dance scene and the closing pan out, which fixes uncomfortably on Fede and Sara's smiling faces before pulling back further. Though this is only his first feature film, Tabernero seems to be a less-is-more, literary director who values restraint and understatement. He offers imagination a visual springboard rather than spoonfeeding viewers scene after scene. The most graphic events of Vida y color take place offscreen, and Fede's coming-of-age story is nestled in among so many other narrative strands that it makes his moment of heroism seem less heroic and more modest and natural. Tabernero even passes up one of the most tempting opportunities for sentimentalism, the departure of Mortadelo. Instead of a last-minute rush across a field of poppies and a tearful goodbye, Javi sits perched atop the skeleton of half-constructed building, partly obscured by the shadows and smoking a cigarette as the caravan drives off.
Taberneo has given the film a certain fadedness, like an old photograph or the haze of memory, without detracting from the vibrant color that complements the title and motif. His script, representative of nearly a decade of work, is always true to the characters, which is to say that they never seem to be speaking the lines given to them by a fifty-year-old screenwriter. The adolescents in Benito's (Andreas Muñoz) circle are authentically exclusive and impetuous with a penchant for nicknames and insults, and the three generations of adults are delineated well and without using stereotype as an easy crutch. He also manages to work in an underlying metaphorical parallel, with Marciano's madness and the gang of bullies mirroring the madness and repression of the Franco regime.
It's almost a shame that Vida y color is in the International Discoveries section of this year's festival. If it were in the competition, it would be giving other strong contenders a run for their money.
IMDB page.
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