Finisterrae (2010)

directed by Sergio Caballero
Spain
80 minutes
4 stars out of 5
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Not much to go on with Finisterrae solely by its synopsis- "Two ghosts walk along the Camino of Santiago"- but maybe that brief sentence (it's not even really a sentence, is it?) is all that can be said for such an abstract film.

It lacks a concrete narrative or much in the way of correlation between the voice-over narration and what was actually going on onscreen, and it seems as determined as possible to keep the viewer from projecting any kind of identity onto the ghosts. You can't tell what they look like under the sheets, you don't know where they came from, you don't know which voice is whose, and you don't even know for certain whether the voices in the narration even belong to them.

Because of this apparent refusal to give up any secrets at first blush, possibly the only way to watch this movie (without knowing the director's intent) is to make stuff up. In the beginning it looked like the ghosts were a sort of representation of the "everyman", because a lot of their dialogue hints at a struggle to feel real, to feel that you count for something. But as it went on, I chose to conflate certain things with a narrative about colonialism and the triumph of industrialization over nature.

As the two ghosts move along rural Catalonia, they interact with their environment in various ways. Obviously they are Russian speakers in the middle of Catalonia, which puts them solidly outside the norm in that setting. Their push towards becoming tangible beings could signify a need for civilization to move outward and prove itself. They encounter someone credited only as "hippie", whom they tell to run, and eventually shoot; no matter your opinion on hippies, using one as a symbol of nature fighting against encroaching development wouldn't be a stretch. Sometimes the ghosts seem at peace with nature, using parts of it as tools- a rock as a cell phone, a branch as a flute- but they seem to have a lot of destruction in mind as well. I'm thinking mostly about a scene where one of them peers through a knot in a tree and sees a television playing performance art involving the violent death of a mouse.

The imagery used to convey whatever the meaning behind this movie/art piece/???? is are, thankfully, the best thing about it- it would be quite a task to trudge through this otherwise. There's a certain kind of entitlement that men who make surrealist art always have, though, and it tends to result in them using images of women's bodies out of context as a cheap attention-grabber- a tactic which is unfortunately present here in Finisterrae. I don't like at all how men look towards nude women in their surrealism so very often, because looking towards the body at all in absurdist art is a complex thing and usually when men do it there seems to be very little meaning behind it other than that it was the first thing that came to their mind. Women depicting their own bodies in art usually have something to say about them, whereas men just do it because they like the way women look naked. I don't know that I've ever seen art made by a man involving a nude woman that actually struck me as thoughtful or interesting.

So with the occasional bluntness of a random scantily-clad woman aside, I'd say Finisterrae was a winner overall. It's got a nice mysterious tone to it that I'm not used to seeing in film, although that could be due to the blurriness of the lines between "film" and "performance art".