I love going to Berlinale screenings that nobody else goes to. Actually I don’t think that has happened very often, though last year there were a few Retrospective screenings with less people. (Perhaps this is the reason why they completely kicked out silent films this year, and had a Retrospective topic that easily pleases a greater number of people.) For “Cuatro contra el mundo”, the Arsenal was at most half-filled which is surprising even for a mid-day weekday screening. During the second part of the screening, it got even worse. People started leaving and the ones who were left started laughing at how bad the movie was. I am not joking. I didn’t actually think it was that bad, but when the badness was so in my face at the end of the film that I couldn’t ignore the laughter anymore, I also laughed along.
Cuatro contra el mundo
Mexico 1950, Alejandro Galindo, 99′
In essence, the film depicts the downfall of a 5-man gang after they pull of a successful heist, almost like “Reservoir Dogs”. One died during the heist, one is on the verge of dying, the rest of them fall in love with the same woman, who is panicking pretty much just like them and, of course, must also desperately fall in love herself.
Since this year’s Berlinale was so terribly lacking in old films (or at least so it seemed to me), I was mesmerized by this Mexican film noir that nobody has really heard of. “Cuatro contra el mundo” is beautifully obscure, it’s not even listed on They shoot pictures, don’t they though this does not surprise me too much. Generally the entire internet has very few to offer on the film, it doesn’t seem to exist anywhere and if you google it, Spanish websites appear on the first page of results. Sure, the movie is pretty terrible, but amongst the myriads of US film noir films, only a handful can possibly be as great as “Out of the Past” or “Laura”. If I had to take a guess, the majority of them may be worse than “Cuatro contra el mundo”.
Nevertheless, this movie is an exercise in how not to make movies. It nails the style (though Leticia Palma’s wardrobe goes from stunningly beautiful to really silly within a second) and the atmosphere of a film noir, but after a very promising, well-done start, the film starts to become silly when the love triangle-quarangle comes into play. The film was fine when it started out as a suspense story (though the camera work is sometimes not helping much with the suspense), but then delved into mediocrity when it tried to do psychological melodrama. Unfortunately all the actors are pretty terrible, especially the main couple there. Their sudden love confessions came off as terribly pathetic, and Paco’s tragic past sounded utterly unbelievable simply by the amateurish way he delivered it. It’s a shame that this film, which originally had an interesting idea and a generally good script, got destroyed by clumsy directing and, most of all, horrible acting.
Of course I still enjoyed it. I haven’t seen a film noir in forever and was absolutely in the right mood for the film. Maybe the Berlinale is inspiring me to revisit genre cinema more – Western, nouvelle vague, film noir, science-fiction, musicals – it’s been quite awhile since I have seriously studied various genres.