Over The Top Fest: PVC-1
On suspense, Alfred Hitchcock famously said something to the effect of, imagine there is a bomb underneath a table of two people having a conversation. Explode the bomb and you have fifteen seconds of surprise, let the audience know the bomb is there and NOT explode the bomb, and you can have 15 minutes of suspense. Enter Greek masochist (this title will become clear later) Spiros Stathoulopoulos who attempts to one-up the master of suspense not only at the 'bomb not going off' gag, but also in the single take film. The premise of PVC-1 is dead simple. Terrorist thieves break into a remote family farm in the jungle of Colombia looking for suspected gobs of cash, when they do not find the money readily available they affix a homemade bomb around the mothers neck, encased in the titular plastic piping, and give the family a day to find 15 million pesos. If they take too long or go to the police, there is the promise to remote detonation. Judging from the gingerly way the thieves handle the bomb, (clearly articulated in the opening moments) the bomb is not too stable on its own. So, before you can say Wages of Fear, the family is off to locate the local bomb squad and have the thing removed; and without a vehicle (the local car owner says no bloody way!), it is through the jungle on foot.
It is hard to talk about PVC-1 without talking about he simple audacity of the experiment. There are not too many one-take (or real-time) movies because it is a logistical nightmare. Rope, a single take movie which was set in an apartment involving murder and Jimmy Stewart, the camera operator had to zoom in on a pillar or someones back to disguise the cuts (due to the limits of 35mm film, namely that each reel of film only lasts about 16 minutes and new one has to be loaded into the camera). Not so in the modern age, where a steadicam operator and a digital camera can do an entire film in one unbroken take. Mike Figgis' Timecode 2000 had four one take movies going on but again, in normal locales and city streets. Even Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, with its massive cast re-enacting history in the Russian Hermitage museum is contained within a reasonably film friendly environment. But here is the masochist bit from above, director Stathoulopoulos strapped the heavy steadi-cam onto himself for the single 80 minute take without limiting himself to a room or a street rather traversing vehicles, a huge farmstead, the jungle, railroad, and a fast moving river. While it is hard to take your mind off of the complexity of pulling off a stunt like this, the roving camera sets the scene for some harrowing moments, not the least of which is a crowd of people, the bomb squad technician, police, paramedics standing on edge of a full real-time.
Due to the logistics of this type of filmmaking (which do indeed boggle the mind), there are some sacrifices, such as consistent lighting as the camera goes indoors and out, but there are also some interesting gains. The camera becomes a character within the film, looking (or not looking) at specific things, that actually allows for a bit of rumination on things in between PVC-1s high concept thrills. A woman feeds chickens on another part of the farm, while the robbery is taking place or the husband has to stop for a nervous cigarette while waiting for the authorities to arrive. These 'down time' moments are not removed, and actually help the 'pacing' of the film, rather than hinder it. Amoungst the nail-biting there is even the occasional bit of dark-absurdity, not just the fact that the terrorized family may in fact be as poor as the thieves, but also visual moments such as a young man with only one arm making a living pushing a railway car, or the failure of a trained professional to do something as simple as light a match at a key moment (albeit every moment is a key moment!). Load in the 'this could happen to you' factor of the seeming random selection of the family (apparently the story is of the 'ripped from the headlines, based-on-a-true-story variety) and you have a smashing piece of cinema.
In our 21st century milieu, I'm hesitant to agree with this point however, “There is no terror in the bang,” Hitchcock said, “only in the anticipation of it.” In so many authoritarian and dangerous parts of the world, the terror in the bomb going off (and the aftermath) is quite real.
