Fantasia Dispatch 3 - Tres días Review
There are too many post-apocalyptic films to name, just ask the fine fellows over at The Quiet Earth blog who have a sprawling website dedicated to covering hundreds and hundreds of films that probe every corner of the genre. This type of film has been a staple of cinema since the first adaptation of Richard Matheson's novella, I Am Legend as the The Last Man On Earth starring Vincent Price. Follow that through the Planet of the Apes cycle of films and George Romero's 'Dead' series all the way up to the modern remakes of those very films and multitudes of everthing in between. The 'lone man' and society crumbling aspects more than a little mimic much of the elements of the Western (from Mad Max to likely the upcoming The Road), and one can perhaps wonder if somewhere the transition from making westerns to post-apocalyptic films (a new, rougher frontier) resulted in the tapering off of the most iconic of American film genres. Certainly in the 21st century there is no shortage of post-apocalyptic films. In fact, the past few years seem to be a landmark era for the genre allowing a variety of writers probe different corners and aspects of that type of film. Furthermore, more the rise of the disaster and epidemic film or more succinctly the 'during the apocalypse' films has many entries as well, usually the film would involve a search for a cure or a way to stop doomsday from arriving. However there are relatively few films that focus on a coming apocalypse that has zero chances to be stopped, and purely focus on the futility of things. Ooooh, nihilism.
Enter F. Javier Gutiérrez's Tres días (aka Three Days, aka Before the Fall) in which a meteor is headed towards earth that is so large the chances are zero that anything will survive. The opening shot of a satellite orbiting the planet rattling apart before disintegrating (and this from a small advance token of the big rock to follow) implicitly promises doom on a number of literal and metaphorical levels. These pre-shocks, echoed in the English language title (Before the Fall) are what we witness here and offer some interesting insight into the human need to keep the drama going even in the face of absolute futility. Like Shakespeare said in Macbeth, "...a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more." What I love about this movie is that it proves yet again that there are really no end to the angles and perspectives where a genre-film can reach; there is always another interesting story right around the corner.
The story follows 20-something Ale who runs a crew of general labour handy-men fixing things that break down in the small town of Laguna. Ale lives in the shadow of his successful older brother, Tomas, who remains a bit of a local hero in putting a serial killer behind bars a decade and a half prior; saving young Ale, nearly the killers last victim in the process. Ale has no girlfriend (although he pines for the girl next door whose boyfriend got her pregnant and then took off) and lives at home with his mother, while Tomas has a family of four kids and is mobile enough to be traveling around Spain. When Ale gets news of the impending apocalypse while fixing a TV set for a local bar he heads home to his mother who is freaking out due to a number of things. The chaos state that the town of Laguna is thrown into, the fact Tomas is out of town far enough away that he won't be making it home prior to the end-of-the-world while his kids are by themselves in their house just outside of town, and that the prisons have practically opened their doors, all the guards and staff having abandoned their jobs. Ale's mother is convinced that the serial killer is going to make the short trip out and murder Tomas' family. Ale tries to console her that this guy who has been in prison for years is more likely to try to get laid than make a big revenge mission on children he doesn't even know exist, but spending the last 72 hours with family seems like as good a thing to do as. Besides, the town is a write off of violence and suicide.
The catch is that Ale and Mom discover that the kids do not know about the impending apocalypse being isolated without TV or Radio at the cottage-home in the desert. This is where Tres Días shines as a meditation on how we protect children and family from the truth for their own good, yet kill them with harbouring the secrets and lies. Considering the subject matter, it is remarkable how the film plays out so quietly and shifts genre so elegantly from morbid family drama to western existentialism to set-piece action picture as the acts go along. The underlying fact that all the struggles, physical and emotional are not going to matter in a few days yield some fresh new flavours, imparting the film with a savage grace worthy of the attention of any fan of genre films that step over and above their genre. It should also be mentioned that Spain seems to be the best treasure trove on the planet for astonishing child actors. Performances across the board here are convincing, even if you get a bit squirmy as to what they put these kids through.
Michael Haneke effectively mined this territory in an intimate fashion with Time of the Wolf, but in that film society and humanity plunges onward crippled but not entirely broken. Canadian writer director Don McKellar probably has the closest analogue with the fabulous Last Night in which the characters spend their brief remaining time in an elegiac fashion. Despite (or because of) some radical changes in tone across each of the three acts of the film, Tres Días certainly belongs in the fine company of both those films. And it certainly does not hurt that the film is shot with the a quality of visual sophistication. The gorgeous bone-bleach cinematography on display would feel right at home in a Nuri-Bilge Ceylan movie. Eye of the storm images of people staring up at the sky as the beast approaches underscore the equally frantic moments by those very same people, giving the film tonal range beyond what one often expects from this type of film. There are always new stories and methods of mining a genre or carrying one film inside and outside the fuzzy boundaries of 'genre'. A character in the film, one of the children, even echoes this sentiment asking for a bedtime story from Ale, who thinks that the 12-year old is past such things. Nobody is ever to old for stories. And no one is above human drama regardless of what is promised at the end of the day.
