Arrebato

Arrebato

For the sake of new audiences, this 1979 Spanish psychological horror film “Arrebato” has been brought back in 4K; it is also receiving its first American theater release this week. For forty years, it has sat in the strangeness of Iván Zulueta’s vision, which was a cult classic in Spain for good reason: its homoeroticism tinged with heavy drug use propels a phantasmagoric trip where cinema itself is a soul sucking vampire.

The celluloid under scrutiny in the cutting room reveals the last frames of a horror movie made on a shoestring budget by José Sirgado (Eusebio Poncela), an argumentative director who bickers with his editor over an abrupt ending. Stubborn and dissatisfied, the storyteller whose prominent eyelashes and bony face lend him an almost seraphic quality heads home, unaware of the dark package awaiting him there.

As much as anything else, this is a film about analog technology and culture. Driving around Madrid’s streets whilst looking up at all the cinemas showing imported blockbusters like “Superman,” “Quo Vadis” and “Bambi,” José acts as a temporary reminder of Travis Bickle’s taxi rides through New York City; those neon lights are blinding but can’t quite conceal what’s festering underneath.

However disenfranchised from the mainstream he may be, though, José resides on the opposite side of Travis Bickle’s righteousness he is a cocaine and heroin using cinephile. His on-off girlfriend Ana (Argentine actress Cecilia Roth), also fond of illegal powders herself, encourages and indulges in his self-destructive behavior.

During a bout of druggy frustration he listens to a tape sent by a puzzling acquaintance. The voice belongs to Pedro (Will More), an eccentric-looking man who appears to be in his late twenties but acts much younger. His narration of the nameless happenings sends the story into a long flashback of how they met; Zulueta treats the narrative as hallucination at all times, asking us to accept that we are in a warped place where reality is slowly receding from view.

Pedro, like Norman Bates, pathologically captures time-lapses of everything around his rural domain on Super 8. Meeting José, whom he perceives to be a real filmmaker from the capital, gives this disturbed adolescent trapped in a deceitful body a creative jolt. The “Arrebato” (rapture) that he talks about so fervently throughout refers to the trance-like state that overtakes him when he films people, places and things he has never seen before; when drugs send him into similar ecstasy; or when he is near an object (a toy or sticker from childhood) which stores his childlike capacity for wonderment.

The communication is a warning and an invitation at once. Zulueta doesn’t provide answers not the mechanism of the supernatural events slowly but surely wearing down Pedro nor their interest in each other which only leaves us more confused. Set mostly in a functional addict’s home, visually grounded in clutter while textured and lit like many works from this era, even its craziest swings with sentient objects have a chewable quality to them.

“Arrebato” is alive as film stock, a ghost that feeds off everyone who needs it to understand themselves through eternity-bound moments. Once realizing this, Pedro can’t walk away; he’s entirely subject to the physical manifestation(s) of the imagery’s will. Nor does Zulueta make decisions without a few movie-making incantations on his side: A needle piercing skin in close-up or editing tricks that enhance an otherworldly atmosphere come from wanting to manipulate the beast that torments/nurtures so as to say something felt rather than told. This is storytelling pulled from the viscera; it has flaws built-in but passion baked right in.

Irreverent master Pedro Almodóvar has said he appreciates Zulueta’s movie for its pop aesthetic and unabashed portrayals of undefined sexuality and scandalous vice. But Almodóvar’s connections with the director’s idiosyncratic creative personality go deeper than that, having been drawn into his work first as a designer when he commissioned posters for “Labyrinth of Passion” and “Dark Habits.” The latter of those titles also starred More, who after just a few credits let himself be consumed by such an unforgiving medium as acting sometimes takes more than gives.

Having struggled with heroin during his lifetime (he died in 2009), Zulueta made only two features: his debut “Un, dos, tres al escondite inglés” and “Arrebato.” Given these circumstances, it feels like this wild intersection of image making and addiction comes from somewhere inside through all its invention, its excessive bizarreness.

“Arrebato” invokes cinema as an otherworldly entity that possesses just as addictive and destructive as mind altering substances injected into the bloodstream. The camera itself is an apparition that sucks the life out of people who are bewitched by its powers. It’s a movie about losing oneself to the dangerously numbing power of experiencing life on a different level of consciousness, chemically induced or through a lens.

The further away men get from ruinous sobriety, the closer they come to being stuck inside the reel forever. To some extent, aren’t all cinephiles damned?

Watch Arrebato For Free On Gomovies.