Free Wine Social Pub/Film Night: ABRE LOS OJOS (Open your Eyes) (Alejandro Amenábar, 1997) (Magdalen Auditorium, 7:30pm Sunday 19th Nov)

Just a quick reminder that wine is provided free before the performance with entrance, which is the standard £3 for non-members, free for members. Anton

For this week's Screening/Pub Chat we have a film that the director Alejandro Amenabar imagined in its entirety after having horrible nightmares while ill with the flu. Again, it's one in which I don't want to give too much of the game away; only that it concerns the shift in a man's life after a car accident (with his suicidally jealous ex driving the car), when his face has become horribly disfigured and he must wear a white mask over it: a terrible thing for an arrogant man – until one day he becomes involved in a revolutionary technique to restructure his face perfectly. This is partly drawn from the French horror film 'Les Yeux sans visage' (Eyes Without a Face), in which a girl after an accident is left only with eyes, and no face, and wanders the staircases of her house disconsolately in a white mask while her father, a surgeon, spends most of the film killing other young girls, 'stealing' their faces and surgically implanting them on her. There is in fact a very similar scene of the moment at which the body revolts against this seemingly 'perfect' transplant, and the face starts rotting away, revealing that it is in fact still in its disfigured state.

Disbelief, suspension of disbelief, and the concept of the dream cure are ideas that are carried on into this film, except here, the border between reality and fiction is actually the main focus. The title itself translates as 'Open Your Eyes' – a line of dialogue that is repeated throughout the film – and considers the idea of the evasive dream, perhaps familiar cinematic territory (cf. The Matrix et al) but here utterly, terrifyingly convincing: for instance, you can never be anything but alone in your dream, faking significant activities with other people – and once that has been revealed to you, how do you regain the will to dream?

It's a beautifully shot film, and good for the pub talk for the amount of symbolic details (for instance, when César (Eduardo Noriega) goes to Sofia (Penélope Cruz)'s apartment and starts to rip down her photos on the wall, there is a picture of 'The Sandman,' a popular comic book that deals with the world of dreams, created by Neil Gaiman, and also the song playing at the nightclub when César first arrives is 'Rising Son' by Massive Attack, in which the phrase 'dream on' is frequently repeated.) You may, in fact, already be familiar with the annoyingly indie remake 'Vanilla Sky', which came out four years later (keeping Penelope Cruz in the same role), and though it was a very straight remake for the benefit of those English speakers who couldn't be bothered to press the subtitle button, it threw in a sly reference to 'Jules et Jim' which can be used to rather skew your reading of the romantic relationships in the film. But don't get me started…

Hope you can make it,

Amy Cutler (Magdalen FilmSoc Committee)