El Orfanato, Part 1

Note: this is the first in a series of posts about Juan Antonio Bayona's debut feature film, El Orfanato (2007). I've avoided plot spoilers. Future posts will focus on images and on several of the film's implications.

In 2005, in The New Yorker, film critic Anthony Lane drew a distinction between violence and suffering; certain filmmakers revel in the former without understanding the latter. I've been thinking about this distinction lately, particularly in relation to my ongoing attempts to understand the horror genre and also in relation to Girish's recent post about his own struggles. Horror is a peculiar genre; in its excesses and methods it breaks down, as Girish notes, the aesthetic distance between the viewer and the viewed, ushering in more immediate, unimpeded visceral reactions, a climate of fear, a convulsion of fright or discomfort. Within the larger culture, as I've mentioned in an earlier post and in the discussion at Girish's, this aesthetic breakdown has attendant issues, not the least of which is a potential transgression from more immediate experiences to something more nefarious, to an entrenched tendency within this culture to be stimulated at a superficial level by images of violence and death. In Lane's distinction, the absence of pathos makes all the difference. Or, as Susan Sontag once remarked about science fiction films, failing to enter authentically into someone else's feelings leaves one only with sheer spectacle.

Juan Antonio Bayona's sorrowful ghost story, El Orfanato (The Orphanage), is so traditional and restrained that it hardly merits the appellation of "horror film". Bayona almost exclusively employs old-fashioned techniques, including bumps in the night, slamming doors, creaks and booms, darkness, swelling music, and panning shots that reveal characters in unexpected places within the frame. But the film is frightening and unsettling enough to raise similar kinds of questions about the purposes of certain kinds of film, about the differences between violence and suffering, between spectacle and empathy. It also compounds these issues by directly involving the illnesses and disappearance of children, so that even with its minimal amounts of violence (if "violence" is even the correct term) the film treads some potentially dangerous waters. This subject matter alone didn't keep me from the film; I'm in agreement with Girish that the process of engaging the arts necessitates opening up one's self to a variety of experiences and sensations (and the film's reception among some critics whose work I respect only piqued my interest).  But the wariness was there. By the film's closing minutes, I realized I was prepared for the wrong thing; I hardly expected this film's strong pathetic impact and its effects on my understanding of narrative, style, and genre.

Given Bayona's rookie status and his reliance on conventional methods, some critics were bound to suggest that the film is inherently time-worn, to point out that Bayona and his screenwriter, Sergio Sanchez, quote liberally from older films (which they do, though, to their credit, their influences are largely literary). To borrow from Lane again (in this case, his perceptive review of the film), Bayona seems beholden to the "near-pedantic wish to make the details lock and hold -- which by tradition marks out the débutant." He structures El Orfanato with the proficiency and acumen of a watchmaker. The film's exposition is steady, its shocks carefully spread out; the transitions across the "acts" are relatively seamless; the characters, images, tropes, and clues all connect in one fashion or another. The film "is constructed," as Lane writes, "like a long, intricate session of hide-and-seek, littered with tactile clues -- a doorknob, a rag doll, an ice-cream wrapper, a trail of seashells." Bayona's foremost talent is for creating tension. In one of the film's more dramatic moments, he robs the film stock of its color, envisioning a séance through the cold, blank greenness of closed-circuit television monitors (the medium is nicely played by Geraldine Chaplin, the famous actor's daughter). In a pivotal moment late in the film, Bayona alternates between close-ups and long shots, carefully building fear by limiting what the audience, and his main character, Laura (Belén Rueda), can see. This sequence is particularly potent because it associates with Laura's memories and her desire to solve a mystery; despite a strong fear of the unexpected, I was entirely alert to the screen simply out of sympathy.

Bayona's cinematographer, Oscar Faura, is also on his debut feature here; together, the two employ a relatively conventional visual language, but Faura's photography contains some beautiful images: a wide shot of Laura and her adopted son, Simón (Roger Princep), crossing a beach on their way to a seaside cave, a close-up of a map on a wall as the camera tracks a series of pins while it also shifts its focal plane, the close-up of a key in the palm of Laura's hand. Rueda's performance as Laura bears the same kind of craftsmanship, the same kind of attention to detail and nuance. Her performance would be mesmerizing even with the sound entirely off. For she conveys her fears and feelings through the tenseness in her shoulders, the movement in her eyes, the lines of her mouth, her posture, and her facial expressions; concerned curiosity appears in the simple movement of her brow, while, in her eyes, I could sense the process of Laura searching her thoughts and then realizing something. It is somewhat of a testament to Rueda's proficiency as an actress that, during moments in which she shares the frame with other actors, I had difficulty looking at anyone else.

Given the film's carefully orchestrated moments of terror and its ghost story, my initial experience centered on the basic mysteries of the plot, on my own struggles with the film's sense of discomfort. But El Orfanato rises above this initial experience by being about, and achieving, much more. As a ghost story, a supernatural thriller, a horror film, and a drama, it traces all of its subjects in a number of inter-connected elements and situations, including Simón's imaginary friends, a mother's devotion to her child, allusions to Peter Pan, a husband's dismissal of the supernatural, Laura's attempt to reclaim some of her past, figures who reemerge from that past, the implication that Laura might be imagining things, the challenges faced by orphans who bear various physical or mental disabilities. With all this, El Orfanato becomes a film about childhood, about motherhood, about memories and the collision between past and present; it becomes a film about retribution, about illness, about the relevance of fables; about the differences between reality and the imagination, about madness in the face of loss; about rationalism and separation and life and death; most of all, it is about suffering. That is this melancholic film's ultimate mark of distinction.

Comments

[Maya]

Such a lovely write-up in its measured observations, Michael. I anticipate the rest to come. Since Girish first broached the subject of the horror genre and appropriate handles by which to appreciate it, I have come across the work of a Canadian theologian, Dr. Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare, whose take on the subject is some of the most distinctive I've read in recent memory. I strongly encourage a review of his essay " 'Even a Man Who is Pure in Heart': Filmic Horror, Popular Religion and the Spectral Underside of History" published in the June 2005 issue of Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, and available online. It is precisely the religious undertone of the horror genre, its anxieties about death and the afterworld or the otherworld, that have long captured my own imagination.

Kudos on this examination and I look forward to where it meanders.

[Michael]

Maya, it's great to hear from you. Thanks for your comments, and also for recommending DeGiglio-Bellemare's article, which I'm very eager to read. El Orfanato has the kinds of anxieties and undertones that you mention, and I've been grappling with those, along with the larger implications of horror films in general. This film has not only affected me in ways I did not expect, but it has done so to a greater degree than just about any other film I've seen in the last couple of years, which is partly why I'm so fascinated by it. Definitely more to come.