Wild Tales

Synopsis: An anthology film comprising six short stories.

There’s a lot of rage in the world. We see it every day playing out on the roads, in relationships, on the sporting fields, in the workplace. Damián Szifrón’s anthology film distils a lot of that anger down into six, short, sharp and darkly funny films bound together by the common threads of fury, disenchantment, frustration and revenge: Pasternak, about the unlikeliest of coincidences turning out to be premeditated revenge; Las Ratas (The Rats) in which a waitress recognises a customer as the man who caused her father’s death and considers retaliation; El Más Fuerte (The Strongest), an extreme case of road rage which ends badly but with a wry twist; Bombita (Little Bomb) in which a demolition expert tries to deal with an unfair parking ticket; La Propuesta (The Proposal) where a wealthy father uses his position to convince his groundskeeper to take the blame for his son’s hit-and-run accident; and Hasta Que La Muerte Nos Separe (Until Death Do Us Part) in which a bride learns an unpleasant truth about her new husband during their wedding reception and reacts very badly.

The anthology film isn’t a new concept. It’s been around at least since 1932 when Greta Garbo checked into The Grand Hotel and said “I want to be alone.” It takes many different forms from the overlapping stories style of a film like Robert Altman’s Short Cuts to individual stories linked only by a common setting, like Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola’s New York Stories to a series of vignettes linked by a common situation such as Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes.

Here, the six stories sit independently of each other, linked only by the themes of their protagonists’ sense of outrage at the small (or, in one or two stories, not so small) injustices of the world. The other link, of course, is that all six are written by the director, which might account for why this film succeeds where many other anthologies fall down. For the most part it manages to avoid the unevenness that sometimes comes from assembling a collection of unrelated stories by different writers and directors.  Szifrón achieves a consistently high level of black comedy underpinned by social and personal issues that have a universality to them. Even if our own moral touchstone isn’t at the extreme end of the scale where most of these stories sit, there is a dark heart to them all that we respond to, if only in the way we might fantasise about redressing the balance of that which we find unfair.  The film’s success is also due to the clever and astute cinematography by Javier Juliá  which often gives us a wry perspective on the situation or visually matches the dialogue in developing the narrative. Plus, the stories are told by an outstanding cast who manage to hit all the right notes as they strike the balance between the drama , the satire, the black comedy or the slightly heightened sense of realism that varies across the different tales.

For me, the first three stories are the strongest. They are succinct and focussed and each delivers a very satisfying surprise at the end. The stories that make up the second half of the film feel less sharp in their telling and a little more predictable. It’s hard to say whether that’s due to the odd sense of fatigue that often comes with a series of short films, or the sense that by half way through you ‘get’ the way these stories work and so the surprises are harder to make surprising. In a way, though, that’s just nit-picking.  These truly wild tales offer us a good knowing laugh as we consider what Hamlet called ‘...the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune'. And the final twisty moments of that first pre-credit story is worth the price of the ticket on its own.

 

 

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