Buenas Noches Espanya/ Good night Spain

 

 I would rather say "buenas noches" to  my pillow than have a headache in finishing the special screening of  Raya Martin's  "Buenas noches, España / Good night, Spain" during the  10th Película Spanish Film Festival in Greenbelt. It has a running time of 70 minutes.

After sitting inside the greenbelt cinema for almost 30 minutes and trying to decipher what the film is all about, i literally walked  out of the moviehouse along with other audience. Being a film addict myself, as a follower of the various film festivals in manila,  I seldom "unfinish" the movie notwithstanding its bad execution.

Press releases described the film of   "filipino filmmaker Raya Martin, one of the most controversial artists in recent years" in the following manner - " In another lifetime, a Spanish couple takes drugs and teleports through their television set. A troubled young man travels through the countryside and meets a lost woman. During the trip, they discover a museum housing the expatriated paintings of the most important Filipino artist of the revolution. Eventually, the Spanish couple disappears toward their colony. Inspired by one of the earliest teleportation accounts, which happened between the Philippines and Mexico during the colonial period. 

Based on how they described Raya as a director,  the film  should have been good. There’s no excuse for it to be not good. 

i was already warned by a  good friend ( who is also a multi-awarded  script writer) that i should not expect much on this film of Martin. And i should have listened to him. Raya himself said at the beginning that "he is afraid of film premieres in the Philippines."

I understand  that Raya wanted to show the audience "strange teleporting and psychedelic experiences"  but i guess he overdid himself. The  "screeching " sound is so irritating to the point you have to cover your ears. The "play" of colors added "injury" to the film since you are already disturbed by changing texture.

The hardest part of any endeavour is to keep your target market/ audience "interested" in your product. For a buyer of a book, he will scan the first ten, twenty, fifty pages  before he decides to buy it. If you buy music CD, you will know if it is okey on the first few seconds of hearing the melody. In Raya's film, it took me almost thirty minutes out of its seventy minutes running time to decide that i can no longer stand being tortured by the bad sound and cinematography. My eyes and ears are really in pain. Walking out is my only option, along with more than twenty people who went out ahead of me.

There’s a lot wrong with the film – it is, frankly, a complete goddamn mess – but its cardinal sin to me is that it has no idea what kind of movie it wants to be. Is it a fantasy film? A nostalgia piece? An alien rampage film? A misunderstood alien film? Some combination of these?

 This is a film whose script should never have been filmed, a script whose structural problems are so obvious and huge that i have to take aspirins   to explain how they ended up on screen.