The immortal David Foster Wallace said in his timeless and resourcing interview to Larry McCaffery that innovators were always followed by crank turners, who made money by running great ideas into the ground through repetition. It's a question I face whenever I consume genre fiction: am I reading/watching something original or seeking solace in familiarity. Sometimes I don't know, there's an argument that can be made for both sides. Spanish movie MARSHLAND is a good example of what I'm talking about. At first sight, it's a blatant, karmic ripoff of of TRUE DETECTIVE, Season One, but it's a thin veneer that goes away if you scratch the surface.
It's what genre fiction does best: being deceitful.
Two sisters have disappeared in a village, at the very end of Andalusia, in 1980. The movie is set roughly 5 years after the death of General Franco and 18 months after Spain became a democracy, which are important details. The village where the girls lived in suspended in time, floating between the two eras of the country. The two detectives in charge of the case (Javier Gutierrez and Raul Arevalo) soon find the horribly maimed bodies of the two sisters, which triggers a series of events that alludes to a much more terrifying bigger picture. Déjà vu, you're saying? Well, it's always complicated for the people who live in a brave new world.
MARSHLAND is a political movie both in the form and in the narrative. The storyline itself is an agile allegory of what the country was going through at the time: a refusal to embrace the future, the past generation destroying the new one. Everything in this movie is a collision between old and young, on a narrative and symbolic level. The two investigating detective belong to different generations. They come from the new Spain and hate every second spent in the old, rural one where the old ideas of the Franco regime haven't died yet. Director Alberto Rodriguez and screenwriter Rafael Cobos give you the sense that survival depends on accepting the horrors of the past and moving on as much as finding who killed the girls.
It's what genre fiction does best: being deceitful.
Two sisters have disappeared in a village, at the very end of Andalusia, in 1980. The movie is set roughly 5 years after the death of General Franco and 18 months after Spain became a democracy, which are important details. The village where the girls lived in suspended in time, floating between the two eras of the country. The two detectives in charge of the case (Javier Gutierrez and Raul Arevalo) soon find the horribly maimed bodies of the two sisters, which triggers a series of events that alludes to a much more terrifying bigger picture. Déjà vu, you're saying? Well, it's always complicated for the people who live in a brave new world.
MARSHLAND is a political movie both in the form and in the narrative. The storyline itself is an agile allegory of what the country was going through at the time: a refusal to embrace the future, the past generation destroying the new one. Everything in this movie is a collision between old and young, on a narrative and symbolic level. The two investigating detective belong to different generations. They come from the new Spain and hate every second spent in the old, rural one where the old ideas of the Franco regime haven't died yet. Director Alberto Rodriguez and screenwriter Rafael Cobos give you the sense that survival depends on accepting the horrors of the past and moving on as much as finding who killed the girls.
MARSHLAND is also a good looking movie.
So yeah, about these TRUE DETECTIVE comparisons. MARSHLAND obviously drew some inspiration from the Nic Pizzolatto penned series and it goes beyond the fact that they are both police procedurals about a serial killer. There are strong visual similarities between Andalusia and Louisiana. The existential buddy cop angle has a different dynamic, but it also feels deliberate. MARSHLAND manages to look quite different than TRUE DETECTIVE anyway because of its photography. The image is considerably rawer than Cary Fukunaga's trademark style. It uses natural light as an only source of style and puts its faith in the gorgeous setting for the rest. So, MARSHLAND could've borrowed a little less of its visual identity to the successful series, but once again the similarities are superficial.
I wouldn't call Alberto Rodriguez and Rafael Cobos crank turners, in the parlance of David Foster Wallace. MARSHLAND is beautiful, stylish, it's not the most innovative movie ever made, but it has a purpose that is its own and efficiently uses crime as a political allegory. OK, maybe it turns the crank on Nic Pizzolatto a little bit, but it's not a hollow film by any means as it offers insight on a fascinating period in the history of a Spain we have all forgotten about. The police procedural is just a sexy and elaborate presentation for something way more subtle. I've enjoyed MARSHLAND a lot even if it was pretty rigid genre fiction (it's an investigation and not much else), because it made genre work for its purpose and not the opposite.