Review of Arrebato

Arrebato (1979)
8/10
Absorbing 70's bizarre
18 February 2007
Warning: Spoilers
Film maker José Sirgado (Poncela) gets to know amateur film director and freak Pedro though an acquaintance of both. Pedro's bizarre movies and José's personal problems and drug addictions act as the glue that forges a master-pupil relationship, especially when José makes a technical improvement to Pedro's camera that allows interval shooting. All this with some undefined gay twist to their relationship.

After the relationship is put to sleep and José is back to his gloomy apartment in Madrid and his drug-driven love relationship with Cecilia Roth, he is surprised to receive a package from Pedro one day. And inside the package, a film and a cassette tape seem to indicate that a vampire lives inside Pedro's Super-8 camera, a vampire that absorbs people and makes them disappear when they are filmed.

Could it be true? Or is it just a result of too much drug intake? The story becomes then a vehicle for theorizing on the creative process in arts, the relationship between the artist and his product, and finally the fascination with cinema in our lives ("Arrebato" can be translated as "raptum" and refers to the impact of certain artistic clichés -- King Solomon's mines for Sirgado, Betty Boop for his girlfriend-- in our feelings)

As a very thin backdrop to the story, Zulueta portraits an sfumatto of the Spain of the late 70's: a society that used drugs liberally, craved for freedom, and made the way of sexual liberation while challenging the statu quo of decades of dictatorships.
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