By Tristan Bishop
The anthology film has had something of a revival in horror circles in recent years, with hits such as The ABCs of Death and V/H/S (both 2012) inspiring sequels and imitations. Wild Tales is a slightly different beast to these multi-authored collections of short films, however; it’s all been directed by one person, for a start, and has been attracting a great deal of praise from the more high-minded areas of film criticism (whereas the previously mentioned horror-based anthologies have had a hard time attracting much praise even from the horror scene). There’s a big name involved here too – although Argentinian writer/director Damian Szifron is hardly a well-known figure on the international circuit, one of the producers is none other than Spain’s foremost auteur, Pedro Almodovar. I’m not entirely sure how much input Pedro had into the film (other than monetary), as he is one of several producers on the project, but his name is displayed prominently on the UK posters at least.
The six tales presented here, ranging from a short, sharp opening vignette to much longer pieces (three of which last nearly thirty minutes each) all deal with the theme of revenge – a well-explored subject in cinema, but Szifron manages to take a different standpoint from each tale. The aforementioned short piece that opens the film is certainly an attention grabber (and one I won’t spoiler), the outrageous humour of which quickly gives way to the second story of a waitress who realises that the man she is serving drove her father to suicide, although she is rather more hesitant than her boss is to see revenge served cold. This segment, although short and slight, works in some nice moments of tension and humour.
This is followed by the third segment, undoubtedly the highlight of the film for me, which hinges on a highway conflagration between a rich arsehole and a leering redneck (or whatever the Argentinian form of ‘redneck’ is). This is another very simply plotted tale, but Szifron goes for the throat here, as the man attempt to best each other to avoid wounding their macho pride, ending in a blaze of blood, fire, and unsanitary toilet practices. Szifron shows his skill at directing an action scene here, with a sequence as tense as anything in a mainstream Hollywood thriller, and the result is hugely entertaining.
The second three sequences are the longest – from a demolitions expert who seems to be channelling Michael Douglas in Falling Down (1993) when his car gets impounded, to a tale of a man who attempts to buy freedom for his son after he kills a pregnant woman in a drunken hit-and-run accident, to the closing story of a wedding gone very very wrong. These three sections shift in mood, alternately, from ironic, to downbeat to comic – in fact the final section feels the closest to Almodovar’s style, and will no doubt appeal to fans of his more ‘hysterical’ (in the clinical sense of the term) work. Personally, whilst I enjoyed some aspects of this tale I found the denoument a little silly and unlikely – admittedly it IS supposed to be a comic section but I guess this highlights the main problem with the film, and this is a problem that is unique to almost every anthology film ever made (1945’s Dead Of Night, Mario Bava’s 1963 effort Black Sabbath and perhaps Roger Corman’s 1962 Poe-based Tales Of Terror the exceptions): the film just doesn’t flow very well. The opening trio of tales are punchy and interesting (and occasionally hilarious) but by four and five the longer form and more serious tone derail the film and start to feel dull. This is a shame as undoubtedly they all have merit – story five in particular would make a very good feature, especially if the characters were more fleshed out so we would care more about the outcome (the other common problem with anthology films), but here it starts to feel like a diversion from the fun, and by the time we get back to the dark humour with the final segment we don’t feel much like laughing.
As a showcase for Szifron’s talents and range, Wild Tales is commendable, and I’m interested in tracking down his earlier thriller Bottom Of The Sea (2003) on the strength of the ‘road rage’ segment here, but as a piece in and of itself the film failed to blow me away.
Wild Tales is out on Region 2 DVD on 15th June, from Artificial Eye.