NOBODY WILL SPEAK OF US WHEN WE'RE DEAD (71)

Directed by: Agustin Diaz Yanes

Starring: Victoria Abril, Federico Luppi, Pilar Bardem

The Pitch: A Mexican hitman goes to Madrid to recover a notebook of Mob info that's fallen into the hands of an ex-alcoholic ex-whore, while also wrestling with deeper spiritual questions of his own.

Theo Sez: A mix of Old World and New (literally so, set in both Spain and Mexico), starting off in the darkly comic, too-hip-to-care underworld of Tarantinoland - philosophical gangsters, drug deals gone wrong, sudden shocking violence - before mutating into a doleful (if slyly funny) movie about trying to make ends meet in depressed mid-90s Spain, all very character-driven and decidedly unflashy. The dichotomy is deliberate, for the film is (among other things) a wry meditation on the existence of God, contrasting the easy secularism of its amoral gangsters with the implicit moral sense in the lives of its struggling Madrilenos, trying to maintain some dignity and build a respectable life for themselves. It's a tough, streetwise kind of religion - because, as a kindly priest puts it, "the God of men is not the same as the God of children" - and the film is similarly practical and unsentimental, interested in the existence (or not) of a Higher Being not in itself but for its consequences on people's right to run their lives - the way we make (or remake) our identity is a recurring theme, if only in the little boy who decides to change his name. It sounds heavy, but in fact it's not - unnecessarily downbeat perhaps, but also stylish and unpredictable. It's the best kind of European movie, both thoughtful and exciting, if inevitably inconclusive : the price of personal film-making is perhaps that many of the pieces (and most of the answers) remain in the film-maker's head.