La ciudad de los Prodigios (The City of Marvels) movie: Spain, 1999

This will likely be movie week as I try to catch on posting about movies I’ve seen recently and over the past few months. This movie hits a trifecta of associations:

1. Continuing with my erratic foreign movie posts for this year—for more foreign movies, check out Caroline's World Cinema Series 2012 and Richard's monthly Foreign Film Festival round-up,
2. Spanish Lit Month hosted by Richard and Winstonsdad, and
3. My usual tie-in to a novel I’ve read, Eduardo Mendoza’s City of Marvels.

The movie La ciudad de los Prodigios tells the story of Onofre Bouvila as he rises in power and riches in Barcelona from the late 1880s through the 1920s. Unlike the novel it’s based on, the movie is a fairly straightforward tale of his struggles, emphasizing his love for the boardinghouse maid Delfina he meets when first arriving in the city from the Catalan countryside. Even with the choice in simplifying the storyline I think it might be difficult at times for anyone not familiar with the book—some of the machinations at times, mostly involving the gang wars, can be hard to follow.

The camera loves the stars Olivier Martinez and Emma Suárez and the lush images make for a gorgeous film…which may also be some of the problem. The dock full of diseased workers is lovely, Emma Suárez with a little dirt dabbed on her is still beautiful, the trash heap where Onofre searches for food scraps looks inviting—in short, almost no hint of ugliness is allowed in the film.

Because of Onofre’s rise though the gang/mob element of Barcelona’s underworld, similarity to movies like the first two Godfather movies can be a natural comparison. As usual, though, I’ll focus more on how the movie compares to the book. As I mentioned in my post on the novel, Mendoza weaves “history, statistics, lore, and fabrication into the narrative,” which gives it a lot of its charm. Stripping away these additional elements simultaneously strengthens and weakens the movie in the comparison. The focus solely on the storyline of Onofre’s rise allows director Mario Camus (who, interestingly enough, also directed the 1980 TV series version of Fortunata y Jacinta) to include most of the novel’s action. While several parts of the story are altered, the movie doesn’t suffer too much from the changes. Fortunately, special emphasis is placed on the political aspects of Onofre’s development. He clearly never fully backs any political group, instead using the movement in power at the time to get what he needed. Inclusion of “history, statistics, lore, and fabrication” would have severely cut back on Onofre’s story.

And yet, those elements provide much of the charm of the novel. More importantly, those elements are tied in with Barcelona, the city of the title. It may seem a subtle change in stressing the developments of the era instead of Barcelona’s catching up with modernity, but the choice of the city lies at the heart of the novel and the movie loses something for that alteration. The intertwining of Onofre’s and the city’s fate doesn’t feel completely developed in the novel (at least to me) but that seems to be the intent. The inclusion of Barcelona’s history, real and imagined, corresponds to Onfore’s rise to power. For the movie, though, it feels like the setting could have been any city with no change in feeling or impact. Similar to the book, the most I can muster is a lukewarm recommendation. You can do worse and I’m sure it will have stronger appeal to some than it did to me, my disappointment based more on what seems to be an unfulfilled realization of intent or potential. Is that a fair way to judge a book or movie? Probably not…which is why I’m taking pains to point out the basis for my lack of enthusiasm for an otherwise okay book and movie.

You don’t need subtitles to understand the following clip, which shows one instance of the interaction between Onofre and Delfina:

The City of Marvels by Eduardo Mendoza

The City of Marvels by Eduardo Mendoza (translation by Bernard Molloy) has been sitting on my bookshelf for a decade. I needed the push of Spanish Lit Month hosted by Richard and Winstonsdad to finally open it. From the bookflap:

Here is the story of Onofre Bouvila, a poor Catalan country boy who arrives in Barcelona in 1886 and lies, cheats, and murders his way to enormous wealth and power.

Young Onofre first stays at a boardinghouse whose permanent residents are a distingue closet transvestite, a lady fortuneteller who treats her clients to large doses of doom, a garrulous barber who also pulls teeth, and a scullery maid who protects her virginity with the aid of a ferocious cat. Onofre, for his part, quickly establishes himself as an anarchist agitator. Yet he realizes just as quickly that his skills as organizer can be put to better use—selling a cure for baldness. He goes on to form a burglary ring, instigate real estate deals, build a film empire, but a world-famous diamond, reconstruct a mansion with eleven balconies, fall in and out of love with three women, and throw a reception for the Tsarina of Russia—where he chats with Rasputin while planning to sell arms to the Bolsheviks.

Meanwhile, in marvelous digressions, we learn about an old sailor who speaks a language no academic can identify; a nun who plays the accordion for the dying to cheer them up; a missionary priest who goes to the Sudan to make converts but is himself converted to the Dervish religion and returns home to preach sorcery; and about Eulalia, the patron saint of Barcelona, who steps down from her pedestal in the cathedral to talk to the mayor about housing problems.

I find writing about The City of Marvels difficult because I had little response to it. There are parts I enjoyed, usually with some of the digressions mentioned above, while most of the book didn’t move me to either like or hate it. Which is a shame because the book is very well done—I respect Mendoza’s talent even when reading through parts I find problematic.

I included the bookflap summary because it does a fair job of capturing the general flow of the book, which ultimately is about the development of Barcelona between the World Fairs hosted in the city in 1888 and 1929. Weaving history, statistics, lore, and fabrication into the narrative, Mendoza captures the era and the city’s struggle to modernize, oftentimes in spite of itself. Also reflected is the increasing tension between Madrid and Catalonia. To some extent the character of Onofre Bouvila reflects these struggles, first buffeted by the changes and later shaping them. Onofre’s disgust with his father, a bankrupt and scammer after his time spent in Cuba, echoes the general feeling of disappointment with the venal government. In order to succeed in this atmosphere Onofre has to exceed in cruelty and corruption, even when his intentions are good.

Every now and then the book comes alive, such as when Mendoza goes into detail about the gang war that established Onofre as the power behind a shadowy throne or when weaving a tale about Mata Hari’s capture that involves denying Spain receipt of the world's first full-length feature film. Too often, though, these scenes highlight how flat other parts feel. Despite spending a lot of time on Onofre, the character rarely seems to develop or grow, although now that I think about it, for someone so closely tied to the city that he supposedly embodies the spirit of the era and the city’s collective dreams, that may be precisely the point.

Similar to my comment in the post on The Truth about the Savolta Case, Mendoza seems to be anticipating the future while looking at the past. Just as the structure of the book uses the bookends of the two World Fairs to look at Barcelona’s entrance to the modern world, there seems to be an implied question as to Barcelona’s future. This goes beyond the then-upcoming 1992 Olympics the city would host (the book was released in 1986) and reflects on the cost, not limited to monetary measures, associated with such progress.

If you’ve read the book, I’m very interested in hearing your comments on it. And, of course, since there was a movie based on the book, I’ll be watching that and posting on it later this week (hopefully).

Update: I've added a post on the movie adaptation of the novel.