Endless Night
A work of art from Spain set during the Franco regime proves to have a much wider relevance.
Here’s a film for adventurous viewers. It is the work of Eloy Enciso who comes from Galicia, that region in the north west of Spain. Endless Night (Longa noite), his third feature, reveals him to be a filmmaker very much concerned with cinema as a serious art form. Working from his own screenplay, Enciso gives us a three-part meditation on war, dictatorships and oppression. Given the source of the film, it is no surprise that a portrait seen hanging on a wall is of Franco and other details, such as references to the Falangist movement, situate the work in Spain. But, regardless of that, one feels that Endless Night is limited neither by location nor by any specific period of history. Instead, it is asking the viewer to ponder these matters in the widest possible context.
The first of the three sections, each of more or less the same length, has an urban setting, while the other two take us into the countryside. One figure links them in that early on we meet a man played by Misha Bies Golas who then leaves the town heading for the rural area which had been his home. He nevertheless ultimately ends up alone in a densely wooded landscape. However, there is no real story here. What we are given are a number of conversations relevant to the film’s themes and these are interwoven with existing texts that are spoken and which point up the sufferings that human openings inflict upon themselves (the use of the latter will remind some of the approach to be found in works by the French director Jean-Marie Straub).
Despite any such echoes, Endless Night feels totally assured and individual. At one point it is suggested that to be a prisoner is to be a living being who is, in effect, dead and the film is as much concerned with political persecution as with war itself. Social and class issues are considered too, as in an early scene in which a man and a woman, both reduced to begging, meet on the steps of a church and are ignored by the churchman who enters (in passing it is pointed out that, if it does exist, heaven would appear to echo the hierarchies of this world since it contains both angels and archangels). Meanwhile, a workman assists in building a new police station. He is aware of what it will represent under the current regime but excuses himself by saying that he needs to feed his family and that if he doesn’t do the work somebody else will. Another scene looks at local government and a concern with status that makes conformity requisite.
The use of texts in this film might have rendered it a work over-reliant on words but, in fact, Endless Night is a film of wonderful faces. Among them is that of Nuria Lestegás who rivets us with a tragic monologue in the second segment. In the final section the words become voice-overs in the form of letters read aloud, and here our traveller becomes a lone figure often viewed from behind and symbolically becoming more and more engulfed in what, often seen in the dark, feels increasingly like an imprisoning landscape. With less visual variety, this third episode lacks the richness of what precedes it, but the whole film is notably well photographed by Mauro Herce. Nevertheless, it is the challenging originality of Enciso’s concept that makes this film stand out. By its very nature this is inevitably a work of specialist appeal, but the audience that Enciso had in mind will embrace its themes and welcome his artistry.
Original title: Longa noite.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Misha Bies Golas, Manuel Pumares, Verónica Quintala, Celsa Araújo, Nuria Lestegás, Marcos Javier Fernández, Suso Meilan, Manuel Pozas Henrique, Zé Parades, Alberto Albite, Fernando Garcia, Lutz Martínez.
Dir Eloy Enciso, Pro Beli Martinez and Eloy Enciso, Screenplay Eloy Enciso, Ph Mauro Herce, Art Dir Melania Freire, Ed Patricia Saramago, Costumes Fanny Bello and Melania Friere.
Filmika Galaika-Mubi.
90 mins. Spain. 2019. Rel: 26 October 2021. Available on Mubi. No Cert.
