Chaotic Ana (Caótica Ana)

Chaotic Ana (Caótica Ana) (Director: Julio Medem): Chaotic is one way to put it. Train wreck might be more accurate. Annoying, arti­fi­cial, absurd, and by the end, simply appalling. This was a real dis­ap­point­ment. I had been warned earlier in the week by some friends who saw the first screening, but I wanted to see for myself. Unfortunately, Medem has turned all the ele­ments of his pre­vious films up to 11, making this a jumbled mess of coin­cid­ence, chance encoun­ters, per­form­ance art, hyp­nosis and an inter­na­tional cast speaking all the wrong lan­guages. The dir­ector has clearly bitten off more than he can chew, and though the first half was at least watch­able, I was annoyed by what appeared to be a kind of “show-off” atti­tude. Ana (played by the lovely Manuela Vellés) is a raw-talented painter living in a cave with her father on the island of Ibiza. One day, the slightly sin­ister Justine (Charlotte Rampling) arrives and offers to take her to Madrid and be her patron. Once there, she’s esconced in a dec­adent and mys­ter­ious house filled with artists of all kinds. Cue the pre­ten­tious art talk.

Then Ana begins to have powerful flash­backs and through a random encounter with experts in hyp­nosis, is sud­denly the sub­ject of numerous ses­sions exploring her past lives. Then she escapes as a stowaway on her friend’s father’s yacht and ends up in New York City, where both her hand­some young hyp­notist and Justine find her and take her to the desert, to dis­cover her “true” self, the first in a long series of rein­carn­ated women who all die viol­ently at the age of 22. Still with me? There’s more. By the end, there’s even a ludicrous attempt to tie everything into the Iraq war.

Using inter­titles to count down from 10 to 0, as in hyp­nosis, had one pos­itive func­tion. It let me know how much longer I had to endure. Even the sight of often-nude Ana wasn’t enough to make me stop wishing it would end. Medem is a tal­ented dir­ector, but this was just self-indulgent and for that reason, it’s all the more disappointing.

Trailer
Official Site

(5/10)

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