FILMREVIEW (c800 words each)

- English Title: The Outcome
- Original Title: El Desenlace
- Country of origin: Spain
- Year: 2005
- Language: Spanish
- Studio: Atlántico Films
- Director: Juan Pinzás
- Producer/s: Pilar Sueiro and Juan Pinzás
- Screenplay/Writer: Juan Pinzás
- Cinematographer: Gerardo Moschioni and Tote Trenas 
- Art Director: Dibe (Graphic arts)
- Editor: Miguel Ángel Santamaría
- Runtime: 105 minutes
- Genre: Experimental, Docudrama
- Cast: José Sancho, Beatriz Rico, Javier Gurruchaga, Carlos Bardem, Miquel Insua, Isabel de Toro, Víctor Rueda, Fernando Epelde, José Carlos Rodríguez. 
- Volume: Spain
- Awards and mentions: Official Dogma 95 Diploma; Honour Prize (Juan Pinzás), Young Cinema Festival, Saint John’s University (New York), 2006; Best Screenplay (Juan Pinzás), Miami Latin Cinema Festival, 2006; ACE Award for Juan Pinzás; ACE for José Sancho; Special Jury Prize for El desenlace (The Outcome) at LaCinemaFe – Latin American Cinema Festival of New York, 2005; Special Mention for his Dogma trilogy at the Ponferrada Film Festival, Spain, 2005; Nomination for the Golden St. George Award at the Moscow International Film Festival, Russia, 2005.
- Further Reading: De Padra, Juan Manuel; Alonso Barahona, Fernando; García Fernández, Emilio; Hueso Montón, Ángel Luis: Juan Pinzás: Un Universo Propio. Madrid: T&B Editores, 2008.
SYNOPSIS
Successful writer Rosendo Carballo (Carlos Bardem) meets with independent filmmaker Mikel De Garay (José Sancho) and producers Andrea Bilbao (Beatriz Rico), who is Mikel’s mistress, and Fernando De La Cueva (Javier Gurruchaga) in the Galician town of Santiago de Compostela to discuss the film adaptation of Rosendo’s last novel, Después Del Fin. Joining the group are two more characters, Rosendo’s friend Nacho (Miquel Insua) and Fernando’s mistress, Beatriz ‘The Best’. What started out as a professional meeting quickly spirals into verbal abuse, prompted first by Mikel, that reveals the characters’ dark secrets. Initially intended to help Andrea come to terms with the tragedy of her father’s death which she refuses to recognise, ‘Mikel’s Game’ becomes a macabre form of therapy that is extended to help Mikel cope with the loss of his paraplegic brother, Rosendo with the denial of his bisexuality, and Fernando’s lost identity. As Mikel advances deeper into his ‘game’, the situation grows increasingly more uncomfortable for the others, escalating to the point where Mikel threatens Rosendo and Andrea with a gun after witnessing a sexual tryst between them. The outcome resolves the characters’ traumas, allowing them to better face an uncertain though optimistic future.
CRITIQUE
El Desenlace is the last piece of Juan Pinzás’ Dogma 95 trilogy based on the Danish avant-garde movement created by Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg in 1995. Over the three films we follow Rosendo, an ambitious writer who desires success above anything. Pinzás’ themes reappear throughout the trilogy, accompanied by the introduction of new features already addressed by Danish Dogma (e.g., the representation of a corrupt society in which characters try to survive and the discovery of a character’s dark past within a setting simulating group therapy). 
 Pinzás’ film attempts to strip down the camera in order to reveal the sometimes violent feelings that can surface from within a group of traumatised human beings wishing to free themselves from the past. With the minimal use of special effects, the camera and actors are the most essential components of the film. The camera, an instrument to delve into the characters’ experiences, keeps a perpetual movement continuously zooming in and out. The probing lens is more painful than ever for the actors, as if aware of its existence and failing to escape from its attentive eye. Furthermore, the film more deeply explores the Dogma 95 concept, constituting a manifesto against the mainstream in favour of experimental filmmaking. Mikel’s character is Pinzás’ thinly veiled counterpart within the film, a director whose last projects have lost money and for whom cinema is much more an art than an industry. Hence in one of the final scenes, Mikel asks Rosendo, ‘¿Crees que es justo que vivamos en un mundo donde las ideas valen menos que el dinero?’ (‘Is it fair to live in a world where ideas are worth less than money?’). Mikel’s question is never answered, but the film shows that while Andrea is able to resolve her problematic past and finally accepts the death of her father thanks to Mikel’s ‘game’, Mikel overcomes his own trauma with regard to his paraplegic brother by stopping a young paraplegic hotel guest from committing suicide. However, the trauma plaguing Fernando, the mainstream producer hoping to do a ‘Dino De Laurentis-style’ film, does not get resolved. Still unable to recognise himself in his hotel room mirror, Fernando’s unrecovered identity contrasts with Mikel and Andrea’s successes, indicating the limitations to the experimental game. In Pinzás’ film, therefore, symbolically, cinema as an art form triumphs and has a future.
The simplicity of the production may lead the spectator to find that some of the scenes, like the one where Mikel tells the story about his brother, are overly realistic due to the absence of an extradiegetic soundtrack used for melodramatic emphasis. The film, however, fulfils its promise: feeling exposed before the camera, getting somewhat closer to Dogma 95’s desire to depict reality. Thus, El Desenlace is a rather effective experiment. It advances the idea of underground and anti-establishment filmmaking and constitutes an accurate example of Spanish experimental film.
- Author of this critic: Óscar Bouzas Iglesias