Last evening, with nothing better to do, I was fiddling away with my remote to find a foreign language movie playing on Zee Studio, Obaba. Well, what really attracted me to the movie was the warm hues of the movie. It had this amazingly warm color tone highlighting some breathtaking European countryside. After a few minutes I rightly guessed the language of the movie – Spanish.
Obaba is a very patchy movie. In parts its really gripping, keeping your eye-balls glued to every single frame. And in parts, so underplayed that its hard to keep your concentration on it. This happens since the movie is in a chapter format.
Obaba tracks the lives of the inhabitants of a fictional area in Spain called Obaba. We uncover the lives of 3 (or was it 4) men from the boyhood/ schooltime days to present day, as a young and quite pretty aspiring filmaker makes a journey to Obaba and interviews folks. In between the flashbacks is a very shabbily done love track between the young girl and a guy living in Obaba.
The best parts of the movie are those involving a young schoolteacher, played by Pilar López de Ayala who is the common thread to all the stories. All these guys were students in her class. There is one episode that is primarily the schoolteachers story, which in my opinion is the best. Another one that surrounds a pen-pal friendship is also quite interesting. The chapters about some seriously horrible lizards and a psychologically ill man are quite misfits here. Rest of the movie plays out in a smooth soft flow, letting us enjoy beautiful spanish countryside. While these episodes are jittery and really disturb the tone of the movie.
The direction is mostly lucid and smooth, apart from the two tracks as mentioned earlier. The camerawork is astounding.
I realized very little material exists on the internet on the movie, which is quite strange considering it was nominated for the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards in 2005.
Do watch this to feast your eyes on smashing Spanish visuals and two beautiful women.
