Fando (Mahdi Chaouch) is a young boy living through the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and struggling to come to terms with the strict political and religious climate of the times. He frequently lets his imagination run away with him, seeing the cruelties of life around him played out in his mind. The Fascist leaders of Spain announce that every atheist and Communist in the country will be hunted down and killed, even if it means half the population are executed, and such an atmosphere cannot help but affect Fando, especially considering that his father has been recently arrested as a traitor and Fando wonders if he will ever see him again.
Hailed as a surrealist work to rank alongside the likes of Luis Bunuel and Alejandro Jodorowsky, Viva La Muerte (meaning "Long Live Death") certainly looks like a Jodorowsky work, which is perhaps not surprising when you know that writer and director Fernando Arrabal's play Fando and Lis was adapted for film by the cult Chilean director, a fellow artist in the self-styled Panic Movement. What this work resembles is the product of a man who has been driven mad by growing up under religious and fascistic repression, lashing out at the things that have tormented not only him, but millions of other people as well.
The film is semi-autobiographical, and takes the form of various episodes from Fando's life - Arrabal appears to pick the most shocking highlights to get his point across. Perhaps the most shocking aspect emotionally, certainly for the young protagonist, is when he finds letters proving that the person who informed on his father was in fact his own mother (Nuria Espert). This elicits conflicting feelings, to say the least, as he loves his mother but cannot understand why she would be responsible for her husband's punishment, a fate that seems completely unnecessary and avoidable.
Fando imagines his father being tortured or executed, and his thoughts are rendered on what looks like monochrome videotape, all in a selection of colours, which makes them difficult to make out at times. Everyone in the film come across as more than a little barmy, as if the heat has got to them, or more likely the society has. Fando attempts his own small revolutionary acts, such as smoking in the classroom or urinating off a tower, which he envisages as a torrent to drown the townsfolk, but mostly he is held down by the cultural pressures.
As the title suggests, death is never far away, and we are treated to a scene where Fando's grandfather dies, farting loudly while the last rites are administered. Eventually the shadow of death falls over Fando as he contracts tuberculosis and has to be taken away to a medical ship for recuperation. Arrabal presumably was hoping to work up a mood of delirium with his barrage of weirdness, but his efforts only go so far; as an attack on church and state goes, it's more unfocused rage than rapier wit. It's like a Mondo movie with its succession of bizarre, staged acts - Fando covered in spaghetti or imagining his mother shitting on his father's head, for example - and if you really need to see a man sewn up in a dead cow while accompanied by a brass band in a slaughterhouse, then this is the film for you. Everyone else will probably have their own opinions on Arrabal's preoccupations, and Viva La Muerte is too strange to alter them either way. Music by Jean-Yves Bosseur.
