Mortality be damned

REVIEW

‘’El Ruisenor y La Rosa (The Nightingale and the Rose)

Directed by Alfred Enrique Rivas

Presented by Peachtree International Film Society

June 17 at 7:30 p.m.

Cinevision

3300 NE Expressway, Chamblee

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In the spirit of Don Quixote and the existentialist poetics of modernismo, local filmmaker Alfredo Enrique Rivas’ short film “El Ruisenor y La Rosa (The Nightingale and the Rose)” examines the nature of time - both mortality and eternity - and, transcending all, love and friendship.

Framed by the narrative discourse of the venerable ghost, “el estimado Gaspar,” “El Ruisenor y La Rosa” is the story of Maurice, a 150-year-old spirit who, as a young man, spent his life “waiting for a destiny that would never arrive.” Maurice decides to challenge his fate when he falls in love with a mortal woman, Dafne, and petitions “the committee,” an absurd, bureaucratic rendering of the fates, to allow him to return amongst the living. Once reincarnated, however, ironic injustice prevails. When he learns that Dafne has fallen into a coma, Maurice himself falls prey to the Siamese twin of human liabilities: fear and apathy. Though still faithful to his undeclared, unrequited love, Maurice, along with the plot line, wanders from his raison d’etre and retreats into isolation once more.

Unfortunately, this quick summary of events does little to convey the viscous, belabored action of Rivas’ film. The dialogue, while certainly interesting in clearly enunciated Castellano, is better suited to the philosophical vagaries of an after-dinner tale than the high oratorical style of Rivas’ actors. At one point the story veers off to incorporate an animated parable of “The Nightingale and the Rose,” which Gaspar recounts to Maurice, with obvious dubiousness, for “no reason at all.”

In an analogy parallel to Maurice’s predicament, the nightingale goes in search of a red rose in the middle of winter to help a young man win the love of a vain and demanding woman. Unable to find anything but white roses, the nightingale impales himself on a thorn, drenching the pale petals in his blood before returning to the boy, dragging the coveted red rose with him. Like a red rose in the middle of winter, the timing, so to speak, is all wrong for Maurice and Dafne, requiring the spirit lover to cross all boundaries of existence, from immortality into mortality, and life into death. That he is not content to accept his fortune and resign himself to an existence without Dafne, is Maurice’s greatest act of hubris and offense against the committee. Like the nightingale, Gaspar sacrifices himself for the sake of Maurice’s love, taking his friend’s punishment upon himself.

El Ruisenor y La Rosa is a magical realist story about the deep and abiding friendship between two isolated, immortal souls, for which Maurice and Dafne’s love is, ultimately, a kind of catalytic bond.

Admission is $8 general public, $7 members of Peachtree International Film Society. www.peachtreefilm.org.??

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