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Tierra
Julio Medem
Spain, 1995, 125 minutes, Tartan
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)

The third picture from Basque director Julio Medem is one of the most distinctive pictures to come out last year, and a valuable entry in the not overstuffed canon of angelic cinema. But Travolta’s banal Michael it ain’t. Think instead of that apogee of filmic heavenly hosts, Powell/Pressburger’s magisterial A Matter of Life and Death; not least its breathtaking aerial opening as our hero, Angel (Carmello Gomez), crashes through the clouds above rural Spain. A former mental patient, he’s here to fumigate surrounding vineyards for the woodlice that give the indigenous wine its distinctive earthy taste. It’s his more earthy side that lusts after two local women: Angela (Emma Surez), married to thuggish farmer Patricio (Karra Elejalde), with a daughter also called Angela; and Mari (the mono-monikered Silke), Patricio’s 19-year-old biker-chick mistress. As Angel organises the local gypsies against the lice, tensions ensure that not all of this unlikely cabal survive to the credits. 

Tierra is about both the micro- and macro-cosmic, with all-embracing panoramas and burrowings into the ground beneath your feet; Angel carries a device allowing him to microscope to louse level beneath the soil, which also functions as powerful electronic binoculars, the better to observe unseen. Tierra literally means earth, but Medem explains his film as ‘that small island of knowledge and light in which we live.’

This is an oblique, elliptical picture that defies easy reading: Angel describes himself as half-alive, half-dead; half-man, half-angel. It’s full of duality, from the two people killed by lightning and the duplicated names, to the twin hunts (for lice and wild boar) and a bizarre double hanging. Medem provokes but denies us explanation. Visually it’s stunning. The vivid red soil is barren and otherworldly, houses sprouting seemingly with neither rhyme or reason. When the spray-crew don padded suits and helmets the film echoes science fiction. When Angel returns to three storm-killed lambs (another has been eaten but ‘tastes of lightning’), they form a macabre hill-top tableau; we think of Greenaway, even Bunuel.

Tierra is so at the mercy of Medem’s baroque allegory that it’s hard to judge actual performers, but Surez, fixture of the earlier, not-quite so wigged-out Vacas and The Red Squirrel, achieves the luminous quality of a Kieslowski heroine.

And alongside the late Pole’s pictures, with their multi-layered, subtle, half-explained emotions, is a good place to leave the challenging tangle Tierra offers. For Tierra, with its brilliantly employed visual effects and gorgeous Alberto Iglesias score, is as ambiguous as it is ambitious, its meanings not easily revealed.