Movie Review: Caotica Ana

 

Hypnosis may turn into a traumatic experience, no matter how well prepare for the encounter with your inner soul and deeply burried memories. I did it once completely by curiosity and even I prepared the event for long months and also was in best hands, it took me almost one year to get rid of the uncomfortable feeling of brokeness. Entering your psychic underground does leave traces into one´s daily life in the way in which one may feel when being unwillingly shared a terrible secret. You want to - at least I did want it to - forget it, but somehow it remains sticked on your mind no matter what. It´s like the experience does have its own availability and will get out of your mind only after its expiration date, even if you struggle with all your might to forget it. The demons are out in the free and out of your control.

Caotica Ana by the Spanish film director Julio Medem is chaotically dark. An induced exploration of the mind of a young artist living a bohemian, non-conformist life in a hole in the mountains in Ibiza, it is set as a sequency of various episodes in a descrescendo counting typical for the hypnosis sessions. The movie was made following the tragical death of his younger sister, Ana, also an artist.

Meeting her thousand of year-old selves, in a journey through mostly native cultures and tongues, once returned back to her everyday life, she is asking: ´Who I am when I am not dreaming?´ Her encounters with the subconscious are progressively turning from political stories of militantism to dark comedy kitsch. It was not the sheer brutality that bothered me, but the effort to bring on too many symbols and meanings from Freud to Jung, which complicated and overloads the visual story. Which is a pity because there were some good premises for a more relaxed narrative, especially when it comes to the hidden connections between subsconscious layers and the artist self. 

In the end, I may honestly say that I was not impressed at all, although the journey through the maze and the symbols and the genuine naive enthusiasm of the Ana character did have some appeal.

Rating: 2 stars