Intacto

We've lucked out a bit recently with our deliveries of European cinema through Screen Select, here and then again here. This however is a bit of a mini-jackpot!

Intacto is about the gift (or curse) of good fortune. You see how those that deem themselves unnaturally well-provided in this respect habituate the demi-monde of a secret society of jammy bastards who gamble and steal each other's luck and that of ordinary fortune-challenged citizens that are drawn into their underground activities.

It's tense, sinister, stylish and often enormous fun too. I enjoyed the gripping scene when a select group of the abnormally lucky race each other blindfolded through a forest, the winner being the one that doesn't end up with a face full of tree.

We both thought it felt rather like the work of an Asian director- it certainly has much of the weird sensuality and ambiguous erotic currents that characterise many movies from the East. The influence of Jorge Luis Borges is also undeniable.

Whilst the plot is anything but intacto itself, I suspect that the ever-shifting gaps are essentially deliberate as they drive much of the suspense. You never quite feel that you are playing with a full deck of cards. First time director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's film is repeatedly posing the question "what is luck?" rather than serving up an imperforate metaphysical explantion for his dramatic puzzle.

Max Von Sydow adds considerable power to the proceedings as Samuel Berg "the Jew", a concentration camp survivor who runs a casino in Ucanca, Tenerife (here a bizarrely multi-foreign desert location), and by means of a deadly game of Russian roulette played out in his bunker-like basement, has accumulated the fates of hundreds in a little metal drawer.

At the beginning of the film we see how Berg literally drains the luck out of his fleeing protégé Federico with a chilling Godfather-like embrace. The role Federico was attempting to abandon was policing the casino floors for winning streaks that he could bring to an end with a glancing touch on the back of the gambler's hand. Seven years on and Federico appears to want to revenge himself on Ucanca's "God of chance" by mentoring the sole survivor of a plane crash into the ultimate challenger.

The character of Sara, the policewoman on the tail of Federico and Tomás could easily have come across as a two-dimensional genre type deployed to move the plot along, but Koppel and Fresnadillo's script credibly integrates her own existential issues into the mix.

My fears for an unsatisfying conclusion to all this delicious intricacy were in the end unfounded.

Regretably Hollywood has acquired the right to remake this. No Cruise please.

Lucio Godoy's score is also excellent.