"MAXIMUM SHAME"

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT ON "MAXIMUM SHAME"

I can’t explain why I make a film. I never know. For me a film is neither a tool nor a means, it’s an aim in itself. It has its own reasons, like a living being. What I can definitely say is that I don’t make them to tell stories —although, by the way, I do tell them— but to create small worlds different from ours. This may sound pretentious, but this is actually very humble: it consists of setting up a little enclosed ecosystem, ruled by its own rules. It’s just a game. The narration is an excuse to describe— and an itinerary to travel through —this ecosystem, that can be made up by a reduced group of inhabitants. That’s what happens in Maximum Shame, the only difference is that, unlike my other movies, in this one not even the protagonists know the rules that govern their lives. In this sense, the world of Maximum Shame is similar to ours. Even if we could have an opinion about this we really don’t know if what happens to us is the result of fate or destiny.

The characters of Maximum Shame live in a black hole, a place where time and space don’t exist, a limbo between reality and fiction, order and chaos, present and eternity. And what they do is, essentially, speak and eat. Or, on the contrary, shut up or fast.  Some people who haven’t gone over the anal stage don’t like when characters speak in the films, they think that in filmmaking very little has to be said, if possible, nothing. It’s an upsetting whim that I don’t share. I like people to speak inside and outside the films, mainly if they say interesting things. And this allows me to establish a hierarchical order that turns out to be very stimulating when deciding, with the authority of being the author, who speaks and who doesn’t. Normally the powerful speaks and the submissive keeps quiet. As there’s usually a character that’s more powerful than others, the sequences that I write end up as a monologue or, in the best of cases as a dialogue at crossed purposes. Considering that in the real world it is really rare that someone listens to someone else, also in this aspect Maximum Shame is a realistic film.

Gags are great to repress speech. There are two kinds: the ones that keep the mouth open and others that keep it shut, but both give the person back their vocal capacity and take it to a previous stage, articulated language. An adult on a gag has the same oratory skills of a child being breastfed. As I wanted to do films about adults that behave like children, I really felt like gagging actors, so I broke my piggy bank and had a look at some of the sex-shops from my neighborhood. To try to find atrezzo in sex-shops is more fun than in a notions store, although to ask for a gag in a notions store is quite something. Based on gags and childish cruelty exerted by lost souls in the limbo —children’s limbo— where they all participate in a chess game but where no one knows how to play, I assembled the plot of Maximum Shame. Being a lousy chess player helped me a lot.

I managed to write the script very quickly, in barely one month, fitting together at first sight the pieces of an absurd puzzle, though, in the end it showed itself to have a surprising internal coherence as it connected together. The different pieces seemed to be magnetized and attracted each other following correspondences between semantic fields: the unintelligibility of the rules of the game called for arbitrariness, this at the same time called for the fight for power on the one side, and for weariness on the other side, weariness lead to sadism, this to pain, pain to rapture, rapture to mysticism and to Saint Theresa’s transverberation, the transverberation to the ineffable. The ineffable is a hole in the verbal universe. And every hole has a double nature: that of being a gap and that of being a channel. The same happens with black holes, which are ruptures of space and perhaps doors to other worlds, and also the dark space between the bed and the floor, and the hole made by a red-hot sword in the body of someone who has gone through trasnsverberation and the tracheotomy performed by a picador’s spear, a vent that lets the air in but stops words from coming out.

As I write this, I realize how capable I am of expounding non-stop about the successive meanings and ramifications of meanings in this film. And that, probably, I may not have filmed a script, but a foolish and tangled Byzantine essay about ethics, faith, power, sex and other issues that attract me. I’ll stop here, not so much because I don’t want to go on for too long, but mainly because I don’t want to give the impression that I’m something I’m not —someone who knows what he’s talking about— and because I don’t want to present the film in an analytical and judicious wrap. I love it when a film displays multiple interpretations, polisemies, hidden senses, and leads to endless discussions. But above all —and Maximum Shame is not an exception—  I like it when it makes up a sensory experience, when it seduces intuition first and later, in any case,  the brain, if it’s necessary. Like a dream. If seeing Maximum Shame submerges your mind in an Alpha state, I will feel satisfied. If apart from that you notice that in that trance your mind gets separated from your body, it floats in the air and you are able to see yourself dozed off on the seat, then go through the screen and come to say hello to me: you will find me crouched down behind the camera.

Carlos Atanes
Madrid, May 2010

********************

"MAXIMUM SHAME" ACCORDING TO MIKE EVERLETH'S POINT OF VIEW


Post-apocalyptic films are, of course, typically allegories for life in our modern world or specific historical eras. However, Spanish underground filmmaker Carlos Atanes has stuffed the allegorical envelope so full that very little in his down-the-rabbit-hole fantasy Maximum Shame remotely resembles anything that could be considered reality.

Atanes’ “wonderland” is a massive, garbage-strewn, sewer water-soaked abandoned warehouse that is presided over by a black leather-clad, roller skate-wearing Queen, played with total sadistic glee by Marina Gatell. The world, apparently, has fallen into a black hole and this hellish place is all that exists anymore.

The Queen humiliates her subjects by trussing them up in S&M gear. Although these devices are not used for sexual purposes. Instead, her subjects are simply robbed of the ability to speak or eat. Thus, they are rendered as mute imbeciles, forced to listen to her megalomaniacal ranting.

Maximum Shame is an incredibly dense movie, which is particularly surprising since it’s Atanes’ first film in English. The characters don’t engage in dialogue as much as they spout off tyrannical monologues, engaging in a loopy logic that only makes sense to themselves. There are also, even more surprisingly, a couple of musical numbers thrown in. The songs, with music by Marc Alvarez and lyrics by Atanes, are quite catchy.

In addition to the Queen, the majority of the other characters are similarly named after chess pieces. The film begins with the Queen sacrificing a Rook (Paco Moreno) by impaling him through the throat after she allows him to suckle her breast. The sacrifice brings a Bishop (Ana Mayo) into the Queen’s realm, where she is subsequently tortured alongside a singing Knight (Ignasi Vidal). There’s also quite possibly a King character in the film, but — like with most of the movie — that can be left up to interpretation. (My interpretation is that actress Ariadna Ferrer becomes the King.)

Whether or not the film is following the logic of an actual chess game isn’t clear. Although, this is the type of film that would take repeat viewings to sort out everything that’s going on in it. The plot, such as it is, resembles more of a puzzle to the audience while the characters are somehow fulfilling their roles as game pieces.

However, the chess analogy is a good one since it’s a game of domination and subjugation, and there’s plenty of that happening in the film. Characters aren’t “shamed” so much as they are humiliated and robbed of the basic essence that makes them human: They can’t eat, speak or move about freely and are periodically viciously attacked. Like the Queen chess piece, Gatell is given roller skates so she can glide anywhere she wants to in the dingy warehouse. She is a sovereign, yet rules a place nobody would ever want to visit.

The Bishop — who alternates with the Queen as being the main character in the film — is the most humiliated. She is drawn to this game against her will, robbed of her true love, i.e. the Rook, then sealed up in what can be best described as an iron maiden made out of a cardboard box. She is trapped, along with the audience, from this nightmare world from which there appears to be no escape.

While the female characters are trussed up in sexy attire and strapped with bondage fetish devices, the film is fairly devoid of sexual activity. The devices are there just for the humiliation, without any other character deriving any pleasure from the situation. The only scene that comes close to being sexual is The Pawn’s (David Castro) manic masturbation scene, an act that appears not to be stimulated in any way by the women surrounding him. The “shame” indicated by the title that any of the characters may feel is derived from having their humanity completely robbed from them.

Out of Atanes’ three feature films to date, after FAQ and Proxima, Maximum Shame is his most confined and claustrophobic, at least in terms of scope and plot. This film is the closest to his earlier short films, basically existing as a series of tableaux. Although connected, each scene could exist by itself and each has the feeling of being still paintings being brought to life. How this film is connected to all of his films, shorts and features alike, is his uncanny knack for finding distressed locations that really give his work a truly otherworldly vibe.

There are several references within the film that the characters have been teleported to another dimension and it certainly does feel that way. Plus, as most of the characters are robbed of their humanity, there is a distinct, and clearly intentional, lack of anything human. While there may not be much warmth to the film, it’s certainly very playful, particularly in Gatell’s straight-faced clowning around on roller skates.

As such, Maximum Shame is a confounding film, but in the good way a good puzzle film should be. It has the veneer of sexuality with no actual sex, violence without any cathartic release and musical numbers that are disturbing rather than cheerful. Despite these contradictions, it is — like the best of Atanes’ films — a completely engaging experience.

Mike Everleth (Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film)