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Not quite Spanish gold
Lobo
Directed by Miguel Courtois
Certificate 15
THE lesson from this film is plain: it’s best not to rely on the silver screen for history lessons.
Lobo is the dramatisation of true events that took place in the Basque region of Spain in the early 1970s.
It focuses on the double life of a man who became an undercover agent for the government forces trying to infiltrate Eta, the Basque separatist movement.
But in trying to make a palatable story, it rushes through the complicated political history of the Basque country and its relationship with Madrid.
The film focuses on El Lobo – ‘the Wolf’ (Eduardo Noriega) – who was trusted by Eta’s top brass and he fed information back to Madrid about the movement’s plans.
The film has the elements of a grainy political thriller, with a bit of trashy sex appeal thrown in to keep the punters more interested in some glamour and violence than the political motives behind the story interested.
Noriega (who has been called Txema for this film) a builder by trade, is arrested after friends are implicated in a political hit.
He is a Basque, but doesn’t like Eta’s violent methods. He doesn’t have much time for Franco’s bullies either, but gets coerced into helping them with offers of cash – his business is hardly booming – to pass on information.
He smoulders and broods and is generally charming, despite his secret life.
Things begin to get sticky for Lobo when Eta manage to bump off the Spanish prime minister, which prompts a furious attack on Eta operatives, ultimately putting Lobo in a compromising position. He then discovers what a pawn he has been for both sides – but it is hard to feel much sympathy for him.
In the film’s defence, both the people of Eta and the Spanish are not glamourised: neither side earn the audiences sympathy – but there are problems.
Although director Miguel Courtois tries to create a picture of a man who was partly driven to betraying his fellow Basques because he abhorred violence, and partly because of threats from Franco’s bullies, he manages to ignore the history of the region.
Instead the whole issue of Basque separatism is portrayed in a slapdash manner, the director preferring a few sound bites tossed into conversations about how the region deserves autonomy.
The regional nature of Spanish politics post-civil war is important, and the director’s inability to tickle this out from under the chin of the chief protagonists is annoying. Ken Loach managed to simply bring forth the conflicts within the anti-Carlist and anti-Franco factions of the Spanish republic in Land and Freedom: to make Lobo a film that is more than an espionage thriller based on true events, Courtois would have done better to treat his audience with more respect and find the time to explain the social, political and cultural background which was the driving force behind Eta’s violent struggle of the period.
He touches on the divisions between members that want to give up the armed struggle and those who want to fight. But perhaps Eta’s ceasefire is too fresh in the mind for these issues to be explored in any detail. |
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