Rapture (1980)

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Fresh and Exciting

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Extraordinary, oblique, disturbing, and somewhat rare Spanish feature from 1979. This stylish piece documents the gradual subversion, and inexorable collapse of a young, dope-addled, wholly jaded filmmaker's life. A dark, surrealist nightmare about the apparently vampiric properties of a hypnotic, phantasmagorical super-8 film that once seen is not soon forgotten! (including the viewer and main character alike!) 'Arrebato' is a strikingly lucid and fiercely imaginative work of pure cinema that includes some genuinely unsettling sequences; the narrative enigma grips right from the terse opening gambit, and swiftly immerses the giddy viewer in its unrelenting maelstrom of hallucinatory strangeness.

Film maker José Sirgado (Poncela) gets to know amateur film director and freak Pedro though an acquaintance of both. Pedro's bizarre movies and José's personal problems and drug addictions act as the glue that forges a master-pupil relationship, especially when José makes a technical improvement to Pedro's camera that allows interval shooting. All this with some undefined gay twist to their relationship.After the relationship is put to sleep and José is back to his gloomy apartment in Madrid and his drug-driven love relationship with Cecilia Roth, he is surprised to receive a package from Pedro one day. And inside the package, a film and a cassette tape seem to indicate that a vampire lives inside Pedro's Super-8 camera, a vampire that absorbs people and makes them disappear when they are filmed.Could it be true? Or is it just a result of too much drug intake? The story becomes then a vehicle for theorizing on the creative process in arts, the relationship between the artist and his product, and finally the fascination with cinema in our lives ("Arrebato" can be translated as "raptum" and refers to the impact of certain artistic clichés -- King Solomon's mines for Sirgado, Betty Boop for his girlfriend-- in our feelings)As a very thin backdrop to the story, Zulueta portraits an sfumatto of the Spain of the late 70's: a society that used drugs liberally, craved for freedom, and made the way of sexual liberation while challenging the statu quo of decades of dictatorships.

Obviously, you will receive a surprise from this enrapturing film due to strange denounement and secondary characters. Slowly in the begining, it justifies that scenes during the film while you get catch for the story unconciously. Special mention to the work of Will More, a curious actor who didn´t work in cinema never more, only little appearances on TV series. Correct performance of Eusebio Poncela but he is better actor now, the same to a young and inexpert Cecilia Roth. Definitely you have to see this movie and think about it during hours before you beat the insomnia that the film could produce. Very disturbing.

Arrebato is an unknown film also in Spain because it's very difficult to access to one copy of this inimitable film. In fact I think that Arrebato had been seen by a minoritary group of all the people who loves deeply the good cinema. It is a cult movie made with the same cast and professionals than Almodovar first films, but it isn't an Almodovar's film. It is one of this films that change your impressions about the cinema and without any doubt, we can say that is the history which better reflects the vampiric relationship which we can see between the movies and those people who believes that the cinema is more important than live.