Jan. 18, 2012 - Issue #848: City of champions
Cell 211
Chekhov's gun? Check.
» Prison gone wrong
Yet the dingy, claustrophobic horror of that opening seems to fade. Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) visits the prison a day before starting his job as a guard, only to suffer an injury and be abandoned as a riot breaks out, led by Malamadre (Luis Tosar), with Basque/ETA prisoners (considered terrorists) as bargaining-chip hostages. Juan's out-of-nowhere predicament strikes the viewer as implausible, his memories of his pregnant wife are all rather pretty and gilt-edged, and there's just never quite enough of a lingering sense of threat.
But the shadows lengthen over the prison administration: it negotiates in bad faith, chief guard Utrilla (Antonio Resines) is brutal, and riot police use force against spouses and family gathered outside the jail.
By the last half-hour, the story's seething skepticism towards the surveillance-state (Juan explaining the government's attitude: "We're trash and what you do with trash is take it out so it doesn't stink") and its wild-eyed portrait of a naïve guard turned murderous prisoner, trapped inside as the media outside tells him of his tragic loss, makes for a mesmerizing movie.
The last line goes to a prison official, saying to an investigating tribunal (but looking at us), "Any more questions?" And it's the happy ignorance of those on the outside that Cell 211, in its best moments, condemns. True to its title, its message was of oppressive, haunted-horror all along—prisons are where we don't just lock away but make more monsters, banishing them to dark spaces buried deep within our society, out of sight and out of mind.
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