Black, no sugar
Watching The Coffee Table-- picture the ugliest piece of furniture on the face of the earth, a pair of gilt nymphs loosely screwed to a gilt base arcing unsteadily towards each other (every time someone walks around, actually every time someone makes an emphatic move anywhere near, the furniture shudders as if flinching), supporting a reportedly unbreakable glasstop. Picture a chubby mustachioed salesman (Eduardo Antuna) looking up at his prospective customers, meekly if gamely trying to sell them on the table's virtues. Facing him on either side are Maria (Estafania de los Santos) and Jesus (David Pareja) and for the next five minutes they bicker-- Maria about how expensive and godawful tacky the furniture is (she's not wrong), Jesus on how he's spent the day following her and doing what she wants and their whole life-- insisting on having a child, naming the child (Cayetano, which he hates) has been devoted to making her happy. Now he wants a table, this table, for himself alone, just because.
Darkly hilarious opening scene, and what makes it darker and funnier is the sense you get that this particular spat is just one of a series, exposing long-simmering tensions. Apparently Maria is unattractive or feels unattractive or feels that her husband could have done better for himself if he wanted to, and Jesus-- to his credit-- doesn't seem share this view. But Maria as a result is a mass of anxieties and perversely needs to constantly test his dedication to her, a type of wish fulfillment that, to the casual observer, is likely to be catalyst to their ultimate separation.
Surrounding the couple are an interestingly eccentric supporting cast: Ruth (Gala Flores) is a precocious 13 year old fixated on Jesus who insists they run away together (or she'll scream rape); Jesus' brother Carlos (Josep Maria Riera) and his 18 year old wife Cristina (Claudia Riera) insist on visiting their newborn nephew; even the salesman makes a late appearance, delivering a screw needed to properly assemble the table, and their conversation in the doorway of Jesus' apartment is a record of all sorts of cringe.
You ultimately wonder why Casas bothers to fill in the details because as it turns out the film is mainly about Jesus-- basically husband and father suddenly having One Bad Day, squirming and maneuvering to delay the moment when that bad day will inevitably inexorably become worse.
And I have to give Casas credit: he knows how to turn a screw. As Jesus, Pareja gives a tour-de-force performance, a one-man show of shock, disconnect, nausea, mounting sweatstained dread shading gradually into despair. The tension does dissipate somewhat when he confides to Carlos...
And that's my chief complaint about the movie: Casas dreams up a great nightmare setup, sustains it for an impressive length of time, then somehow lets it get past him. Hard to say why without discussing the plot, but this is his second feature; the man has shown imagination and resourcefulness, coming up with a project on the relative cheap that turns on a tight concept. What's needed is the discipline to properly develop the story and bring it home to a persuasive conclusion. If, say, one could have persuaded Pedro Almodovar (who's moved on from black bitchy wit to a more mellow humanism), or if Michael Haneke were interested-- his Funny Games I consider a masterpiece of no-exit storytelling, as claustrophobic as they get (Haneke even turns the notion of a miracle escape into a gimmicky sick joke) but strictly limited, an ineloquent masterpiece. The film's perfect, but doesn't say more than it's designed to say, and I find that useless in the larger scheme of things.
Anyway Funny Games-- if Casas were able to direct with the kind of grip Haneke has, The Coffee Table might have been a minor masterpiece. Casas has a gift for dreaming up characters with fascinating emotional dynamics (Haneke's come off relatively flat); he needs to light and shoot much like Haneke lights and shoots the Schober's lakeside house, all whitewashed walls the better to see blood splatter (wanna bet Haneke studied Psycho?). With proper style comes proper tone, with proper tone the viewer can begin to appreciate the tragedy of Jesus' situation, doing his utmost best to prevent pain only to end up causing it to fall upon them with greater force than even he might have imagined. Casas comes O so teasingly close but alas and alack, the poor man gets no cigar.
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