Ventura Pons's Barcelona (un mapa): Trapped in the Crystal

Ventura Pons' Barcelona (un mapa)/Barcelona (a map) (2007) is the director's bold adaptation of Llusa Cunill's play Barcelona, mapa d'ombres/Barcelona, map of shadows. The play takes place in a claustrophobic flat where six nameless characters engage in strange dialogues during five succinct two-character scenes. Pons's adaptation follows the same sequence, including the closely transcribed characters' exchanges, but amplifying them by establishing another dialogue, visually and textually, with Catalan history. Accentuating the multiple themes that inform the play, he filters the whole narrative through a crystal rgime, a cinematic style that, as Gilles Deleuze describes in The Time-Image (1985), coalesces actual and virtual images. The identical opening and closing shots delineate a continuum that fuses the historical past and the present in perpetual exchange. The crystal effect becomes a visual refrain as Pons's images merge sheets of time into an indiscernible flux, and the mise-en-scne injects crystals that both capture and affect the six characters, their dwelling, and, inexorably, history. Ultimately, the movie's conflicting chronology and maze-like composition question the state of a dying community; an issue that has always been the backdrop of Pons's works now takes center stage.