Chaotic Ana (2007) User Reviews

Weaving, magical, masterful

[tim-764-291856 · 7/10 · 17 March 2012]

Having now seen all six of Medem's DVDs in his Spanish released "Collection", I was worried that this last one, would be rubbish. Other reviews and reviewers hint at such but I found it utterly intense and mesmerising.

Anyone having seen more than one of Julio's films knows that logic often disappears and an adult fantasy awaits. Beautiful sexuality, strange and exotic visuals, stunning landscapes and a chequerboard of interlocking story pieces that sometimes sort of connect. I loved not knowing what was going to happen next, or who Ana's next incarnation was going to be.

Instead of trying to make sense of it all, just light a candle of two, turn out the lights and let it overwhelm you. This is a director of immense imagination and he has the guts to follow them through and onto film. The ravishing paintings done by his late sister alone are worth seeing.

Here in the U.K., I've not seen any of the regular actors of Medem's in any other director's films. So, it was nice to see the reassuring maturity of Charlotte Rampling and her character as the Patron of the Arts that takes Ana under her wing perfect for her and she plays it superbly, of course.

Chaotic Ana isn't my favourite Medem flick, The Red Squirrel is. All his films are quite long and meandering and it is this unpredictability and superb visual tapestry that makes me rate him so highly.

Scattered Ana

[johno-21 · 5/10 · 6 February 2008]

I saw this last month at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. The premise of this film was done before back in 1968 in the film Candy. You take a lovely nymph-like girl with a lot of hair and a beautiful body and build a series of disjointed, ridiculous sketch-like stories around her with the help of a big name actor or two and pretend it's a comedy. This film does the same except it pretends to be a drama. The films title character Ana (Manuela Vellés) is a gifted young artist living with her father Klaus (Matthias Habich) in a cave near Ibiza, Spain. Yes, they live in a cave but it's quite nice and richly appointed for a cave dwelling. Newcomer Vellés almost didn't have the role as it was originally attached to actress María Valverde who wisely bowed out and you can only imagine if it was her refusal to do a certain scene in this film. One day a wealthy art patron from France named Justine (veteran international talent Charlotte Rampling) discovers the artistic potential in Ana and wants to cultivate her talent by setting her up in her exclusive art colony she runs in Madrid. Ana meets Linda (Bebe Rebulleto) who becomes her best friend and Said (Nicolas Cazalé) who becomes her boyfriend. Ana discovers the doors to past lives through regressive hypnotism by an young American hypnotist named Michael (Asier Newman). The movie has you hooked for a while and you wonder where it's going to go but once she heads for New York it rapidly falls apart as a film trying to hard to be an art film with a political and social message. The film looks great with art direction by Montse Sanz and cinematography by Mario Montero and direction from the talented and celebrated, international film festival award winning Julio Medem. The film is dedicated to Medem's sister Ana Medem whose actual artwork are featured through the film. Her Picassoesque style painting were to be shown at an exhibit in Valencia when on her way there she was tragically killed in a car accident. I hate to be critical of a film dedicated to someone who represents such a personal loss to it's director but the story written by director Medem is so bad that I can't help it. Watching this film you realize that this guy knows how to make a film but you wonder why he didn't make one this time. It features some nudity and some prolonged unnecessary violence and I would give this a 5.5 out of 10 and not recommend it to a general audience.

A movie for or by an adolescent?

[doug-697 · 6/10 · 13 September 2007]

An art student undergoes hypnosis to unlock repressed memories of past lives and discovers she has a unique place in human history.

Early in the movie I was just thinking it was a silly movie with superficial pseudo-hip observations about sex and life. As the movie continued I began the think that perhaps the movie was made with the intended audience being adolescent girls. For example, the guy who puts Ana under hypnosis to bring out her repressed memories is clearly too young to be taken seriously and the way the women talk about sex would not be considered sophisticated by most adult women, but in both cases might be interesting to 13 year olds. I was thinking that if the movie's target audience was young girls then based upon that it wasn't a bad movie.

However as the movie continued and began to makes it's political views more explicit I concluded it had actually been made by an adolescent girl. It's not the politics or the moral point of view that's silly, it's the fact that the director obviously thinks he's telling us something we don't know (Ex: men are responsible for all the wars in history! Hmmm...what a shocking new idea!)

Oddly enough, the final climactic scene, which is utterly naive and blatantly anti-American actually saves the movie. The silliness of everything that goes on before doesn't prepare you for as brutal a political statement as could ever be made. I don't agree with the statement (to say the least, by the way) but I have to admire the courage to put in on film.

However, the movie is incredibly silly and if you're a moderately well-read person, it probably won't have much to offer.

Ordered Disorder

[tedg · 26 July 2008]

When you align yourself with an artist, it is a true commitment - as deep as any in life. It should not be taken lightly and I suppose the commitment can be as deep as that which you, the art and the artist can permit. That can be deep, permanent and resilient, and such is the case with myself and Medem. There are three living filmmakers who I trust in this way.

When you do this, when you braid imaginations a sketch, a hint, has import. If it suggests that it should have been finished and is not, the difference becomes artistic. If it fails, eve if it repulses, it matters.

This film is less perfect than his two previous. Its that perfection that first attracted me — not the perfection itself but that someone could imagine such a type of structure. The control over it is merely a matter of conversation.

This film has much of that vision of order: nested realities; art within art; selves within selves; symmetries of all sorts; honest giving of selves as a symmetry. It has visual expressions of this: from Caliban's Tempest cave through modern New York to Greenaway- like quantifications. Sea. Desert. But the order is broken, and I see that has put off viewers all over the world. This gives the impression that it is half-baked, that it is not finished. For instance, there's a mirroring of desert Indians and displaced Arabs that doesn't seem to work. There's a confluence of several types of violence that seems as if it could have been powerful but is not.

There's a remarkable notion of painting, painting doors and painting with feces that could have become archetypal but fails.

But each of these is a matter of disorder muting the effect and thereby making it all the more powerful. The personal story, if you do not know it, is that Medem's sister Ana was a painter. The paintings you see here by the character Ana are hers. She was killed at 22, just when this character is killed. There is a retroactive disorder that ripples back through time to perturb the movie that probably once was as perfect and powerful as "Sex and Lucia."

Its that perturbation that is the art. If you open yourself as I have, this will matter. If not, well, someone died and it didn't matter.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Hummm

[ben-in-france · 7/10 · 9 May 2008]

Visually, the movie is beautiful. Wonderful landscapes and light throughout, as always with Medem.

In terms of the story, it's not very clear, a bit too mental to make sense. I enjoyed it until she got to New York and Said just re-appears like that, and what is that about the Irak war?? Suddenly, the story turned a bit too 'real' to make sense.

Good acting all round, though some characters are undeveloped: Charlotte Rampling's, the cute hypnotist etc...

Some strikingly beautiful moments though - Ana's recollection of dying in the desert (quite violent though), the animations, Ana dancing with her father etc...

Utterly Complex but Brilliant

[Imdbidia · 9/10 · 12 February 2011]

Chaotic Ana is Julio Medem's ode to the female and the myths of the motherland. Despite some bloody and shocking scenes, is also an ode against male violence, wars, and those individuals who starts them; however, the film also shows a blind faith in the good of human kind, despite the tragedies and havoc that we create and surround us. Moreover, Chaotic Ana is both a reflection on death and the void left by the departed - Medem's tribute to his late sister Anne. The film is also an invitation to see Art as a form of individual expression, a timeless biography of the living, and a living legacy of the deceased.

In his odyssey of discovery of The Female, Medem takes us from the cave to the skyscraper, with the ocean as an element of continuity.

This is a very intimate, personal film that touches universal themes and myths(from Oedipus and Electra to primitive matriarchal mythologies) to share personal experiences, feelings and ideas that relate to Women and the Female.

The editing is complex and very dynamic. Every single small detail in the film has an intrinsic connection with the story, is part of it, not as an object, but as object that conveys meaning. I especially liked some of visual shows shown in the House of the Artists.

The film continuously unsettles the viewer. However, the violent, shocking and sex scenes have a purpose within the story.

The actors are all OK in the movie. But this is not a movie for the actors to shine, but a movie in which the script, the story, is what matters. The actors are here just as Medem's "mediums". In fact, Medem has curated this film to the smallest detail.

You cannot watch this movie as if you were watching a normal movie, not in the same mood, or with the same intention or attention. This film requires of you 1/ A willingness to let the odd, the chaos and surprise express themselves freely. 2/ To embrace Medem's personal story being shared with you. 3/ An attention to the detail. 4/ Have into account that this film is personal as it is related to the figure of Medem's late sister, who was also a remarkable painter, and that many of the references and scenes in the film are related to her.

Movies like this are a challenge for the viewer and are never popular or highly rated. But this is just a sign that most people don't watch movies, just see them.

Disappointing movie of a great director

[abisio · 3/10 · 16 September 2007]

After the wonderful "Lovers of the Arctic Circle" and his masterpiece "Sex and Lucia" (the last almost seven years ago) my expectations on Julio Medem's follow up movie were very high and for that reason I rushed to see "CAOTIC ANA" at the Toronto Film Festival. To my disappointment, this movie is just as its title CAOTIC. A sad demonstration that some interesting or even original ideas by no means end up as a good movie.

Ana is a young painter living in IBIZA with his widow father. One day she meets Justine (the great Charlotte Rampling) who offers education and economic support to perfect her artistic skills if she moves to Madrid. Ana starts "feeling" the big city and the new life (it is a sensorial feeling; she is be far from shy or at least she has no problems in being nude for art's sake or to take a bath in the ocean or for many other reasons). One of her new "feelings" is Said; a young Arab and fellow student which Ana gets involved and obsessive in love (like Lucia in "Sex"). In short time, Ana starts having strange daydreams and seizures until a professional hypnotist finds out she had lived many previous lives and all of them ending with terrible deaths at a very young age (around 22 years old). This discovery plus something said by Ana (she speaks different languages while hypnotized) causes Said to run away without any explanation. In order find out what happened with Said she accepts being part of a hypnotic treatment, trying to investigate her previous lives (and deaths). The only condition, she does not want to remember anything about the session, unless is related to Said. Many more things occur and for reasons that do not make a lot of sense she ends up in USA where she is submitted to the last "session" to find out the truth. Even when the idea looks interesting; the unrealistic chain of events, many of them too forced, harms the narrative. No character in the movie (which includes very well known European actors like Rampling or Luis Homar) has any deep or definition. They are mostly pieces put there to generate a situation or a dialog; we do not get to properly know Ana since her only motivation seems to be finding Said; and even this mystery (which drives the movie ) is easily predictable. Medem (like Bergman in his own way) has a personal concept about love and human relations and all his movies make reference to the stupid choices and things people do and consequences in everybody's lives. He never really made a lineal or realistic story; just a chain of events aligned to show his theory. This concept worked fine in previous movies; because in some way everything (albeit not always logically) got connected and made sense; which is not the case here. Many ideas seem to be thrown in the mix (not all of them really good or original) but like water and oil did not blend at all. Cohesion is missing in many moments (like the missing reels in GRINDHOUSE). The perfect example is the scene with the USA government functionary; a scene many people will probably enjoy (aside for the disgusting) but has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It is really sad because technically the movie is excellent; the paintings and the animations are outstanding, the locations are pure beauty but while Ana had many souls, this movie has none.

The most intense movie I've ever seen

[adlad3 · 10/10 · 4 November 2007]

I have been lucky to see Julio Medem's films at several film festivals over the years and he always manages to captivate his audience. I was fortunate enough to attend the UK premiere of his new masterpiece Caotica Ana at the London Film Fstival recently. He is arguably one of Spain's all time most important film makers, for example Stanley Kubrick said that Medem's "The Red Squirrel" was one of his all time favourite films and Steven Spielberg offered Medem the chance to direct "Zorro", which he later turned down to spend more time developing his own movies.

Caotica Ana is one of Medem's best films to date, beautifully filmed, beautifully acted and with an intensely captivating story of reincarnation and never ending love. Manuela Velles as Ana is enchanting and lights up the screen, Charlotte Rampling turns in a good performance in her first ever Spanish speaking role, Bebe provides much laughter and Asier Newman is simply hypnotic, exuding vulnerability and charisma. Sequences are at times "Chaotic" as per the title but are necessary to build emotional attachment to the story. The change between chaos and calm being personified in many ways through Ana's final journey to New York by boat, travelling on stormy and more tranquil waters. Overall a must see movie, very different to anything you have ever seen before and a real homage to the importance of women in society throughout the ages.

Boring and Chaotic Mess

[claudio_carvalho · 3/10 · 7 October 2008]

The teenager artist Ana (Manuela Vellés) is raised in Ibiza by her German father Klaus (Matthias Habich) in a naturalist lifestyle in a cave. One day, she meets a woman called Justine (Charlotte Rampling) that invites Ana to move to Madrid, offering education and economical support, to live in an old house with other artists having classes of Arts and with the only commitment of studying. Ana befriends her mate Linda (Bebe) and falls in love for the problematic Said (Nicolas Cazalé), having her first sexual experience with him. After a period together, Said leaves Ana, and then she is hypnotized by Anglo (Asier Newman), discovering her past lives and deaths.

The first work of Julio Meden that I watched was the wonderful "Los Amantes del Círculo Polar" on 29 December 2000. Then, on 10 June 2005, I saw the extremely erotic, weird and confusing but also intriguing "Lucía y el Sexo" that I actually liked. I was looking forward waiting to see another work of this cult director, and I have just watched "Caótica Ana". I found a surrealistic original story, supported by a gorgeous and sexy actress with a lovely smile that exposes her naked body very easily and for free along the feature, and a wonderful cinematography, with beautiful landscapes and scenarios. Unfortunately the screenplay is a boring and chaotic mess, and the conclusion is awful. In the end, "Caótica Ana" is a disappointing movie from a director that I had great expectations. My vote is three.

Title (Brazil): "Caótica Ana" ("Chaotic Ana")

Opening doors

[RResende · 10/10 · 25 August 2007]

This is really something. Any Medem film is a true event. Being able to watch such a master evolve, film by film is a privilege. Medem is on the top of cinematic innovation and exploration today, at this moment, and this film may be his highest achievement so far.

So this one is built with oppositions, scale oppositions, characters temperament oppositions, landscape oppositions. Ana is, herself, "chaotic", she holds inside the quietness of anonymous lives, and the burden of women's heritage. The first scene, with the birds, apparently so detached from the rest, Ana and the dirty senator, Ana and Linda, her friend.

(NARRATIVE CONSTRUCTION) Medem's films have been always a reinvention of the love story, at once concerned about tenderness, human mind and visual cinematic storytelling innovation. The human soul is a huge iceberg from which we only see a short tip, and Medem's cinema always cared about the vast mass we don't see. This still matters here. But adding to that, there's a whole new dimension. This is a mark in Medem's career, and i would say in cinema, since he depicts new "scales" and new ambit to his cinema. He globalizes, and puts context into his once only dreamy, beautiful and tender world, that of "Lucia y el sexo" and "Los amantes..." One can't stop thinking about what this one shares with Babel, this is Medem's version of a contemporary global world.

And he is so deep here. He freely works with time and space, in several dimensions. Let's check:

. He works global space in being able to bring coherence to multiple stories, excerpts of lives, that pass all through Ana's mind (and Said, but Woman is the theme here). By global space i mean the world, let's call it realities, different countries and cultures no matter when we place it;

. He works linear time, the one that carries Ana from the beginning to the end of her physical journey (also made by global spacial exploration). Here is Medem as we had seen him before in "Lucia...", dream like editions, always putting the audience looking for what happened;

. The genius stroke: Medem adds historical time, working at once with various epochs, various "times", various contexts. Medem's own woman centered mythology finds in Ana the gate, or the passing point of every memory. This is the word, Medem brings memory to life.

(CINEMATIC CONCERNS) All this would be just intellectually ambitious, but it is all put together in such a cinematic way that i do believe this film will prevail as a mark to a new approach. This is fresh and unseen before:

. the cinematic devices: the edition, in the almost psychedelic moments in which all women from all times suffer at once, check the careful photography, always adequate to the situation but always coherent with the global work (duality once more).

. the presence of "cinema" as a "mood" that en-forms all actions in the character (and mostly in the Camera) of Linda: she always films, Ana always watch the films (as well as a crowd), and many times those films (as well as some scenes) come worked out as the installations/performances of the students from the art school. And there's a particular moment in which this becomes clear as water and which is when we watch the heads of an audiences in a room wathching one of those films (this scene will only work in a theater, preferably with other people sitting in front of you). This will lead you to another dimension that may already not be cinema, but performative art, in which you are participating. Genius.

. the unexpected use of animation, which intelligently starts "flat" and than becomes "deep", multidimensional, just like the whole construction as soon as Medem introduces his use of historical time.

(THEMES) Ultimately, this is about paying attention to fundamental (though many times forgotten) issues: we came from somewhere, and that en-forms who we are today, forgetting that is rejecting Culture, capital C. Medem cares.

"This column is doric, I am Greek", says Ana after being hit by a corrupt politician with a small doric column

My evaluation: 5/5, this is a cinematic essay, on my list of most important.

http://www.7eyes.wordpress.com

I hated this movie...

[srbijadrolja · 1/10 · 11 February 2011]

This is the most intense film I have ever seen. This film has seriously disturbed me. I just...hate everything about it. It wasn't the violence... I don't know what it was about this film but I feel traumatized. I'm not a film expert and i'm certainly not faint-hearted, but this really got to me. A huge part of it was the camera angles. Definitely the camera angles. They were what made the scenes in this film especially disturbing. After watching this I cried for hours and felt very paranoid and scared. I know this sounds really bad but it's the truth. This film really freaked me out. I am writing a review because I cannot sleep after watching this film. The last few scenes were the worst for me (4, 3, 2, 1, 0). I think I was really badly affected by this because whilst I am female, I am definitely not a feminist. Definitely not. I almost felt like I myself was in a hypnotic state after watching this. It was terrifying, without being a horror film. The genre is stated as 'drama', although for me it had the effect of a psychological thriller. It got in my head and it just..truly disturbed me.

A cavewall that always opens doors

[chaos-rampant · 26 September 2015]

If you don't know Medem - and it seems the history of film has largely bypassed him, much like Raoul Ruiz - he's magical, with stories about stories sliding into memory and yearning. Love is his theme. His camera paints with music. Fiery duende. He's a more deeply felt Ruiz in this way. He had made two more successful films leading up to this that you should absolutely see, then come to this.

It starts in a slightly clumsy way with a father and daughter living remotely in an island, then schematic in an artistic commune where she goes, but soon you see what he's capable of. From about when she meets the Berber boy until she arrives at New York he soars. This part incidentally mirrors his previous two.

It starts with the scene of their meeting in painting class; her painting clearly a sparrow in a corner of her painting that he painted elusively as just shape in his, his texture of the painting as primal as the desert he comes from, the inexplicable urge that takes over her, you can see Medem soar here. The whole is about tumultuous urges in the soul that rush to the surface, carrying with them memory, image, contact, consciousness of something larger. It is about having known him in a cosmic way, before this specific affair started, as having always suffered for him, this is how deeply Medem portrays.

And it always starts again from the middle, with him always already gone from her. Medem employed a similar device in Lucia. It's halfway in that we get this, the cinematic device that gives the story its specific shape of sliding visions. She's being hypnotized to remember. The thing to glean is that she's the one swimming into urges that heave around her, has been since the very first scene. We get the searching for him (he has mysteriously vanished) as searching across different lives, dying innumerable deaths. Selves within selves.

This has always been Medem's force; the ability to take love, make love so deep, it becomes what this life has always been about since the very start, meeting this person. Before and after blend. Urge rushes out both ways from a center in the middle. No one does deep love better, not even Malick.

But then something happens and it slips from him. You'll note quite clearly - we shift from this affair, from love shuffled by chance time, to broader elegy of womanhood. Fiery, quietly enduring the ills of mankind. Man is now more than this Berber boy she met one day, it's a child she had taken from her in the desert, a father who took off on a boat, an Indian chieftain who slayed her. That was also the time of the Iraq war so we get an angry vignette against the warmongers.

But now every new allusion jars, falls apart. It takes breath of life out and puts symbolic motif in - the woman as goddess and as mother of humanity. It does away with love we might have known and gives something broader but without anchor.

The film is dedicated to his sister Ana, then recently departed. The set of paintings we see throughout are hers, from an exhibition she was about to stage. It may be that he had already started work on this as one thing (or the story idea pre-existed) and it morphed to something else.

Cool

[hajekp · 10/10 · 1 April 2012]

The movie is amazing, graphically perfect, inspiring, thrilling, like a magnet, you won't miss even a second, great, and most importantly, it is totally relaxing. It leaves your mind free, relaxed, if you felt tired before that, it took your mind through thrilling path and left you totally relaxed while you will remember parts of the movie much much later after you saw it. Definitely worth seeing it at least once. Try to avoid reading about it much before you go and see it, get surprised! There good acting, moments you think now the movie may end it won't and gets to another similar moment. It is a drama but somewhat different, like if you watch a romantic movie and you cannot be sure until the very end if it really ends happily. This is that kind of a movie.

A movie that will leave you wanting to leave the movie theater

[eyal philippsborn · 4/10 · 2 November 2008]

You know how sometimes a movie really reminds you of another movie you saw, not because of obvious reasons such as plot similarities, duplicated characters, suspiciously identical quotes etc. but because of another reason, a little less evident but existent nonetheless. I associate Chaotic Ana with "Stealing Beauty", a romantic drama by Bernardo Bertolucci that made Liv Tyler a household name. seemingly one has to be slightly hallucinated to associate Stealing Beauty with a fantasy/occult movie and like I said earlier, the reason is subtle but it still exists. Ana (the mind-blowingly beautiful Manuela Vellés in a good performance) is a painter who lives with her father in a cave (seriously, an actual cave) when one day, she is spotted by an artists' patron (Charlotte Rampling ) who immediately identifies her talent and asks her to join the artists greenhouse she runs in Madrid. Ana who is very close to her father is a little reluctant at first but ultimately decides to cultivate her passion for art, preferably in a modern day dwelling. Ana is acquainted with other artists that share her artistic vision and propensity to avoid coherent statements (I will elaborate about that later on) but one man draws her attention, Said (pronounced Sa-Id), an enigmatic painter who grew up in a rural area of a north African, trauma ridden, country. How he got from there to the artists' house is anyone's guess. Ana and Said fall in love and conduct a passionate and highly explicit romance. One day, though, Said disappears for no reason. At the same time, Ana discovers that her dreamless sleep and peculiar visions originate in a startling fact in her past. To avoid spoilers, I will not elaborate too much on that fact but like I stated earlier, this movie deals with the occult so if you hate the sixth sense because you're too old to believe in ghosts, this movie is probably not your cup of truffles-juice (no tea in this movie, it's way too normal to be consumed)

Ana, aided with the French patron and an American "occult professional" (Asier Newman Who unfortunately, struggled too much with his coarse Spanish to give a good performance), decides to search her destiny in light of these revelations. These revelations are abundant with cultural references, Flashbacks, scenery shots etc. but they all lack one crucial ingredient- sense.

Sense is usually a missing ingredient in the films that deal with the occult but the sense I refer to is not the fact oriented sense. It's the sense of the characters state of mind and disposition that makes them genuine. The endless theories about the nature of men and women might seem offensive to some or ridiculous to others but to me they seem the clear cut symptom of the film's artificiality. Hearing the characters lay out their philosophies, listening to them converse, and watching them react to certain situations, make you wonder in what bizarro world this code of conduct is considered common or even acceptable. And if that's not sufficient enough to depreciate the film's cinematic worth, the blunt and redundant sex scenes as well as the stereotypical background stories deteriorate the film to good guys/bad guys dichotomy usually common in Road runner cartoons. By "stereotypical stories" I mean the stories that are too clichéd and metaphorical to be authentic, for example: Said that was abducted from his family by soldiers, Ana's friend, Linda that was abandoned by her father, the encounter American official who "made" the war (no, I don't know what that means either) and the list goes on and on.

I feel a bit reluctant to criticize a film that was made from such a personal and painful viewpoint (the director made this movie in his deceased sister's memory and incorporated her paintings throughout the film). I can't think of a more difficult task to translate personal loss to the big screen. I have no knowledge or skill to determine whether the character of Ana is based on Hulio Medem's deceased sister but I can say with a great deal of confidence that the world depicted in this movie doesn't fit to the planet we all live in.

If you recall (which I doubt it), I mentioned that this film reminded me of Stealing beauty, Liv Tyler's big breakthrough. That film was highly acclaimed at the time so I rushed to see it and ended up bitterly disappointed. I believe that many critics who wrote in glowing terms of Stealing beauty's behalf, spent the movie mesmerized by Liv's infinite charm and sex appeal and overlooked the film's overall qualities. Manuela Vellés has the same undefinable quality and I can only assume her name will be known to many in the future.

Hopefully in more coherent films.

4 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter.

That movie has changed me

[drsixthsense · 10/10 · 8 July 2015]

I was reading through other reviews and I was surprised that people didn't get the point of this story. Previous movies of Medem I did like. But these were not so deep, so intense. I think the reason is that movie dedicated to his sister. And knowing that her paintings were used in this movie just gives even more feelings about that film. I really loved that and advising to all my friends who like other movies than Transformers. Perfect acting, perfect story-line, perfect idea behind, perfect soundtrack. Whole idea about being mother of good human - so powerful and great. In the end I was crying with tears of happiness. I was so happy that someone could make such a movie. Room in Rome was not such deep but not as simple as Lucy and Lovers.

My applause to Julio Medem.

A film of missed opportunities.

[MOscarbradley · 4/10 · 1 April 2020]

Ana, (Manuela Velles), is a young hippie living in a cave in Ibiza with her father, painting pictures which she sells to tourists. One day Justine, (Charlotte Rampling), happens by and takes Ana off to her colony of artists in Madrid where she meets the handsome Berber Said, (Nicholas Cazale). Julio Medem's "Chaotic Ana" aims to be a kind of dark fairy-tale with a heroine whose life is more chaotic than it first appears. Under hypnosis it seems she lived several lives before this one.

The problem is Medem's film can't quite make up its mind what it wants to be; a psychological study of a young woman with multiple (past) personalities, a cool thriller about a kind of cult, a political movie about refugees and Middle-Eastern politics or a movie about performance art? As Ana, Velles is certainly a blank slate but it's a blankless lacking in personality and unfortunately Ana is actually quite boring and she's the film's dominant character, (Rampling flits in and out, saying and doing very little), and at around two hours it's very long. This is a film with too many ideas that never amount to anything and is ultimately a lost opportunity.

awful movie, unfortunately

[hedys10 · 1/10 · 2 February 2010]

I also saw "Lucía y el Sexo" and I liked it. A LOT! However, "Caótica Ana" left me with a bitter feeling of a good artist in a pushing manner to impress. In my opinion, this movie has a wonderful beginning, beautiful images, intricate relations, but then it continues nowhere with exaggeration in an evident effort of being modern, artistic, tempting through crushing images, shocking without content. What's the idea at the end? What's the purpose of Ana's cyclic dying? Why there are no elements to underline here character or personality? No, my vote it would be normally 5, but after Lucia y el Sexo, this movie has 1 (awful).

chaotic heart..... chaotic mind.......

[andrabem · 23 September 2008]

Many people said that "Caotica Ana" had sunk in its own chaos. Well, I don't demand from films a straightforward narrative, I think that the stream of consciousness, the poetic, the surrealistic can be much more powerful, emotional, than a story told in conventional fashion. I've liked a lot "Lucia y el sexo" - It was so beautiful that it took my breath away, and when I tried to write about it in IMDb I just couldn't.

Now, "Caotica Ana" .... as a whole it's a mess. In his homage to his sister Ana, Julio Medem invokes the sea, the sun, reincarnation, the tragedy of Western Sahara etc... Many different ingredients were put into this soup, but in what concerns the taste... Some scenes are beautiful and moving, but other scenes feel like nothing. The film is like a mind game (from reason, through reason, to Emotion) - many situations and elements seem to have been arbitrarily inserted.

I don't care so much for logic and I was expecting with "Caotica Ana" an audio-visual-emotional trip (the beautiful Ana in different times and places, the sea, the sky. What could possibly go wrong?), but I was disappointed in this regard. Anyway "Caotica Ana" is a very personal film. It's different from anything you may find in your local DVD rental store. Give it a try if you want.