the urban community

Saw La Comunidad (2000) tonight. A non-melodramatic Spanish black comedy. Enjoyed it very much even if it was unbelievably ridiculous. Carmen Maura plays a sort of down-on-her-luck temp working as a real estate agent. (Where on earth can temps do that sort of work?) To make a long story short, she finds 300 million pesetas in the derelict apartment of her dead "neighbor" upstairs (she kinda camps out in the swankiest apartment on the market in Madrid). Everyone else in the building has been waiting for the guy to die so they can have the money he won in the sports lottery twenty years ago. Everyone wants it so badly that s/he'll kill Julia and even each other to keep it all to him/herself.

Anyway, for our essay in Spanish cultural studies, we have the opportunity to write on the film, exploring such ideas as femininity, urbanism, and "invented communities." Because I had no idea what La Comunidad was about before going in, I didn't understand the question that asks me to analyze the Julia character "in relation to ideas of urbanism and femininity." But while watching it, I saw it.

Just when the film ended, the narcoleptic who slept through Flamenco (1995) said she didn't understand how she could examine the "urbanism" of the film. She said something to the effect of: "They [the characters] never went outside the building. We never really saw the city." I thought I should share this one with you. How could they not see housing as a part of the urban landscape? Is it not a building too? My teacher said that it relates because the building and its inhabitants form a sort of microcosm of society. That's true, but I see the way in which you can examine class in relation to urbanism as represented in the film.