The opening minutes of For Your Dead are expected to be Rock N Roll mania as […] – Metralla is an obsolete band with some of the faces who were once famed in the Spanish music scene. Looking back at that mock infomercial moment, I was having fun… possibly because I had an idea of how this story is likely to be told- Latin American Spinal Tap. Of course, that star skin crawly feeling does not last long. For anyone who is keen enough to notice the effort of encouraging the audience to the creation of For Your Dead film, it has been a hard sell for the team which has been making this film- it is no walk in the park in this country. This however does not seem to be what the filmmakers intended even at script level. Rather we have a story told by José Mota, and now where Mota plays Fito Cabrales, it was rather disappointing than surprising. The comedy is barely even threatened by the melodrama, and an extremely basic rock-and-roll plot is reduced to no more than the excitement level of a ‘salsa class’ in a retirement home somewhere close by.
The story of aged rock stars, who plan a staged management, is a well-wooled thread. Perhaps that is because it has already been well done before, as in David Galan Galindo’s Methuselah, which quite cleverly inverted its base concept, and David Suárez, in his crazy mockumentary Your Mother is a Whore: Behind the Success. Sadly, For Your Dead is quite the opposite and presents a series of boring clichés and cardboard characters with a screenplay that equally deals in drama and comedy as in The Hour of José Mota.
The movie director Sayago Ayuso, a host of one of the oldest rock programs dedicated to music in Spain in a radio (The Pirate and His Band), does not get a warm welcome in the movie which does not feature or spoof in any shape real rock moments. It seems as though it has gone through the Josemotization process with no elements of entertainment or extravagance – no crazy parties or weird supporting players or whatever which would have made them memorable.
The drift in tone and structures of the narration can be found from the beginning; in the author’s approach to what, for instance, the personal dramas of all band people should include, the director instantly goes plain which leaves no hope on moving the piece above mediocre. To draw on the local proverb, ”we either come out with mushrooms or Rolex.” Barring Jorge Sanz, who appears to have a sense of the cheekiness that the movie wishes to convey, this dismal effort is unlikely to be salvaged by even the casts.
With the dramatic twist and the tragic climax, all emotional moments fall flat as they have been well and truly telegraphed. For Your Dead is fired with several seeds but ends without inducing any surprises and then leads the viewers on a straight line which has no stimulation, action, heart, and ironically, music. The canvas upon which the film is diagrammed has an intention of brilliance but it completely disappoints on all fronts. It, therefore, becomes none of the aforementioned – an appreciation, a parody or even an endearing romance of soulmates who are lost and then come back together. It becomes a black hole of missed opportunities and unfulfilled concepts.
In the context of art house films rendered with deep underlying themes, there could be nothing more excruciating than watching a film which evokes utter apathy. This was how I felt with For Your Dead – it was made for television against critical admiration as to its artistry. It is a consolation that the film does not rise to the efforts of the cast. This was an opportunity lost to us to create a Spinal Tap, a movie which could encompass a wide variety of story May it be a rock. A bolero or even reggaeton.
Queer resolutions as we have been seeing in these days new age dramas, do not happen here, making it feel as though the drama is caught in between weepy weepy melodramatic moments and queer comedies that are better read than seen play out in the movie. As a result, the picture is as dull as its content, unable to find the fundamental uniqueness of a work of art and reducing it to nothing more than content.
As a result, the potential of For Your Dead is wasted and a few picturesque scenes are the only interesting parts. I tend to think that this is not the film created by anyone, in particular, warner’s appropriate sensibility. I bet this was a very different film from before the need to consider making money and the necessity of making the film accessible to more viewers kicked in. Eventually, the apathy to the film becomes the final product disregarding the good will that stood at the beginning of a brighter concept. Instead of epic symphonies, a tribute to the original sends a discordant twang of a somber guitar being played in a cover band.
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