La Cabina (The Telephone Box) - (1972)

 

DIRECTED by Antonio Mercero

SCREENPLAY by Antonio Mercero & Jose Luis Garcia

STARRING - Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez as Trapped Man.

PLOT - One morning in a city square, a group of workmen for a phone company install a brand new telephone box.

Later that day - a man drops his son off to school and enters the phone box to make a phone call. Upon finishing his call he tries to leave the box but finds he is trapped. No matter how hard he tries the door just won't open.

Very soon a crowd gathers and they try to free the trapped man but to no avail.

Eventually the men from the phone company arrived and remove the box from the city square with the unfortunate man still imprisoned within.

The man and the phone box are transported to an underground lair in the mountains. What the unwilling prisoner will find there will utterly shatter his sanity and his hopes for freedom...

PERFORMANCES - La Cabina is only a short film (about 45 minutes in length I think) and the entire film is carried by just one central performance - Jose Luis Lopez Vazquez as the unfortunate and unnamed man who finds himself trapped in the mysterious phone box.

Right from the outset the phone box seems to exude a sense of menace - for some reason it just looks wrong and strangely incongruous (even though the sight of a phone kiosk in a city centre is nothing out of the ordinary). The man seems to think nothing of it as he innocently makes a phone call, little realising that he's pretty much stepping into the Lion's den.

Vazquez's performance runs the whole gamut of emotions - he starts out mildly pissed off at the seemingly innocent inconvenience of being trapped in a phone booth.

As the situation becomes more heightened his mild frustration starts to grow - a crowd grows around him (and true to form when lots of the general public are gathered together the vast majority of them aren't particularly helpful - most of them just sit there watching as if someone's laid on a free sideshow for thier own personal entertainment. Small children even point and laugh at his plight).

As the main character is trapped inside a phone box we the audience (and the spectators outside) can't hear his voice (presumably the glass in the phone box is soundproof), what this means is that Vazquez essentially gives us a silent performance - the main character's plight is essayed purely through facial expressions and gestures, it's more or less mime but it works very well and Vazquez totally manages to pull it off, you can fully emphasize with our hero's growing irritation, anger and eventually fear as his situation becomes increasingly surreal and eventually horrific.

As the story progresses Vazquez's character even forms temporary relationships with the various bystanders who are watching his plight unfold - like the strongman who tries to smash him out of the phone booth, the young boy who seems to remind him of his own son, the circus dwarf who is a carrying a highly symbolic ship in a bottle who looks at him in upmost pity and the other man who is also trapped in a different phone booth who he encounters when he's being driven to the phone company's H.Q. Once again these brief connections in the midst of adversity are shown purely through Vazquez's physical acting and form the main spine of the story.

Once our hero enters the telephone company's secret underground base and the secret is out about the grisly fate that awaits him, Vazquez's performance ratchets up one final notch into utter mind snapping fear. The final shot of the film is of the unfortunate man sliding down the side of the phone box's window - totally unable to escape and knowing that now he never will. He's a broken man collapsing into utter hopeless despair. It's as bleak as Hell but it's also a masterclass is silently emotive acting. Vazquez knocks it out of the park.

VIOLENCE - You wouldn't think there'd be any death or suggestion of violence in a film about a man trapped in a pesky telephone box would you ? Happily you'd be very wrong.

Once the entrapped man arrives in the secret base he spots row upon row of identical red telephone boxes - each one with it's very own HUMAN CORPSE sealed within. The implication is clear - for reasons known only to themselves and never explained onscreen - the phone company has been ensnaring innocent and unknowing members of the public in their phone booths and leaving them to starve to death.

This is further confirmed when our hero spots the other trapped man he saw earlier - only this time the other chap has chosen to take his own life by strangling himself with the phone chord.

This is the final straw for the trapped man - he realises he's never going to escape and the bitter choice facing him is either death by starvation or by his own hand. He breaks down and the film ends...

RATING - This a wonderfully surreal black comedy/art house horror short, it's even more amazing when you think that this was originally made for Spanish television. 

It became something of a late night favourite on British TV in the 80's and 90's (in fact that's where I first saw it on my mate's portable TV when I was at Uni living in halls of residence late one night in the winter of 1996), it's currently available in YouTube and I'd recommend watching it. Simple but effective. Once seen never forgotten.

5 killer phone box's out of 5.

ART -