“The problem is thinking that the bad guys are not like us, but they are.” These words are from Carlos Vermut in 2022, who today has shaken the world of cinema by the publication of a new case of sexual violence. As El País has exposed in an extensive report, the director would have taken advantage of his position in the sector to maintain violent and non-consensual sexual relations with three women in the industry.
The reactions on social media came quickly and last night it was the talk of the Feroz awards. Vermut is one of the greatest exponents of auteur cinema in Spain during the last decade and, in fact, has received recognition such as several nominations at the Goya Awards or the top award at the San Sebastián Festival, where he swept the screen with Magical Girl.
But it is these very successful Vermut films that now raise the question of whether his harassment could already be glimpsed in his cinema. For example, critic Alfons Gorina has linked the filmmaker’s alleged attacks with the theme of his films in a tweet. But what is true in all that? Could Vermut’s films really predict a situation like the one that has been revealed today?
The Spanish director has directed a total of four films. He debuted in 2011 with Diamond Flash and his career exploded in 2014 with Magical Girl, one of the most celebrated arthouse films in the country. Subsequently, he released Who Will You Sing (2018), and his last film was the disturbing Manticore (2022).
Precisely, disturbing is the word that could define Vermut’s filmography. An alternative, auteur cinema, which has always sought to create discomfort in the viewer and make them reflect. A cinema where, in addition, violence is always present. Also violence against women.
The case of Diamond Flash, for example, tells the story of 5 women whose lives intersect at some point with a kind of mysterious superhero. A film where, apart from pedophilia appearing, very explicit scenes of violence by a man towards a woman are shown. In fact, this sexist violence can be seen just by taking a look at the film’s trailer:
The images briefly show some scenes from the film, such as one in which the supposed hero repeatedly punches a woman and leaves her face covered in blood. Or another one in which he suffocates another woman. Precisely, suffocation is one of the violent practices for which Vermut is accused and which he says he practices with consent.
But Diamond Flash is not the only example that illustrates all the rawness of his work. We said that Magical Girl is the greatest exponent of the director’s filmography, and in this case the film does not escape controversy either. Despite being less explicit, among several plot lines related to the crime, she stands out in the role of Barbara, a woman with a mental illness and a sadomasochistic past who is totally submitted to her partner, a psychiatrist who tells her directly. face: “You are a capricious and silly girl.”
What’s more, Barbara ends up prostituting herself in the mansion of a bourgeois society. A moment that evokes the sexual depravity of the millionaires in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Who Will Sing You, on the other hand, maintains the usual disturbing setting of Carlos Vermut, but it is surely his most conventional and least controversial film.
A controversy that he returned with the utmost forcefulness in his latest work: Manticore. Although violence against women does not appear, Carlos Vermut does recover the theme of pedophilia that he had briefly explored in his debut film, and this time he dedicates all his attention to it.
In fact, the protagonist has a very disturbing relationship with a boy who lives in his building and, in one scene of the film, he even masturbates with the 3D image of a boy that he projects on virtual reality glasses.
Despite the criticism of Carlos Vermut’s cinema and the fact that many people have immediately linked the director’s work with the alleged violent acts that he would have committed, there are also voices that oppose this deduction.
For example, film critic Agus Izquierdo believes that Vermut’s works must be separated from what he may have made, and assures that creating this comparison is trivializing and childishly conjecturing.
In any case, the accusations against Carlos Vermut and the controversy surrounding his films reopen the eternal debate about whether a filmmaker’s filmography should be separated from his actions.
One more example that joins many others, such as that of Woody Allen, accused of sexually abusing his daughter when she was a child, and author of controversial films such as Manhattan, where his character dates an underage girl. Or Roman Polanski, director of many disturbing films and convicted of sexually abusing a 13-year-old girl.
And the most extreme case, that of Marlon Brando in Tango in Paris, where precisely the barriers that separate reality from fiction fell and the actor allegedly raped Maria Schneider in a supposedly fictional scene that appears in the film, but that had been very real.
