Paraísos artificiales
1997 · 17m · España
Directed by Achero Mañas
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark
Pablo has taken different drugs throughout his life, from glue and joints at the start to heroin, his pleasurable emotions contrasting with the physiological effects he suffers.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the drug film to be a cautionary tale or a descent-into-hell narrative—Mañas just refuses to moralize, letting pleasure and damage coexist without resolving the contradiction, which is far more unsettling than any lecture could be.
There's a formal precision here that situates itself squarely in the lineage of European experimental cinema circa the '90s—the montage structure treating sensation and consequence as equal formal problems, edited with the rigor of someone who understands both documentary and abstraction.
The decision to score physiological degradation against moments of genuine euphoria, rather than underlining one or the other, forces the viewer into an unbearable complicity that a bigger budget and safer framing would have immediately lost.