Asignatura Aprobada (1987)

I am not really sure why none of the plot synopses of Asignatura Aprobada (Course Completed) on the internet is correct. This is not a film about a man who has several affairs. In fact he doesn't even have one! Asignatura Aprobada is a film about a man who is reckoning with being alone and the decisions he's made that have brought him to his solitude. He is an asshole – something he freely admits to his son and friends – and he chased away his girlfriend, whom he loved deeply.

Asignatura Aprobada is about growing old and time and regret and not knowing what to do next. It's about not being able to stop yourself from saying the wrong thing and being too self centered to make the other people in your life more important. It's a great film. I also love Garci's filmmaking. He refuses to give us any exposition, starting off immediately with layers upon layers, usually with a game that we can't trust. It's a technique of theatricality that Almodóvar will also favor. In fact, there is much of Almodóvar in Asignatura Aprobada – although Garci's work is very, very heterosexual – and their films would probably benefit from being analyzed side by side.

Sesión Continua (1984)

I gotta say I really love José Luis Garci's movies - this is the second one I've seen and they have such a beautiful quiet way about them. I have personal reasons for being moved by Sesión Continua in particular, but that's because the film is a kind of meditation on living through work or avoiding living through working. And then... the plot of the film the director and screenwriter are making is about falling in love with someone much younger and being inspired by the youth of one's beloved. (This was a film, incidentally, that Natey, a guy I was dating last summer, had planned to watch with me when he got home from Spain in the fall – before we stopped seeing one another.)

This is all subtle and comic while at the same time managing to be poignant. It's a kind of particularity of Garci's movies that they can be broadly funny, even farcical, while also being sad or bittersweet – sometimes even in the same scene – as when a scene begins with the writer and director discussing plot points at an outdoor café and it sounds to a terrified innocent patron like they're plotting a kidnapping, but as the scene ends we hear the director muse about how his daughter is having an affair with an older man and how that makes him reflect on his own age.

The real star here is José Bódalo who gives an absolutely brilliant performance as the head of the film studio. He is ill the whole movie – probably prostate cancer – but his own illness is a kind of red herring for what Garci's film really has in store. But, man, Sesión Continua is so good. This is an excellent follow up to Volver a Empezar.

This film wasn't released in theatres in the US and has never appeared on DVD. I watched Sesión Continua via the Cave of Forgotten Films website here.

Volver a Empezar (Begin the Beguine) (1982)

José Luis Garci's Volver a Empezar (Begin the Beguine) is a sad, charming story about a dying man. It's also very simply told. The film is a kind of tribute to people whose lives were interrupted by World War II, who left Spain and never came back. A generation – as the film says at the very end – whose lives were interrupted. I quite liked it.

Perhaps most improbably, of the 13 films that were nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s – films by Pedro Almodóvar, Carlos Saura, Luis Buñuel, Francisco Rovira Beleta, and Jaime de Armiñán – this is the only film that won the award.

Two other Garci films were nominated for Oscars (Sesión Continua and Asignatura Aprobada), and I've managed to get my hands on subtitled bootleg copies of these movies recently, so I am sure I will watch them soon.

P.S. I have no explanation at all for this rainbow on the poster. Volver a Empezar is not a film about rainbows or floods or peace or homosexuality.