No News From God at 25: Díaz Yanes' Heaven and Hell Comedy Still Lands
Heaven has a numbers problem. Hardly anyone passes the entrance exam any more, intake has dried up, and management is close to writing the whole century off. Hell has the opposite trouble, which is overcrowding. Then a woman on Earth prays for her son, a boxer with a bad past and a head injury that could kill him, and both head offices scramble a field agent to go get him.
That is the whole engine of Sin noticias de Dios, which Agustín Díaz Yanes released in 2001 and which almost nobody outside Spain seems to have watched since. It deserves better.
The best joke is in the production design
Heaven is shot in black and white. It looks like a slightly out-of-date Paris, everyone speaks French, and the angels amuse themselves with musical numbers. Hell is in colour, the entrance looks like the turnstiles at a football ground, the official language is English, the food is junk, and somebody is always starting a fight over nothing. Earth speaks Spanish and has forgotten both of them.
You can read that however you like. Díaz Yanes doesn’t underline it, which is why it works. He just builds the two places, puts a camera in them, and lets you notice that the afterlife has been divided up along the lines of an old cultural argument about which civilisation won.
Heaven’s operation is run by Fanny Ardant, with Gemma Jones on the other side of the ledger, and the two of them play it like rival agency directors rather than like deities. Gael García Bernal turns up as Hell’s manager, working his own angle. Victoria Abril goes in as Lola Nevado, Heaven’s best operator, under cover as the boxer’s wife. Penélope Cruz follows as Carmen Ramos, Hell’s answer, under cover as the cousin.
It’s a spy film wearing a theology costume
This is the thing most reviews missed at the time. The heaven-and-hell comedy has a long shelf of respectable ancestors, and every one of them plays the supernatural for warmth. Díaz Yanes plays it for tradecraft.
Lola and Carmen behave like case officers. They have legends to maintain, handlers who lie to them, a target who has no idea what he is worth, and a deadline set by a brain scan. Neither of them trusts her own side, and with good reason, because the more interesting treachery in this film is internal. Two agents circling each other in a cheap apartment, each one waiting for the other to break cover, is a scene you could lift straight out of a Cold War picture. That it is being played by an angel and a demon over a washed-up fighter’s soul is the gag, and the film never winks at you about it.
Cruz has the harder job and does it well. Carmen was a male gangster before Hell converted her into a waitress as punishment, so Cruz is playing someone who moves like a man, thinks like a criminal, and is furious about the body she has been assigned. Abril is the counterweight, elegant and slightly chilly, doing the job of a professional who has been at it for centuries. Her turn at “I Want to Be Evil” is the film’s best five minutes and belongs in a much more famous movie.
Where it goes slack
Many Chávez, the boxer, is the hole in the middle. Demián Bichir is fine, but the part is written as a prize rather than a person, and every minute the film spends on his fights and his debts is a minute away from the two women. When the plot turns in the last third and starts servicing a conspiracy inside Hell’s management, the tension drains out of it. At nearly two hours it has maybe twenty minutes of slack, most of it late.
The critical reception reflected that. Abroad, reviewers mostly found the premise too pleased with itself and the laughs too thin to carry it. Spanish critics were warmer but not uniformly so. The awards it did collect came from home.
None of that has aged as well as the film has. What survives is the tone, which is dry, and the two central performances, which are doing something genuinely strange: playing eternal beings as tired professionals stuck in middle management. Twenty-five years on, the idea that the afterlife would be run by underfunded agencies with falling numbers and dishonest bosses reads less like whimsy and more like reportage.
Find it. It’s odd, it’s confident, and there is nothing else quite like it.