Synopsis
Cadaqués is a little white village at the northern edge of Spain's east coast, not far from the French border. The public at large knows it as ‘the village where Dali had a house’. Cadaqués can only be reached by a narrow mountain road from Rosas that runs past steep cliffs. And between November and April, the tramontana (the ‘wind from across the mountains’) blows there almost ceaselessly. A mythical and raging wind that quite literally drives some people mad, and is said to drive others to suicide. The people of the village seem to divide the year not into days and months, but into the number of times the tramontana rears its head. And in Cadaqués, superstition has it that one becomes ‘a few years older’ each time the tramontana blows. People get depressed without knowing why – en when they get depressed connoisseurs say: ‘It is the tramontana, it will be here in a few hours.’ Other people get physically ill; in earlier days intestine gripes reared its head shortly after the tramontana dropped. Some inhabitants talk about the tramontana as if it concerns an ‘evil woman without whom life makes no sense.’
The tramontana wind takes us to the story of the 64 year old widower and leftish Pepet Tremolls who had a secret and dramatic relationship with the 18th year old Rosa Campos de Amor, a young woman from the village. On Christmas Eve Pepet Tremolls commits suicide. When the people of Cadaqués leave church at midnight, they find the streets covered with snow and see a strange dummy covered in snow hanging on the balcony of a house. Only the next day people find out it is Pepet Tremolls. Years later, during a bingo game evening in the local Bar Casino, ‘number 24’ is referred to as ‘Pepet Tremolls’. People laugh. In the back of the bar, four men hear the name of Tremolls and begin reconstructing the story of his and Rosa Campos de Amor. But as the truth is covered by the dust of time, all the four men can do is to use their imagination and each one of them tells a different version.
Was Rosa Campos de Amor a local vamp who drove Pepet Tremolls mad, with his suicide as a result, because of the relations she maintained with other men from the village? Did she clean his house, or was she his model? Was Pepet assassinated by Federico Costa, Rosa’s supposed lover? Or was Pepet Tremolls himself a possessive and jealous old man? Then it appears that the four men themselves have played a dramatic part in the whole story. In the end, just like a picture that is enlarged to much, the story blurs and falls apart in pieces.
But the film consists out of more than just the story-line: TRAMONTANA will show us the wind visually. There won’t be an image without the wind blowing through it. The film is based on rhythm of image, sound, framing and the physical properties of the phenomenon it will depict. Beauty and sense will be realised by combining these means of style.