Five years after Black Hollow Cage, the director Sadrac González-Perellón returns to the official section of the Sitges Festival with Asombrosa Elisa, a drama with fantastic and disturbing overtones divided into five chapters and with three stories with a common link that premieres in commercial theaters this Friday.
The beginning presents us with a serious girl who responds to her interlocutor -off-screen- that she is not afraid of being hurt. Elisa is convinced that she has superpowers, just like the protagonist of the comic that she adores, a young woman with a cape and always accompanied by her rottweiler. But the knife does not end up bending and the teenager is injured in her arm. Her father (Iván Massagué) worries about her, although Elisa insists that the accidental death of her mother must be avenged.
On the other hand, Úrsula (Silvia Abascal) is a bitter woman who is in a wheelchair. She is married to a painter who is played by Asier Etxeandía. It soon becomes clear that the marriage is not working. Abascal’s performance has fascinated the contest with a most disturbing composition that points to a prize. “It’s a very special animal. A pressure cooker. As soon as I started reading the script and with the first sequence of Úrsula with the shoes I already connected. I really wanted it. In theater I do work in greater darkness, but in cinema they don’t usually offer me characters like that and I really liked what this woman has to go through,” the actress told La Vanguardia.
The fact of acting together with Etxeandía, of whom she is a great friend and with whom she had not yet worked, was another point in favor. “I admire her and for the film we worked together that the marriage in the past was very close and had a lot of sexual activity. She was a very empowered woman who seduced even the stones and, suddenly, she is sitting in a wheelchair. Her husband He hasn’t touched her since then and he’s very bitter.”
Abascal believes that the chair is the throne of his character, who even crosses his legs. “To work the deadlift from the waist down, I needed to dance sitting down on the set before and after the day. I wanted to represent that Úrsula had a lot of fire inside her even though she was so cold.”
The actress immediately fell in love with her role and didn’t mind doing some pretty crude and explicit scenes. “When I get into a character, I’m him,” says the 43-year-old performer, who is not a fan of genre films and who sets foot in Sitges for the first time. “As a spectator and actress, I like to work on the human mind in films. I would love to be able to work on something very complex, which Úrsula is already working on, but taken to a more terrifying extreme. The day things don’t challenge us, this is over,” he says with a big smile.
Abascal also presents the García series at the contest, where he plays “corrupt politics” and argues that he is not very prolific on the big screen “because there are not many proposals and those that come to me, not because it is cinema, I need to do it. If I get a script that’s neither good nor bad and I have to go away for two months and reconcile as a mother, it doesn’t compensate me. But if something interesting comes along, I jump, especially if they are characters that are the furthest from me. I feel that everyone we have infinite colors inside, I have my cold, my clown, my queen and it’s like getting to take out what I don’t allow myself “.
About the platforms, he feels that “on the one hand they are very positive and enriching but on the other hand they accommodate the viewer to not go to the movie theaters”. Eleven years after suffering a stroke, Abascal bluntly affirms: “I am very aware that reality can change today overnight. That is why I savor the day to day and stop bullshit.”
González-Perellón states that just as in his first film, the protagonist is a girl who has lost her mother in an accident. A fixation? “I never knew my father, my mother and grandmother raised me” that’s why in my movies I kill the mother so that the father stays and that’s how I imagine how parents do things. “Amazing Elisa’s script was written a few years ago seven years, before Black hollow cage, and being in Spanish “it was more difficult to get financing, that’s why I recycled the script and first did Black hollow cage. I didn’t think I would ever get to shoot it”, says the director. The story starts from “feeling that when you lose someone that trauma you have to transform it into something. Elisa reads a comic that she loves and she thinks she’s like the superhero Beatriz.”
The Madrid director hates superhero movies, but in his film it is an element that is interesting. “Believing that he has superpowers, he thought that a psychotic preteen might think that she can stand up for others and the people she loves.” Jana San Antonio, the girl who plays Elisa, saw her when she was 9 years old, “it was a long casting”, and she was surprised by her maturity.
That the film is divided into chapters has its origin in a piece of advice that Sadrac asked Tarantino when he saw him at a party: “you put chapters on any shitty movie and it’s already cool,” the creator of Pulp fiction told him. For the role of Úrsula, she had Abascal in mind from the beginning, “I fell in love with her seeing her in Pepa y Pepe” and “since she has a sweetness and is so special, I thought she would have to give her a twist. In addition, all the ideas that brought to the role I loved them”. More than a genre film, he maintains that his is akin to auteur cinema, “but if you want to tell a story that may not have reached a certain audience, because they don’t like a normal drama, it’s important to wrap a little your film of that so that it draws attention”.
He confesses that he loves involving the viewer in his stories and playing with them, “with a point of confusion” and with characters that are intertwined with each other and scenes that the viewer knows when they are already started. He will soon get involved in another project, Rewind, a “more commercial and with a different rhythm” thriller.
