In her first feature film, Meritxell Colell delved into aspects of her own family history to build a delicate fiction with an almost documentary tone based on deep silences and contained emotions. The main character of Con el viento was the dancer and choreographer Mónica García, who rushed back from Buenos Aires to her town in Burgos due to her father’s illness. After the death of her father, her mother asks him to stay with her to sell her house. They thus establish a complicated relationship that Colell explored in a story about what the return to origins implies, where the feminine had a generous presence.
In Dúo, which opens this Friday in cinemas after Colell won the award for best director in the Zonazine section of the Malaga festival, García returns to his character to now embark on a tour of the Andes with her partner (Gonzalo Cunill), with whom she represents a very particular dance duo. They are 25 years together sharing and looking for the balance between professional and personal life. But at 4,000 meters of altitude, the Andean desert tests the limits of their relationship in what will be their last tour.
Two bodies so united and at the same time an abyss of distance between them. “The film arose from the desire to continue working with Monica and explore her character, since Con el viento was very hermetic, and I wanted to work with other registers. And I also wanted to explore how one change opens up another change. The fact of how it has affected the life of Monica, 50 years old, having been in the town with her mother and how all this makes her rethink her existence, and hence the couple’s crisis. It seemed very interesting to me to follow someone who has no place in the world. In this sense, travel is a unique space to confront yourself with doubts and crises,” says the director in a conversation with La Vanguardia.
The film takes place on the border between reality and fiction, with García leading the charge and the weight of a relationship that goes from one side to the other, tumbling like their own show, and to which they cling in a body-to-body dance under the promise: “I won’t stop loving what’s left of you”. The camera fearlessly approaches their desires and suffering, their desire to feel alive. The expressiveness of Garcia’s face achieves everything else. His voice sounds almost like a whisper to the viewer as he watches and recalls remote images and landscapes that ooze poetry.
When Colell wrote the first draft of the script, Monica readily agreed. The character of Colate, “who comes from many universes”, is embodied by Gonzalo Cunill, whom the filmmaker fell in love with when he saw him in Àlex Rigola Passolini’s work Who is Me. The actor signed up for the project in 2018 and together with García they did a dance residency. “It has been a very beautiful process because a couple’s memory was generated starting from the body. Both have been very generous,” says the director.
Once again, the landscape plays the leading role in a very sensory story, which connects directly with nature. “Duo works on confinement. I think the film has something claustrophobic, and the landscape is an interior place. An immensity opens up on the silence and the sensations that have to do with the cold, the storms… For me the landscape is always a place that reflects something that happens inside. And that landscape configures a certain way of being in the world”. For Colell, Duo “talks about the end of a relationship, about how to say goodbye, but I was also interested in placing it on the emotional plateau. This correspondence of being suspended in double geographic and emotional space-time seemed powerful to me,” he adds.
The shooting, which was done chronologically, was made up of a team of eleven people – all very familiar – and it was complicated and tiring, despite the emotion of living an adventure. They were caught by the pandemic in the middle of filming. On March 22, 2020, they returned to Barcelona and the film was finished with the material they had recorded. “We had shot a lot of Super 8 in a bid to do documentation tours in an approach with the camera without the actors,” says Colell.
Duo also reflects on cultural traditions, focusing on places where the culture of silence dominates. Thus, we see how during the different places that the protagonists visit to carry out their performances, they integrate with the people and their traditions. “The film works as if by oppositions. On the one hand, the artist’s self against the community. Contemporary art against art that arises from life and fiction is also a reflection of our questioning as filmmakers. No one has asked us to come here to make this film, to dance this Duet. And it seemed interesting to me to see how someone can reconnect with their past through women who take care of the land, who make bread, and who take Monica back to her childhood, with her mother and her grandmother in the town. What life do you want to lead, that of the show or an everyday space from a serene place? She wonders who she is from her stay in the town and it is on this trip that she decides to make a decision that we do not know where it will take her “, says the director, who would like to make a third of Monica’s adventures when she turns 65. “I would love to see her older, with white hair and see what life she has had after all the decisions she has made”,she says expectantly.
Much earlier, Colell’s third feature will arrive, entitled Far from the trees, another story that moves in the vein of her previous works and that will bring her back to the Andes. “It’s about the legacy of exile and uprooting, about loss and grief,” she advances. Life, with all its faces, made into a movie.
