On a rainy night, Nina starts smoking while watching the downpour through the window. She is nervous. She has just arrived at the seaside town she fled at age 15 and she keeps a shotgun in her bag. She has a clear objective: to end the life of Pedro, a famous writer who is honored in the fictional town of Arteire and who ruined her life. The revenge that Nina, the protagonist of the second film by Andrea Jaurrieta (Pamplona, ??1986) is preparing, is served.
Almost three decades have passed since this woman dressed in red and with a contorted face fell in love with this man three times her age and seduced her with his poisoned adventure stories. She, who grew up without a mother and with a father who spent hours at the bar, dreamed of being an actress and went to Madrid to fulfill a dream that left behind a trail of pain.
Jaurrieta, who became known with his acclaimed debut work Ana de día (2018), has been based on the play of the same name with which José Ramón Fernández won the Lope de Vega award in 2003, which in turn adapted ‘La gaviota ‘ by Chekhov, to create a contemporary female western told in two parts, bathed by the overwhelming soundtrack by Zeltia Montes and starring Patricia López Arnaiz and Darío Grandinetti. “José Ramón was my teacher and when I read the work there was something in that story that caught my attention. I started writing the script in 2019, but I had already been adapting it throughout the entire process of Ana by Day. I thought about how I could transfer it to the big screen and in the end I came up with this version of revenge with a final duel and, from there, never better said, everything took off,” explains the Navarrese director to La Vanguardia.
Jaurrieta admits that he has made a “very free” version of Fernández’s text. If the theatrical Nina showed the reunion of three former friends who face their broken illusions and fear of the future, the Nina that emerges from Jaurrieta’s imagination addresses the abuse of male power and the limit of sexual consent in Spain, established in 16 years old. “I lowered Nina’s age in the past to talk about it. I saw in the wound that Nina suffered in these plays something closely related to abuse, but it did not seem to me to be a reason that could generate a desire for revenge. And by lowering her age I already had something much more powerful to add, which is not only those legal limits of consent, but also the moral limits.”
“If he weren’t so charming,” he continues, “she wouldn’t see in him a way to escape from that town. I worked on the issue from that infatuation with her, that horizon that opens up to her through that man,” she says while advocating for men to question her own attitudes and behaviors. ”There is a lack of more self-awareness on the part of men. Everything is very complex and it is the most interesting thing to deal with in films, that it is not all black or white.”
In fact, in the film the predominant color is red, from the clothes the protagonist wears to the blood from the wound, the trauma that has not healed. “It is a color that has very strong symbolic overtones and I think that the film has many symbolic layers and one of them is through color and on the other hand, that reappropriation from the present of that classic cinema, that technicolor,” he points out regarding to a story that pays tribute to cinema itself, from the poster for Johnny Guitar (1954) and a López Arnaiz between Joan Crawford and John Wayne, passing through Nina’s profession as an actress and the tribute to Maribel Verdú as her admired performer.
“There is something of me in that little Nina. I was born in a town and I wanted to be an actress. When I was 14 I wanted to go to Madrid and at 18 I insisted to my parents again. Thank goodness I listened to them and studied audiovisuals as well as dramatic art, but that scene in which she looks at the magazine with the interview with Maribel Verdú and dreams about how she would answer the questions, I did it a lot. When I was a teenager, the star was Penélope Cruz, but when the part of the film was set in the 90s, at that time the icon was Maribel Verdú,” she says.
She speaks wonders about Patricia López Arnaiz, the adult and tormented Nina in the film. She “entered the story before she won the Goya for Ane in 2021 and was involved from the beginning.” The Catalan Aina Picarolo – seen in The House Among the Cactuses – is in charge of the luminous and sensitive version of the young Nina until the sinister character of Grandinetti ends up tearing the smile from her lips.
The film, which hits theaters this Friday after winning the critics’ prize at the Malaga Festival and closing the D’A, also shoots against the complicit silence of the town’s residents, who knew of the relationship between Nina and Pedro . “Those were other times,” Blas, his friend from his youth, answers crestfallen. “She returns with the clear objective of taking revenge on her, but on this return to the town she realizes that the wound was bigger and understands that perhaps that is why she never wanted to return. That is why she is constantly denying who she is until in the end she sees that not only has she been a victim of Pedro but that her complicit silence has also been an attack and that affects us all as a society. Because in these cases where there is a lot of gray in the limits of consent, those that have been justified for many years, many things are questioned, and the victims are questioned. So, sometimes, we prefer to remain silent, look the other way and we are not aware of the pain it has caused,” she says.
For this reason, Jaurrieta sees his protagonist as “a weak character who becomes strong.” A woman who “instead of victimizing herself gathers courage and faces her aggressor and her pain.” And in that empowerment she is someone who “from her wound sets out to take the bull by the horns.” Nina’s director believes that today there are many men like Pedro on the loose. “Since I started writing the film and people have started watching it, there are women and men all the time who have told me crying that something like this or something similar happened to them. And many times there does not need to be a rape or anything that can be reported, but there are many situations of abuse,” says the filmmaker, who concludes honestly: “I don’t have any solution, although through my film I want to talk about the subject.” so that we all question these structures.”
