By Salvador Llopart
The moment matters, at the beginning of the seventies. How the place matters: Galicia of lost hamlets and border Portugal. In O como everything is significant: a lost look, a repeated cry of pain or the whisper in a moment of passion. Everything is necessary for Jaimone Camborda, the director, who invites us, in her slow gaze, to notice the details and pay attention to the sounds. Especially from nature itself, where a good part of the story of María takes place, the protagonist of the drama, embodied in a sober and, at the same time, superb way, by the debutante Janet Novás. In its attention to detail, O comono becomes more than just a story about women (for women). Deservedly recognized with the Golden Shell at the recently completed San Sebastián festival, it feels like an elegy for the feminine condition.
It is felt, yes. There are films that have much more to do with music than with narration and this is one of them. The themes of the drama, like the leitmotif in a piece of music, are repeated throughout the narrative: committed motherhood, solidarity between women or the relegated body. Abortion too. They are capital issues, which take on different profiles. Conditioning themes that return transformed again and again throughout the narrative. We perceive it from the beginning, with a long scene of a birth where the midwife and the parturient, both, engage in a kind of joint dance made of silences and waiting as well as howls and suffering. You will give birth in pain, says the biblical sentence. And so we forget the obvious: that in the fact of birth there is also joy. Something that reminds us well of this film of accusations as well as demands.
Novás, the protagonist, is a dancer and choreographer and this is evident in her performance, which is more physical than emotional. Where thought is nuanced by pure movement and the relationship with the environment. The story of María is a story of escape from the modest society of the time and also from the place; a woman who faces, at the same time, the odyssey of reunion with herself. Her journey is worth following closely.
Por Philipp Engel
I admit that I didn’t have it all with me. A brilliant philosopher may not know where or how to place a camera (nor does it take an intellectual to direct a masterpiece). I have also already seen many documentaries and fictions about “the trans issue” to satisfy my curiosity about it, which is not unlimited, simply because it seems good to me that everyone does with their body what they want.
Although Paul B. Preciado’s first film had been unanimously acclaimed at the Berlinale, I went to see it without any great expectations, somewhat indifferent to its political dimension. And I was simply amazed. If the idea of ??a virulent, explosive and pamphleteering device could have crossed my imagination, I immediately encountered a joyful device, as transparent as it is tenderly poetic and inclusive. Not at all uncomfortable or provocative. The philosopher takes Orlando, the transsexual novel that Virginia Woolf published a century ago (recently censored by Vox), and turns what should have been his own “political biography” into a casting call to which all the Orlandos in the world are presented, a endless characters related to the “trans issue” combined in present, past and future.
Displaying imagination and elegance in the management of a limited budget, exhibiting a joyful queer aesthetic à la Kenneth Anger, Preciado’s Orlando can remind us of Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan (I’m not there, 2007), because there are also diverse actors embodied different aspects, or faces, of the singer with the nasal voice. In both cases, which are actually very different, Godard’s influence is palpable, especially in his latest film essays. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, in the scene in which Jenny Bel’Air is denied the right to reserve a hotel room (because she does not look like the photo on her ID), Godard’s ghost appears, telling us left orphans last year. It could be a transfer without a solution of continuity: everything changes, but in a fluid way. In any case, it is a film made from love, and it shows
By Jordi Batlle Caminal
A Spanish comedy of a higher level than usual (nothing to do with the vulgarity of the recent Amigos hasta la muerte or La ternura), whose premise, not being particularly original, is developed and expanded with ingenuity and skill, ensuring that every five minutes new things and that the rhythm does not falter. Distribution in a state of grace, both the chapter of the protagonists and that of the secondary ones. And what to say about the enormous Rellán? His mere presence is already a gift.
Por Philipp Engel
It could remain an average thriller about a motivated police officer in the fight against a global network of worldwide pedophilia, with its moments of tension and some memorable character (the disturbing Yessica Borroto), in a rarefied atmosphere mixed with depressing solemnity. But Jim Caviezel ends up breaking the fourth wall with a murky message that convinces us that what we have just seen is a vehicle for the conspiracy of the American extreme right, which we are not willing to swallow anyway.
Por Philipp Engel
The director of United States of Love (2022), among others, provides an extreme cinematographic experience, and not only because of an elongated panoramic format for the occasion. The story takes place in the interiors of buildings that, due to their decrepitude, are reminiscent of Tarkovsky and, due to their wallpaper, of Kubrick. Although it doesn’t have many handles: a woman takes care of her terminally ill son, who expresses himself with howls of pain. Visually fascinating, and with excellent actors, he goes with a shocking surprise ending.
By Salvador Llopart
The production – British – is put at the service of Paula Ortiz to evoke the figure of a twilight Hemingway, the protagonist of this adaptation – faithful, even in its flaws – of the penultimate novel by the author who loves adventure and bullfighting. A clichéd and somewhat incoherent Hemingway, then, that the actor Liev Schreiber recreates in the figure of Colonel Cantwell, with nostalgia for lost illusions and melancholy of an impossible love, while walking through Venice in the 1940s. Imminent death colors everything.
By Salvador Llopart
A western, indeed, that takes place at the beginning of the 20th century in the extreme south of Chile and Argentina. Of open spaces, as beautiful as they are desolate. A story of extermination and violence, with an undoubted poetic breath in its images. Although their characters are at times hieratic and predictable, like a spaghetti western taken seriously. Gálvez Haberle looks askance at both Tarkovsky and John Ford, and comes up with a dry, dark and poisonous adventure. Slow cooking and difficult digestion.
