Jonás Trueba debuted yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight in style with Volverás, a comedy full of self-references about a couple -Vito Sanz and Itsaso Arana- who decide to celebrate their breakup with a party after 14 years of relationship. A proposal that discomfits family and friends and that comes from a premise of the protagonist’s own father, played with self-confidence by Fernando Trueba, ultimately the director’s father.
“I don’t feel like I directed it much because he directed it and I had to remind him that I was the director,” Jonás comments with a laugh in his meeting with La Vanguardia. “I really wanted to film my father,” he continues, “because the film was fundamentally born from the desire to have my father on stage, in a small way but in the end it is noticeable. It has been the great challenge of the film, to film him, to make him feel comfortable and so that we could laugh about it. The days of filming with him have been the most fun and I am happy that I dared to put him there and that he also dared,” says the filmmaker. “In some way I wanted him to take charge of it and it has been a good experience for him.”
The play, Jonás’s eighth, has been co-written by six hands between him and his leading actors. “I wanted to make a comedy and also to portray a couple in a state of crisis, the film talks about the midlife crisis. And it was clear that it had to be with Itsaso and Vito because in The August Virgin and You Have to Come To see her they were a couple and it was important to use that previous experience to write with them.” For Arana, participating in the script – he had already done so in The Virgin of August – has been quite a challenge because they have had to “imagine a film made from an occurrence, a kind of paradox and inspired by the classic comedies of the Hollywood of the 50s.”
It could be said that the story is a jumble of experiences that are very close to the protagonists. Arana plays a film director who is in the middle of post-production on a film and Vito is an actor. ”It’s curious because I have always felt that the films we have made together were very personal, they spoke of a vital moment and functioned almost as a kind of self-portrait of our concerns. And in this case, despite seeming to be more autobiographical because it is obvious, I also feel that I have played more of a character than ever,” admits the actress and director, who last year made her debut behind the camera with The Girls Are Fine.
Trueba feels that it is perhaps “our most fictional film, at least we have raised it more from there from the script. He also talks about that confusion that we have with our profession and private life and we wanted to parody that and show the almost schizophrenic side that it can have.”
Volverás, which will be released in theaters on August 30, showcases Trueba’s love for the seventh art. There are nice tributes to Bergman, Truffaut, movies filmed in super 8 and the book The Repetition, by Kierkegaard. Fernando Trueba’s character explains that in countries like Mauritania it is normal for breakups to be celebrated. “Ever since I heard it from my father, I have dared to suggest it to couples of friends and I noticed that it made me uncomfortable, but telling it through the film is like having done it,” says Trueba.
To which Arana responds: ”I have never celebrated it and I don’t know if I would be able to do so, but it seems to me that cinema can sometimes make us better or can present utopias. For a viewer who is in the middle of a breakup, it can give them oxygen in some way and take it with humor.”
From the experience of being in the Fortnight, the filmmaker says he feels “very comfortable” because he does not like competitions and it is a section “more of an exhibition of films that represents values ??of cinema philosophy.” Trueba has premiered four works in France and with The Virgin of August he was nominated in the best foreign film category at the César Awards.
