Oliver Laxe says he likes broken people. "They have cracks through which light passes," he explains. He also states that when he rolls he always has a cross in mind. Not for religious, but for precise. On the horizontal axis, he argues, there would be what belongs to causality, to the story, to the physical, to emotion. The vertical, on the other hand, is what calls the static sensations, the artistic ones. "The really difficult and interesting thing is to remain right in the center, where the two axes intersect," he says and continues: "The authors tend to despise emotions. And that is because we confuse them with the excitations, which is a bit what makes that cinema of the distraction and destruction that surrounds us and that works like the industrial bakery. Everything is sugar. There is an obsession to have the viewer permanently excited. But excitement is something that goes fast. As it goes up, it goes down. We have prejudices towards emotions and I think we must abandon them. Now, after three films, I understand that if through emotion I block reason, I get the images to come more naturally to the viewer ».
What burns or, better, O that burns , the third film of the Galician director with Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes, arrives at the Reina Sofía in Madrid after traveling with a step, but firm, that time has called commercial circuit. In his deeply ambitious film modesty he already has more than 50,000 not so much spectators as believers. Spanish cinema has in this film its particular discovery. And secret. It is cinema that, without a doubt, dazzles. It is cinema against uprooting. It is cinema that seeks, and faith that finds, recognition. It is cinema that wants to be first of all a return home. «If it's not rude, I'm going to get a little religious. The human being has a great tear at birth. Just then there is a love vacuum that each one covers in his own way. Clinically it is called neurosis. The way of an artist is very evident: you make movies to like, so that they love you. And what is worth to me, is definitely worth the character of my movie, ”says the director.
Indeed, and to situate ourselves, O that burns is the story of a return. Benedicta, now an octogenarian, receives his son Amador who comes out of jail with an assertive "You will be hungry." Without dramatism, as if time had not passed, as if they did not live, the two, buried by the years of condemnation, one on top of the other, because he set the forest on fire. Amador is what the press calls with the arsonist name of arsonist. In his own way, that man, pure uprooting, drags all the blame of a time and a life that disappears. The causes of fires are many. Almost as many as the guilt. But he, in his silence, owns them all. "If they make you suffer, it's because they suffer too," says the mother. They humiliate him because maybe everyone lives humiliated.
Laxe says that what has rooted him most, what has made him feel the weight of the earth, is to hear his grandparents talk about the tragic chapters of his life: death, hunger, emigration ... «Every summer, my Parents, who were porters in Paris, brought us to the town where my movie takes place. It was the Middle Ages. In a good way. People breathed a dignity, a sovereignty, a nobility, an acceptance, a detachment ... A sovereign submission. And that has always accompanied me. I remember crying a lot at school. It was very fragile, ”he says. It is not clear if he talks about the movie, about him, about the character or about everything at the same time. He speaks without qualms, without fear of the disproportionate gestures of each of his sentences. There is no irony, no imposture, maybe yes, innocence, but conscious. So, it is no longer innocence.
Around the two characters, mother and son, the director composes an elegiac, almost apocalyptic portrait, "a dry melodrama" , as the director likes to say, about the power of purification of the flames. The flames end everything in the same way that they announce the need for a completely new time. His saving virtue coincides exactly with his capacity for condemnation. The same fire that mortifies sinners enlightens cigars. And so. The film surprises in its simplicity for everything complex that it hides. Each plane evokes a thousand ways of speaking; Each story hides the entire story of humanity. If in Todos vós sodes capitáns , his 2010 film premiered in the Directors' Fortnight of Cannes, rehearsed a trip to the very sense of the image of the hand of a teacher and his student filmmakers, now the image itself is offered as an invitation at the bottom of all possible mysteries. After all, that's what it's all about: touching the very skin of mystery. And burn with him. In the same way, O that burns rises against many of Mimosas ' findings, his next film and awarded at Critics' Week also in Cannes. If that was an outward adventure, towards the Moroccan Atlas, it is inward; deep into a world that fades away.
The film is attended by four shootings distributed between summer, winter and the wild capture of fire. And in the middle, the prodigious photograph of Mauro Hercé . What is seen is the illuminated result of a fieldwork at the very edge of the flames and, at times, it would be said that even within them. The film burns as much as it burns. But if something distinguishes it is the thunderous silence of each of its protagonists. More, despite being in the background, hers than his. Benedicta is Meryl Streep, but in good. «The two are broken and the light is visible through his body. Although, really, the light is a veil and, at times, it is she who does not let you see anything, ”says Laxe and, let's admit it, mislead. But it was Benedict we were talking about. «Yes, it is hers and theirs. Women are more connected to the world and the earth than men. They are more sovereign because they love above all, ”he reflects, stops and continues:“ I trust women and let myself be carried away by them. We are in a moment of radical investment of values. I am convinced that we must feminize the look. And that means that the urgent thing is to prepare the viewer not to understand the works of art but to feel them. Art is female because it is not a straight language. It has no angles or even light. The feminine energy is the ambiguous, the exoteric, the subtle. The feminine is the world of subtle shadows and the masculine, of material shadows. We live in the empire of light, in the empire of meaning, and I don't know if this decline can be redirected. The mission of art and cinema is to recover that energy that is feminine or not ». And there, for now, leave it.
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