Criticism: Karra Elejalde, the best of the neat and rigid 'While the war lasts' of Amenábar

• Interview with Amenábar. "The current Spain is what Franco devised"
• Zinemaldia.The return of the Civil War

While the war lasts it is in its own way, and from the same title, a provocation. In addition to a calculated contradiction. The war, in effect, still lasts. And what we have left, Alejandro Amenábar tells us in his last film presented at the San Sebastian Festival. The flags of now are those of then; the doubts, the same, and the wounds remain unhealed on the side that bleeds the most . It is cinema that makes history, but that does not hide its vocation for controversy and, above all, for the present. Let's say that the director's strategy is quite similar to that already used in Ágora . Then, it was about portraying the conflict between insurgent fanaticism and an entire library, that of Alexandria, which was falling apart. Now, it is the university, that of Salamanca in the voice of its rector Miguel de Unamuno, that has to render accounts before the imminent barbarism .

The director says that he has prepared the film conscientiously and that he has written it in conscience. And indeed, and as is the norm in his cinema, devotion to detail and a taste for leisurely and elegant narrative can do everything. The film, as is well known, tells everything that preceded the verbal outbreak of Unamuno (winning is not convincing) in the Salamanca paraninfo on the Day of the Race of 1936. The idea is to get as close as possible to everything what paradoxical, anomalous and brutal had that episode . After all, few characters in recent history so close to the contradiction, so chaotic in their convictions, as a man capable of declaring himself socialist, evangelist, liberal, father of the Republic and champion of the uprising without a solution of continuity.

And indeed, and by the hand of the always volcanic Karra Elejalde, the film moves forward recreating everything that moment had, again, contradicted. Unamuno supported the coup d'etat and then, for whatever reason or no reason, condemned him. And that is where the knot of a tape that lives happily in the almost indiscernible aporia of the country that draws is resolved. While the war lasts , it thus manages to be perfectly consistent in its description of incoherence. And it is for his fascinated look at a time that is recreated with such precision and so vividly that it would be said today.

Well it is true, and the bad news arrives, which, at times, gives the impression that the director can bear the weight of responsibility. And here the parallels with Agora reappear. As then, the self-imposed obligation of not separating one millimeter from the facts or, better, from the faithful recreation of what that had to be, numbs the narrative pulse far more than desirable. The story, especially in the excessively long introduction and presentation of the facts and the characters, is numbed in a kind of tableaux vivants that in their less successful moments remind the sad compositions of a wax museum . Nor do the melodramatic touches recreated with a sort of dreamlike flashbacks help . Neither that nor the magical-tragic-origami resource that, supposedly and in the Amenábar version, forced the writer to say what he said.

Without Karra Elejalde, all of the above would be an almost complete challenge. But the certainty of how the actor reconstructs his very particular Unamuno subjugates. In his skin, the character's more certain egolatry explodes and is sometimes madness, another outrage, at times tenderness and always the certainty of an archetype (that's what it is, a thought scheme that transcends times and identities) perfectly alive . Good for him. And by Eduard Fernández in the skin of a chaplain and violent Millán-Astray. And for Santi Prego become a Franco so close to the common that it ends up being too scary.

Be that as it may, that vocation is imposed by drawing parallel lines between what was that and what is this. And here, as in the Inland Sea , Amenábar's sensibility and hearing is appreciated and appreciated so that, again, reading and touching what hurts us most . Yes, the euthanasia of Ramón Sampredo was a necessary matter and the Civil War, that which never ends, too. Silence is never a strategic resource or a political reason, it is always an imposition. And it is against that imposture against which it rises While the war lasts .

Stellar feminism

For the rest, the official section continued its dialogue with reality, ours, but from positions (in the exclusively geographical sense) so far apart from each other that they would say they were opposed. To talk about feminism, Alice Winocour went to outer space, and to describe the perfidy of the capitalist system that devours us, David Zonana preferred not to move from his native Mexico. Next is about a female astronaut on the way to Mars (or almost). Of that, and how hard it is to float in a severely macho environment. And Labor takes care of a worker first humiliated by their employers and then by the impossibility of changing anything . And so.

The French Winocour, formerly the director of the hypnotic drama of the Agustine period and of the thriller , which was disordered Disorder (The protector) , now proposes to reflect on issues such as motherhood, responsibility with children or, as has already been said, machismo. The approach of the film seems impeccable: by the hand of a meticulous and very realistic reconstruction of the training of astronauts, the idea is to radiograph those intact power structures that condemn women wherever they are. What is valid for the most vulgar of professions serves the same for the most demanding and sophisticated of them all. And so, Eva Green officiates as a master of ceremonies like the mother and astronaut so abandoned perhaps by her husband as misunderstood by her classmates.

However, and against all odds, Winocour soon decides to change the original direction of the tape to the other side. Much more confusing. Suddenly, Proxima is schematized, abandons the rigor and becomes the punctual description not so much of a state of affairs as of a debatable and very well-rounded melodrama . Pity. Rate, of course, the transparent description of the very Martian world of travelers and space travelers.

Labor , on the other hand, is, in its simplicity, a small miracle. Debuting director David Zonana plays bleak metaphors and, in his game, leaves no choice for anything other than simple despair. A group of workers decides to collect the land they do not receive and converts the luxury house they have been building in their residence. Soon you will see how reality is merciless and cruel; especially against all those who question it. Zonana gets rid of resources and voices and works for reduction. Of each sequence, the essential; of each sentence, the rigorously true . Even the loudest of silences. The result is a small jewel as accurate as millimeter. And even painful. Mercilessly.

And so ended a day so pending of reality that limits us as on a war footing against the silences that condemn it. Here, in Salamanca, in space or in Mexico City.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• movie theater
• culture
• Spanish Civil War

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