• Penelope Cruz. "I appreciate my family not laughing at me when I told them I wanted to be an actress"
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  • Javier Bardem. "Climate denial can only be understood from evil or ignorance"
  • Donald Sutherland. "The attitude of the UN on the environment is crap"
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Novalis, the romantic, said that only when you feel absolutely you think with absolute clarity. Carlos Gurméndez, the philosopher, spoke of the sense of feeling, of sentimentality. And Daniel Sánchez Arévalo , the filmmaker, strives, one step further, to reconstruct the mechanism of emotion from within and without complexes. He does it in Seventeen , presented out of competition in the official section of San Sebastian.

The film means the return of its director to the cinema after seven years writing novels, shooting ads and, surely, making money. But also, and this is what counts, it represents a challenge to all the complexes associated with feeling (and even sentimentality) and a good part of his previous work from clarity, beauty and, again, emotion.

The director says he likes movies in which people are reborn . He quotes Alexander Payne's Nebraska , and runs as an example the adventure of an old victim of a scam. Composing a story has to do with the reconstruction of the characters that inhabit it.

Seventeen tells the story two brothers who are reunited. Or they just run away. The little one runs away from the reformatory in search of the dog he has taken care of for months. The older one runs behind. "What impressed me and still amazes me," says the director, "is that right after your 18th birthday, the consequences of your actions are dramatically aggravated . Just a moment." Indeed, just one minute separates a mischief from a felony. The Criminal Code says so.

Sánchez Arévalo says that the first impulse for a movie is always passion or, if one is apprehensive, the fear of losing it. He also says that he is interested in the worlds and families that fall apart because his own existence invites him to reassemble everything again. He also says that fiction is the best of therapies; suffering from anxiety attacks since the age of 16; that if Cousins was a response to a sentimental break, this is the need to rethink. And while he speaks, he describes with precision and in an involuntary way the most intimate mechanism of both his way of creating in general and of the tape that occupies him in particular: all of them focused on the urgent need to give reason and sense of passion, of pure passion.

The film is resolved on the road until you find not only the dog of the maras ('Sheep' is called) but, as we said, with the same sense of feeling. There is an explicit will to flee the spiral universe that shaped the motley architecture of films such as Cousins , Gordos or Azuloscurocasinegro . The idea is to minimize, compose from within. But not everything can be so simple. As the film progresses, the stories bifurcate , the genres get confused and the drama acquires the human touch of simple comedy. The relevant thing is, again, the very texture of the feeling.

It was Spinoza who said that "we don't want things because they are good, but they are good because we want them". And he affirmed it with the idea of ​​offering a life program in which passions were not considered vices, but forces to enhance or diminish the action. We must understand the power of affections and soul to moderate them, he told us. Well, and with the proper distance, there is placed Seventeen , a tape determined to be a meticulous treatise on the passions in which the emotion of the narrative merges with the mechanism that moves it inside. So sensory and physical in its appearance and presentation, as reflective in each of its arguments.

The film would have neither the strength, nor the sense, nor the feeling, nor the sense of the feeling that it has without its protagonists. Biel Montoro and Nacho Sánchez are neither Quim Gutiérrez nor Raúl Arévalo nor Antonio de la Torre. That is, they do not belong to the insistent cast that has presided over the director's filmography. They are others as another is the movie. And they are with all the consequences and the brightest of clarities .

The result in a tape that strives for simplicity with the same complexity that describes it. It is definitely, with Novalis, of being able to feel absolutely to understand absolutely. And so.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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