Rodrigo Sorogoyen: "Love is a tool to save yourself"

It was John Cage who in his best known and parodied piece even imposed four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence on the audience. 4'33 '' , as it is entitled, can be interpreted on any instrument and, if necessary, by anyone. The musician sits and on the score reads Tacet . Nothing else. After a moment of forced bewilderment, the spectator is forced to stop at the awkward roughness of his own mutism. And so on to draw with tragic and comic precision at the same time the deep meaning of everything that is missing, of each of the absences that perhaps define us. Madre , by Rodrigo Sorogoyen (presented these days at the Seville European Film Festival), shares that temptation by emptiness with the avant-garde composer's work . In fact, it is the loss, the loss of a child, the one who presides over everything and the one that modulates the pulse of a film that essentially runs away. Silent.

«I could not say what the motivation was. Perhaps the requirement to do something different from everything done so far, perhaps the need to work with actress Marta Nieto [her partner] or, why not, the obligation to make a film about my mother ... I am a son only single mother ” , says the former director of violently energetic films like God forgive us or The kingdom. And it does so to locate the origin of the production that after presenting this weekend at the Seville Festival arrives next Friday to the screens.

Be that as it may, the origin is easily found in the short film of the same Goya-winning title and Oscar candidate that locks in a little more than 20 minutes the panic of a mother. It is a single plane sequence. And in it, the main character seeks in his despair and horror the ghost of his son who asks for help on the phone. That first sequence is exactly the start of the film. Then, the film takes a leap of years forward. The woman now lives alone in France, in the Landes on the shore of the Atlantic, in the exact place that the child disappeared and with him everything else. The idea is to place Marta Nieto's character next to her absence, her silence, her most intimate loss. And there, as in Cage's piece, stop at what we might call the synesthetic property of the absence. What color it has, how it smells, how much it weighs, what it flees from.

"Spain seems obsessed with forgiveness. There is a Spain that does not forgive and another that does not want to ask for forgiveness"

Sorogoyen says that, in effect, all the work of realization rests on the will to portray that emptiness that, in reality, is not such. It is a place full of issues such as pain, the feeling of guilt, the sense of motherhood and the distant possibility of forgiveness that does not come. At the rhythm of a rare and magnetic binary rhythm, the camera moves between long and nervous planes shot with steadycam , that is, with a camera sewn to the operator's body capable of reproducing any movement almost liquidly, without vibration; and static and distant planes that place the central character in the middle of probably nowhere. The steps stop listening. On the one hand, the nervousness of a resurrected memory, on the other the ghostly and inert presence (or absence) of a protagonist who is known dead in life, just a specter. What matters is weightlessness, the lost gaze of a huge actress who, when walking on the beach, the reverberation of the sun makes her silhouette disappear; of an actress who, in her thinness, bleeds from pain.

And suddenly, the light. Indeed, the film, far from abandoning itself to the guilty and hypnotic pleasure of the murky, imagines itself happy and healing. An adolescent of an age similar to the one that the lost son would have had at that moment crosses the path of the protagonist. What first is obsession, then wants to be more. Or simply something different. And if, in spite of everything, self-forgiveness was possible? The film always asks in silence. "I imagine," Sorogoyen takes the word again, "that is what it is; of love as the only tool to be saved, to heal ... What is still a very intimate issue, but political at the same time. Not in vain, right here we live drowned by the consequences of a Spain that does not forgive and another that refuses to ask for forgiveness. Everything sounds very Christian ». And at this point he laughs.

As always in the Sorogoyen cinema, the film wants to be a sensory and tactile journey to the drive of the image. "I imagine that whoever wants to see contact points between what was done before and now, but what prompted us to Isabel Peña [scriptwriter of each of her projects] and to me was just the will to do the opposite," he says. The opposite has led him to work in a co-production regime with France and to move away from the reductionist scheme between comedy and the thriller to which Spanish cinema seems doomed. «It gives the impression that we have lost that cinema about what happens to normal people that is, in some way, the body of any cinematography. I do not know if it is cinema of the middle class or the middle class of a cinema that is neither genre cinema nor author cinema in its narrowest sense, ”he says. Now, another twist, Sorogoyen struggles in the filming of a television series that attends the name of Riot and that will be seen from September in Movistar. «The current situation in Catalonia has made it more desirable to know what we are going to tell. Well, for a long time these policemen have been seen as beasts and no, they are people, ”he reflects.

Back to Mother, there is a film that is defined in each of its absences and contradictions; a movie that, like 4'33 '' , is heard in silence. Everyone's Darkly lit or glowing turbid. As you like.

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