• Interview.Icíar Bollaín: "It seems very strange to me that someone is not a feminist"

What if the covid, as Shyamalan imagined (or was it Vonnegut?), Was a reaction of the planet's immune system to get rid of the human being, the most harmful of its inhabitants? The Malaga Festival of Spanish and Ibero-American Cinema started on Friday convinced that the American (any of them) may be right. Therefore, you have to adapt and, if necessary, resist. Moreover, there is no other. With no red carpets, with a semi-confined audience, and with the screams of enthusiasts still muted , the strangest festival with fewer films began. And she did it, probably, in the best of ways. 'Rosa's Wedding ' is a moviewith a vocation as an antibody, an accidental vaccine, a happy reunion with what was once called normality and that every second that passes seems more and more absurd.

The film by Icíar Bollaín that was destined to open the contest in March, does so at last, and as if nothing had happened, in the heat of August heatwave. And on that journey through a never ending disaster, one wants to imagine that one gains in depth, in clarity and even in beauty. The film tells the story of a woman determined to oppose the world. Perhaps without knowing it, a reader of ' A Room of My Own', by Virginia Woolf, the protagonist chooses to stop being the slave of others to be the owner of herself and her destiny. If the English woman had enough space to be and live without men or family around (in addition to an annual income of 500 pounds), the Spanish woman has enough to avoid everything that is not her very holy desire to be alone.

Said like that it sounds like a stale self-help manual for angry self-absorbed individualists. And yet nothing to see. Or little to see. Or something to see, but in the best and most festive of senses. Bollaín, from the hand of a Candela Peña more inspired than ever, recovers the intimate, social tone without overpowering and rapturously alive of her best and most identifiable works. Without the effort to square each shot in a perfect political metaphor that has weighed down a good part of her last films, what matters now is the careful description of each of the imperfections of a life by definition imperfect. And even contaminated.

The thread that joins this film with that distant and still brilliant surprise that was ' Hello, are you alone? 'besides being obvious, it provokes a feeling of strange familiarity. Yes, the familiar is now the rare. It has been 25 years since Trini, the character that Peña gave life to next to Silke (do we remember yet?), Longed for a family like breathing and, what things are, now lacks the breath of so many families .

Bollaín manages to place each shot very close to that limit where reality begins to lose its balance. And it vibrates. Or just tremble. The camera moves between the characters determined to join their bodies, their desires. Each sequence obeys a peculiar minimal choreography of common gestures. The immense Nathalie Poza and Sergi López, in the role of the protagonist's brothers, manage to dress as tragedy what, in short, is only comedy. Or vice versa. And they do it like few times before and so perfectly immersed in the ridiculousness that surrounds them that there is nothing left but to laugh, or to run, or to make an appointment for the psychologist. Or all together.

Suddenly, what we called normality seems the most extravagant of impostures. And now, covid through, more than ever. Perhaps this is the vaccine effect: accustoming the body to the rigor of the alien, the strange, the sick. So 'Rosa's wedding' is valid as an antibody. Indeed, the quarantine adds to the general perplexity something more serious.

Brilliant opening therefore and for all for a definitely rare festival; the first of all rare festivals to come.

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