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Viggo Mortensen

(New York, 1958) compensates for his facility for languages ​​with a "stubborn" determination (the adjective is his) to speak slowly.

Much.

It would seem that this multiplies by two each of the seven languages ​​that he dominates.

For him this year is the

which, in its own way, is also worth two.

The anomaly of the pandemic situation left him as the only candidate and, in addition, the most anticipated of all.

All the circumstances pointed and even forced it.

He lives in Spain, which makes travel easy, and made his directorial debut at almost 62 years of age.

But there is more.

As soon as you look at yourself as slowly as the rhythm that your quiet diction marks, '

', that's what his film is called, deals with, with unusual precision, precisely what happens to us.

In reality, if the pandemic has shown one thing, it is that all the movies, all the books, and all the songs talk about it.

They have always done it even though we didn't know it.

But in this case, more.

The double.

"My movie," says the actor who is also a

and now he is also a

"speaks of the fear of growing old that is also the fear of being alone and the fear of getting sick. If the pandemic has done something, it is to make us more aware of the vulnerable situation in which the elderly find themselves. Of this and that

. We must accept others and learn to forgive others and yourself ".

Amen.

Indeed, '

' is about that.

The story of a family presided over by a

violent, macho, misogynistic and voracious

father

guides a reflection on issues ranging from the sense of fatherhood to the weight of inheritance through forgiveness, acceptance or simply the love.

"I want to believe", continues the director who in the film reserves the role of son for him, "that what you see in my film is also a microcosm of today's society. As in '

', in today's world

And I'm not just talking about Spain. It's a world situation. "

Dramatic pause.

And he continues:

First they create problems with their simple and crazy proposals, and then they offer to solve what they have. created with absurd formulas. It is time to decide if we want to have political leaders who are carried away by

or leaders who want to do collective work. "

And there, for the moment, he leaves it.

Before reaching the address, Viggo Mortensen can boast of having been through everything.

Through all forms of cinema and even through all the countries from Denmark to the United States through Argentina, Spain and Canada (where he has shot '

').

In Mortensen they converge from the evidence of one of the greatest 'blockbusters' that cinema has given (

) to its most combative refutation.

It was to become world famous in his role as

and, immediately afterwards, he turned his career and filmography into one of the most peculiar, as well as brilliant, artistic and personal investigations of the new screen.

"From

[the director of the Middle Earth saga] I learned to solve problems. He only created an industry in New Zealand and I never saw him give up any of the infinite difficulties that he ran into," he says and hence the thanks at the end of '

'.

He says that despite the fact that '

always appears first in his biofilmography

(Peter Weir, 1985), it actually started earlier.

"I used to tell my mother that I was in

by Woody Allen and

by Jonathan Demme, but she was convinced that I was in New York doing nothing. I went to the cinema to see the films and there it was nowhere to appear. But I worked on them even though it is not in the credits, "he comments slowly.

Extremely leisurely.

Be that as it may and despite Tolkien's success and far from bowing to the whim of a Hollywood that ran to elevate him as one of their own, Mortensen has turned his career since 2003, the year of the '

, into his own investigation.

Very own.

With

, whom you became a prtctologist in his film, he shot the trilogy

and '

, three films built from the most confusing, hurtful and brutal subconscious.

In fact, in the last of them it was his turn to give life to Freud.

', directed by

, made him the bleak image of the immediate future just as bleak envisioned by

In '

', by the Argentine Lisandro Alonso, he lent himself to portray the limits of everything civilized from the borders of cinema itself.

And, again, it is there, at the exact limit of himself and of everything limited where he is best.

His return to prestigious cinema, the one that is awarded at festivals, is full of sweet finds such as

or

his last two Oscar nominations.

The first was for Aragorn.

And all this without forgetting his whispering '

', by Agustín Díaz Yanes, from which, by the way, he will receive the Donostia Award.

He tells of his adventure as a director that he comes from afar.

'

' has been shot on the second attempt and after so many different projects they have fallen by the wayside.

"

" he says in a rare and slow mixture of sayings from here and there.

"But I do not regret anything.

. Besides, debuting so late has allowed me to avoid many mistakes that I would surely have made if I had started earlier," he says in a clear example that his is the art of slowness.

He refuses to acknowledge that the story of his film is his own.

But right after the denial, the closest thing to recognition appears.

"It is the portrait of a generation. Although there was love, there was a way of understanding masculinity that had to do with something inflexible,

in the face of new times that are experienced as a threat ", he affirms in the closest thing to a definition of heteropatriarchy perhaps.

"The mother is the moral axis of '

'", concludes by way of '

' which is also a moral both inside and outside the cinema.

Viggo says he will continue directing.

He says it slowly.

62 years has been taken for his first film.

Quite a compliment to the slowness.

says emphatically at the end and it is not clear what he means.

But welcome is the message, the Donostia Award and 'Fallíng', an unbeatable, brilliant and tumultuous debut.

And slow.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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