Criticism Zhang Yimou and the dignity of the cheesy inaugurate a decisive San Sebastian Festival
Previous Spanish cinema plays its future at the San Sebastián Film Festival
Volpi Cup Penelope Cruz: "In the street I receive a lot of affection and respect and that is always the case. But then ..."
"I can't even hint at what it was like, because it was a composite of everything that is impure, dreadful, unwanted, abnormal and detestable." The phrase is from Lovecraft in
'The Stranger
' and, with all the prevention that is wanted, manages to illustrate the problem of how to find
a fair representation of the ineffable.
Claude Lanzmann, for example, refused to include any images of the Holocaust in his monumental 'Shoa' convinced that any illustration amounted to little less than a trivialization. When Laszlo Nemes shot 'Son of Saul', the gas chamber scenes are barely out of focus in a narrative that purports to be the point of view of the prisoner tasked with cleaning hell itself.
'
Maixabel
', the film by Icíar Bollaín that recounts the meeting between
Juan Mari Jaúregui's
widow
and the ETA who murdered her husband, all of her lives in this same contradiction, but without ever making it explicit or embracing her;
more dependent on the chronicle than on reflection;
happy is its provocative simplicity. How to tell what by definition does not admit definition? How to describe the forgiveness of an unforgivable act? How to imagine a healing process in which there is no cure? Let's say, and without the intention of trivilizing, that the questions arise spontaneously before the mere exposition of the approach.
The choice of the director seems as correct and meticulous as perhaps scared of the road she travels. Both the script signed with
Isa Campos
and the photograph by
Javier Agirre
without forgetting the calculated (and much less provocative than on other occasions) music by
Alberto Iglesias,
all obey the explicit desire to record, to raise the debate, to illustrate the reality with reality itself. Even the exemplary and wounded interpretations of
Blanca Portillo and Luis Tosar
respond to the urgency of perhaps breaking a taboo. And it is there, in its undeniable opportunity, where the film shows both its greatest virtue and its doubts, its sin and its penance at the same time.
The strategy of the film is always to remain faithful, not to break at any time, the commitment of fidelity that seals with the viewer when it announces that what happens there on the screen is real, that fiction is banished. And from this point of view, Bollaín's work is stitched together with that of his previous films such as '
I give you my eyes
'. And it is undoubtedly appreciated that pact of verisimilitude that, in reality, it is really.
The emotion that permeates each frame is a direct consequence of it.
The problem resides in the same way in that strong notarial will that, directly, rules out the most serious questions that, from another point of view, Lanzmann or Nemes raised.
The film directly renounces to even come close to that which paragraphs above we called ineffable.
The excessively formalistic and orthodox structure guided by an excessively cautious staging leaves completely intact and without asking the most tremendous questions, the deepest doubts, the purest terror.
All conflict is resolved in the gesture of the man or woman who mourns, in the rage of repentance or in the enlightened grace of sacrifice.
But everything is shown with fear.
The fear of being wrong outweighs the risk of going too deep.
It's like the monster is sleeping right on the other side of the screen.
Be that as it may, what remains is a film that appeals to us, viscerally and politically opportune;
a proposal, no doubt, to discuss with her.
That and, make no mistake about it, the infinite emotion of simplicity.
And true.
Terence Davies in his labyrinth
The official section was completed with '
Benediction
', a work that is as huge as it is hurt by Terence Davies to which perhaps ambition and, unlike in Bollaín's film, risk. The director of '
Distant Voices'
now tells in a fractured '
biopic
'
format
the life of the poet
Siegfried Sassoon.
His existential path is narrated from the horror of the Great War to the contradictory and always conflicting acceptance of his homosexuality. The twentieth century is directly unveiled before the viewer's eyes in an extremely elaborate work where the fragments of the writer's memory are recombined on the screen
with the echo of a poisonous poetry of his most intimate pain.
Davies wants it all. The film progresses at the same pace as each of the poet's verses while period images are mixed with the perfect dramatization of an anguished life in each of its contradictions. The film suffers in its excessive effort to match two arguments that, despite the director's efforts, far from embracing each other, end up completing two different films. Much more brilliant is the part that has to do with the search for
salvation of a man
who abhors the horror of his time than that that deals with the melodrama between the sheets of a man who hesitates between obeying passion or allowing himself to be carried away by obedience. Social.
In any case, and at times, '
Benediction
' advances on the screen like a lucid and enlightened dream that calls the same to the exaltation as to the terrifying.
And at the bottom, always, the ineffable.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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