Isaki Lacuesta presents his candidacy for the Golden Bear with an absorbing reflection on what remains after the Bataclan

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The possibility of death ends any shred of hope or, conversely, simply makes it possible.

Kant's famous dove dreamed of flying faster and more easily if only he could do it without air.

And, as he ended up knowing her and each of the 308 species of columbida that exist, he only became truly aware of the direction of the wind at the first drowning as soon as his wish was granted.

the work by

that follows his brand new Golden Shell

all of it lives in the certainty of the intimate and hidden obviousness of life, of what is called normality.

"The question is: Do they need to shoot us for us to realize what really matters to us?", commented the director as soon as they gave him the floor.

And in his perfectly rhetorical and quilled questionnaire, the very meaning of a film as

On Monday, the film was presented at this strange Berlinale as a prelude to the landing in Berlin of Spanish cinema (Tuesday is the turn --attentive, very attentive-- of Carla Simón) and, from her hand, came the first certain possibility of a Golden Bear. '

makes foot in

.

He was at the Bataclan the day of the attack.

He left the concert hall on foot where about 90 people were riddled with bullets.

He wanted none of his blood-stained memory to be lost and, as soon as he got home, he began to write, convinced that the passage of time was his enemy.

He refuses to be defined as a survivor for the simple reason that his intention is only to live, to recover life or, in pigeon terms (which are also Kantian), to feel the temperature of the air again.

Simply.

Well, the film, rather than just tracing the intention and meaning of González's story, completes it, orders it and gives it meaning.

Even more.

The director's strategy consists of portraying the couple played close to perfection by

at all possible times during the duration of a year.

They are seen just after the massacre and immediately after, mired in work and the days of a few weeks, a few months, a year.

They carry a weight that sinks them and places before their eyes the simple evidence of the weight, the weight of life.

Everything is offered at the same time, without established chronologies and maps, in a prodigious puzzle of clairvoyant cinema where uneasiness coexists with hope, anguish with clarity, reality with desire and the past with the future.

What matters in any case is the diaphanous and everyday texture of, once again, the air.

Image of 'One year, one night', by Isaki Lacuesta.

Lacuesta manages to compose his most ambitious and least derivative work.

With the precision of a metronome, '

'does not abandon his intention or his dream at any time.

The obsessive mise-en-scène behind the erratic walk of the protagonists by force never obscures or alters the purpose of a

of what is close, of what is simply essential.

He prefers to rethink life from its foundations.

After living so close to death, everything takes on a new meaning.

And in the permanent externalization of a trauma that does not end, he ends up drowning everything.

For completely drowning.

She, on the other hand, pretends that nothing has happened.

In her honor and her logic, she cannot allow the brutality of the brutes to determine even a second of what remains to be lived.

And so, in the constant obligation to forget, she ends up forgetting everything.

For forgetting everything.

In the same way that Isaki weaves the times from the past to the future and back again, she entangles the two archetypal characters in

of panic and calm, of revolution and precipices.

He is a kind of Funes el memorioso condemned to remember everything and dedicated, therefore, to making each moment in the Bataclan the measure of everything else and everything to come.

He lives arrested in the inability to act.

Instead, she recalls the character created by Beckett, who makes constant acting and speaking his only reason for being.

She, by dint of having no memory, ends up also lacking life.

If you like, and to speed up the interpretation, Lacuesta in the company of his co-writers

end up making a perfect drawing, both negative and positive, of what time has called patriarchy.

But that is advancing perhaps more reading of the account.

Also, why not, the film, and here its profound wisdom, achieves a careful reflection on the very meaning of the story.

The air of the dove above is not only an existential metaphor linked to the obvious of life;

it also serves as an excuse to unravel the tools that make up the very meaning of the narrative.

wants at all times to expose the viewer to

You can, of course, add the reading that the pandemic always forces.

like the attack, has split certainties in two.

Or in even more pieces.

Thus, and with the permission of Claire Denis, from Li Ruijun's Chinese film

' and, above all, from that proverbial and sleepwalking enigma that is

', by Natalia López Gallardo, the latest work by Isaki Lacuesta is well worth a Golden Bear. All this, yes, while waiting for

, by Carla Simón.

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