The melodramatic failure of Elvira Lindo in her debut as a film director

• Malaga Festival 2022 'Cinco lobitos' and 'Utama', resplendent biznagas de Oro at the Malaga Festival

• Interview Candela Peña: "If with three Goyas I eat shit from pipes, imagine the girls that come from behind"

• Berlinale Sofía Otero, 9 years old and who gives life to a trans girl, confirms the streak of Spanish cinema at the Berlinale

If you stumble, why settle for a simple sprain when you can open your head?

'

belongs to the genre of films that, as one of the characters says in reference to nothing more and nothing less than

Chekhov's

much more for what he intends than for what he achieves.

And there, in the unevenness that is always seen from pure ambition or also the purest desire,

He wants it all and barely manages to show how far he is from getting it.

She is ambitious, that cannot be denied, but as it is the directorial debut of one of the two signing directors, it does not seem the most prudent thing to learn to jump off the trampoline from the highest plank and furthest from the surface of the pool.

On paper, the film that was good enough

wants to be and is a melodrama about women that, without hiding it, aspires to take over the best tradition of the genre inaugurated in modern cinema by Douglas sirk.

Three women who embody as many generations, each one with their doubts, their shortcomings and their secrets, face each other in an epic duel.

That not equestrian

They are actresses and in the mirror of their profession they have been dumping insecurities -many-, certainties -a few-, and a load of resentment.

Everything tries to flow in a permanent and perfect representation of a life that, in truth, is nothing more than, as Sirk would say, an imitation of life.

Pure theater.

And there that

(turned into a granddaughter/daughter, mother/daughter and grandmother/mother respectively) appear with the firm will to offer themselves as a sacrifice in a story that talks about major issues such as the passage of time, vanity, love, forgiveness and, indeed, sacrifice.

As has already been said, if there is something good about the film, it is that it dares everything and tries everything.

Bare-chested, what would the poet-legionnaire say.

To know more

Chimpún interview.

Magüi Mira: "This democracy and its immobile Constitution are totally retrograde"

• Drafting: PABLO R. ROCES Madrid

Magüi Mira: "This democracy and its immobile Constitution are totally retrograde"

Cinema.

Pedro Almodóvar: "We must dare to reform the Constitution"

• Writing: LUIS MARTÍNEZ Zaragoza

Pedro Almodóvar: "We must dare to reform the Constitution"

The film starts with the thank you speech of the youngest of the saga.

She just received a Goya Award and, as she plays, she remembers her mother and her grandmother.

From the first, she appeals to her survival capacity.

From the second, she is left with simply her genius, her talent, and her aura.

All unfading.

The brief and seemingly innocent statement will unleash the tempest she touches.

The first problem is the tone

.

The good screenwriter and excellent writer that is Elvira Lindo strives at all times to maintain her balance on that fine line that separates (for resorting to classical concepts) the sublime from the ridiculous;

comedy tragedy.

And in her eagerness, what worked so well in that fable so carefully directed by Miguel Albaladejo (the one who has best known how to interpret Lindo's texts),

The actresses move in fits and starts and almost always out of register, unable to identify when it's time to cry, when to laugh and, most importantly, when both.

Curiously,

in the role of partner of Emma Suárez's character and who knows if a mirror of himself, he identifies her voice and gives it the right tragic and comic depth.

At times (oh!),

is confused with a parody of Pedro Almodóvar's cinema where there is no lack of disruptive monologues or references to the excesses of the 80s or meticulous art direction.

But now the monologues are just pompous, things from the Movida sound like outdated marketing and the set is just that, trompe l'oeil.

How difficult it is to be Almodóvar.

And so, the film advances unable to make the keys of a genre, melodrama, its own, which it approaches by simple imitation, not by conviction.

only waiting to relay the movements of the actresses nor resources from another time as spent as some '

' in black and white, of course, help.

If something defines melodrama (the modern one, that of Sirk, Fassbinder, Almodóvar or Haynes) it is its self-referential character, its self-awareness.

It is a distracting drama that uses exaggeration as an expressive resource and, above all, irony.

If you forget that, bad.

And so, until reaching a general plane with a drone from the top of the rooftops and swimming pools of Madrid...

The Malaga Festival is inaugurated.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

• actresses

• Pedro Almodovar

• theater

• cinema

• literature