• Berlinale 'Five Little Wolves': against the myth of the perfect mother
  • Malaga Festival 'Cinco lobitos' and 'Utama', resplendent Golden Biznagas at the Malaga Festival
  • Malaga Festival Laia Costa, the actress who cries beautifully, returns to sweep Malaga

In the natural order of filmographies with draft, with sediment and with future, what counts is the second film, even the third. However surprising and furious the debut film may be. Carlos Saura debuted with the shocking, crude, vision of a dirty Spain in 'The Gulfs', but only when he arrived at 'The Hunt' did he define a new way of looking. Ruben Östlund completed a stylized vision of society's wounds in 'The Guitar Mongoloid', but it would not be until 'Involuntary' or 'Play' where he labeled his name as a warning of what would come next. These are two examples. Other times, a debut film founds a world. And there are Godard, Truffaut, the Coens or Tarantino to prove it. The strange thing is that of Alauda Ruiz de Azúa.

'It's you', the film released on Netflix by the director of 'Five Wolves', is from beginning to end of such a lacerating insignificance that it would be said shot not so much by any director as by the algorithm itself that gives so much to talk about. It is romantic comedy, yes, and as such it is there to dynamite any hint of originality. Moreover, and without wishing to do harm, that much commented on the archetypes that endure patriarchy and its miseries (that if romantic love, that if the desperate search for the better half, that if the meritocracy of sincerity ...) are received with the bloated enthusiasm of those who let themselves go.

Nothing in it is new because in the root and sense of one's own gender is that everything sounds familiar, recognizable, kind... perfectly forgettable. A romantic comedy is entered to feel comforted even with the greatest of lies. In fact, romantic comedies are there to deceive us: they pretend to make us believe that they are cinema and most of them are part of the advertising quota. In essence, both serve the same purpose. That is, lying.

With a script by the very productive Cristóbal Garrido and Adolfo Valor --capable equally of series like 'Kings of the night' and one comedy after another like 'Cuerpo de élite', 'Los Japón' or 'Amor de madre'--, the film tells the story of a man with powers to predict his romantic future as soon as he kisses the girl. They could not miss those drops of fantastic own Richard Curtis himself. In fact, the whole mechanism of the tape refers to 'A Matter of Time' with a rare and slightly obscene fidelity. But, in reality, it is in the genes of this genus to reproduce inbred. Hence perhaps the defects. Let's say that half of the film is completed, all the common places, all the necessary confusions and each of the phrases of self-improvement that one expects and desires have already been completed. The platform's controversial speed up button was created for arguments like this.

Seen from a distance, everything fits. The film that barely received attention from the chain when it came to promoting it and making it known (unlike 'Bard' or 'Blonde' or 'No news on the front') is now one of its products (yes, it is a product) star. Its intention is not to become an event but to join the showcase of the consumable (it is consumed before it is seen). All normal.

The strange thing is that it is the second film of a director who in her debut proposed the opposite. Ruiz de Azúa succeeded in dismantling the keys to the drama from a clear and completely unusual vision of motherhood in 'Cinco lobitos'. What was his debut film is essentially a work of maturity that offers the viewer not only a story with which to identify, and against which to fight, but also delivers the instruction book to be understood in its proper way. The film that won the Goya for best new director along with those of main and secondary interpretation in the perfect works of Laia Costa and Susi Sánchez was itself story and way of looking at the world. The logical thing was to wait for a next work that would develop, expand and justify this brilliant endeavor.

Well, no, 'It's you' is closer to what any director does because he has no choice, to get hot, to meet people in the industry, to make ends meet... to debut at last. Otherwise, 'Eres tú' is the authentic debut film by Alauda Riuz de Azúa. And already wanting to see, finally, the third.

According to The Trust Project criteria

Learn more

  • Japan
  • Netflix
  • theatre
  • cinema