Luis Martínez Malaga
Malaga
Updated Tuesday, March 5, 2024-14:24
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What is it about?
How many times have we been surprised (or maybe not so surprised) by this question when leaving the cinema.
Or before entering into the matter of deciding whether to do it or not.
The idiom gives a clue.
We don't ask where he's going or where he's coming from or even why he's going somewhere, which, honestly, is still the important question.
No, the question is why, which is still a rather absurd and imprecise way of not asking anything.
Isn't it all about the same thing?
The only thing that does seem decisive is that the thing goes, from the verb to go.
Because cinema, that is true, goes, like the ship;
It travels through time and in its rhythmic and constant evolution so close to the car assembly lines it succeeds, when it succeeds, in portraying the very nature of time.
It is not that it runs through time, rather it is time that runs through it and becomes present in it.
That is, he goes and, this is what counts, we with him.
The cinema goes and we go in the shared solitude that is the cinema.
And so far the digression, the digression that goes.
What is
Second Prize about,
the film so close to the masterpiece by
Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez
recently presented at the Malaga Festival?
On paper, it is (that is, it is) the biography made into a film (or, if applicable, '
biopic
') of the group
Los Planetas
.
But not about Los Planetas in general from the Big Bang to the present day but in a much more specific way about everything that happened to the Granada rock group of the same name while they were making their star album (let's call it that)
A Week in the Engine of a bus
.
While they were doing it, it is documented, they fought, they broke into two, and into three, and into four;
the bassist left;
the drummer was lost;
the guitarist became even more lost, and the singer was not found.
It is not clear, nor is there documentation in this regard, that the singer in question has already found himself.
Probably not.
This is the first hypothesis.
To know more
Music.
Inside the chaotic filming of the first film about The Planets: "The idea of making a cursed film was good but there was no need to be so literal"
Editor: LUIS MARTÍNEZ
Inside the chaotic filming of the first film about The Planets: "The idea of making a cursed film was good but there was no need to be so literal"
The reading.
This is how Super 8 by Los Planetas was recorded 30 years ago, the album that revolutionized Spanish rock: "They showed a bestial insteptism"
Editorial: PABLO GIL Madrid
This is how Super 8 by Los Planetas was recorded 30 years ago, the album that revolutionized Spanish rock: "They showed a bestial insteptism"
But it could also be about something else.
At the end of the day, all stories, and even more so those that deal directly with a mythology as established, ritualized and in its own stupid way as that which surrounds rock, are only about themselves.
What if heroin, what if perfect suicide, what if angels dressed in black riding storms... It was James George Frazer, author of '
The Golden Bough'
, who sensed that, in the end and in the end, all myths , whose function is none other than to explain to us the inexplicable, end up being too similar to each other to the point of sharing not so much a common reason as a structure of procedure that is itself mythological.
All myths speak of their own myth, the conclusion would be lyrical and reductionist to the point of ridiculousness.
From this point of view, '
Second Prize'
would be about nothing more than itself, about the meticulous construction of a legend of rise, fall and redemption.
Pure '
junkie
' Christianity.
And '
indie
'.
However, something escapes.
The explanations seem too hasty and perhaps everything is going differently.
Perhaps, judging by its eventful production with multiple changes of direction (there was a third proposal after that of Jonás Trueba, original director, and before that of the directors who are now signing), rewriting from the root of the script and successive annoyances ( in addition to constants) of J (or Jota), which is the name of the man who sings;
Perhaps, we said, the film is about nothing more than its need to survive, its own existence as a film and, in short, the very meaning of the narrative (all of it) as an exercise in salvation and, in effect, survival.
Life can sometimes be tremendously dark;
unbearably dark;
dark of pure darkness.
'Second Prize'
moves across the screen with the constant and mysterious rhythm that the moon does around its planet, our planet.
And at times, he bursts into a cry of recognition.
It is an old generational cry and a new discovery.
Everything at once.
And all this without giving up the necessary and shared experience of the common.
Constructed the opposite of
'The Legend of Time
' - Camarón's old film signed by Lacuesta -, the story does not come to meet the camera as life itself does at the fortuitous moment of filming, but rather it is that life. , transmuted into simple truth, which is summoned in the filming coven.
It sounds tremendous and it is.
How tremendous are the works of the actors and musicians (and vice versa)
Daniel Ibáñez, Cristalino, Mafo, Stéphanie Magnin and co.
Yes, there is something magical in the way the songs already incorporated into the memory of many now forty-somethings emerge from the surface of the screen as if for the first time.
And it is like this, in the constant feeling of mutual recognition, loss and reunion, where the film becomes strong.
Indestructible, I would say.
What if '
Second Prize'
(title, by the way, of one of the most celebrated songs on the now classic album) is not about anything but us?
And this is already the last attempt.
The truth is that there are few films so clear, so adventurous, so transparent in their fever, so hummable in each of their lyrics, so black when they want, so theirs, so everyone's.
Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez have given us a piece of time.
And that is no small gift.
Personally, very grateful.
It's not The Planets, it's us.
I'm beginning to suspect that '
Second Prize
' is simply going.
Like the moon.
And like the ship, of course.