It is already 16 years ago that Núria Aidelman, filmmaker and enthusiastic enthusiast, decided along with other incurable patine of cinema to transcribe the ways from here the inspirations and ideas that the critic and French Alain Bergala left written in the book 'the film hypothesis' . Very summarized, the idea was to create "a link between seeing and making movies" in the younger look. The program, because that is, writes and cartography since then and almost in silence, Spanish adolescence thanks to the involvement of a total of 136 colleges and institutes. Students and film professionals learn, both, to see that not only to shoot. 'Cinema in progress' is called this secretestly hidden lay miracle. Jonás Trueba joined all this in 2013 and since then sees. He saw before, no doubt, but now more.
In 'La Reconquista', the film presented here in San Sebastián in 2016, the last part was starring two teenagers who, exhausted from their own exhaustion, loved themselves. Or better, they learned to do it without excuses. Even exhaustion. Somehow, there were already filtered the illuminated manners of that look, or see, by force new. "Who prevents it ', presented on Thursday in the Official Section, could be considered as the particular and always in progress of the end of the course of precisely' ongoing cinema '. Or the opposite. Be that as it may, what is left is a greater work so dazzling at every step that it gives that it definitely founded a world. And it is not so much exaggeration and the consciousness of attending something unique. Yes, I correct, it was exaggeration, happy and very conscious exaggeration.
The film narrates in three and a half hours converted into a single sigh whole life. Or, better, what we ritually call adolescence with all their edges, doubts and their badly rhymed shingles (good are also there, of course). This is how it seems monumental and even exhausting, but it must be borne in mind that what is offered is a lot. The proposal wants to approach the cinema not as much as an activity, art or office but as a way of being in the world. It is not so much a movie to just see, that too, as well as to live inside it.
Divided into segments and even two intermediates of obligatory compliance, 'who prevents it' appears first as pure testimonial registration where the interpellates review their quotes, their appointments, their hairstyles, their problems and, above all, their hesitations in front of a camera by The one that appears the voice of an essentially clumsy interviewer. The director himself tries to ask, he is lying and the interpelled, wise, undo the drain. One serves all this between surprised, curious and only clueless. And so, little by little, the film is transformed, muta and forces to be repeated as a spectator in front of an artifact that is also documentary and document; Witness and simple truth.
During the next phase, let's call it that way, the tape becomes the testimony of its own desire to be something else, or just something different. Or to see again. And for the first time. The protagonists, which are actually many and always the same, strive to be counted, to roll, to imagine in another way that it is like one always imagines itself. And so, little by little (everything is little by little), the film becomes fiction, in a fabow behind another in which two young people know each other, they want (or that they believe) and even travel to a town of Extremadura Just to the side of Portugal. Moreover, they take a canoe and go to the shore; Another shore that is another country, another way of loving. As delicate as sincere, brutal and obscenely honest.
On another trip, this end of course, they all go to Granada. There, as it touches, drink, get drunk, they are loved again and, by that of disguise maybe, when the teacher speaks, take notes. Meanwhile, they tell again and again with a constancy as admirable as already forgotten who they are, who they want to be, what they feel, what they would like to feel ... and so, to the exhaustion, an exhaustion that leaves the look completely full , Exhauste of a reinventing cinema, of a new cinema. Then everyone is partying to celebrate that they have made a trip, a movie, a song, a picture and that they are on their way to do even an entire life. They sing, precisely, 'who prevents him', by Rafael Berrio, and when he arrived at the stanza that says "you could change your name / for another that sounds better / ending your lineage once and for all," they take it the verbatim. Who prevents it?
The result is an incomplete film that forms the view of the viewer as a call to transform the looks, all of them. Those who have, and we have the old ones, of all those who were born in the 21st century and those who first face an exercise of cinema without scaffolding, without genders, without excuses. A lay miracle and, hopefully, no longer hidden.
And then it is Paco Plaza, the other great film to competition, which this time is associated with Carlos Vermut in scriptwriter's functions. 'La Abuela' is a horror movie. With all the consequences. And terror, it is already known, scary. For example, it panic the same festivals frightened as they live with the one who will say of those who know. And yet, few sensations such rewarding in times as irresistibly uncertainly like these. On the one hand, nothing leaves us more defenseless. Someone scared renounces to demonstrate himself from what he is capable. But with everything, who resists. The feeling of the dread returns us to childhood, that almost sacred space in which everything is still possible. And so.
'The grandmother' tells the story of a granddaughter (attentive all to the delicacy of Titanium of Almudena Amor) that a good day receives the news of the stroke of the woman who took care of her mother in the absence of her mother. She must leave the glamor of Paris where she works as a model to immerse literally in the anguish of an angupious hole. She from the changes of high couture clothes to the changes of dirty diapers. No transition
What follows is, logically, the unexpected. And dreadful. The director manages to raise a degree to the previous works of him (think about 'REC' O 'Veronica') where the genre was modulated with the same wisdom towards comedy than towards the generational portrait. Now - Report of Vermut-- everything turns to something similar to melodrama, towards baroque and dark terrain while blinding and disconcerting; An unprecedented space and plagued by references at the same time where the same is a bolero at half a voice as an appointment to the Manga comic.
Plaza internalizes with a skill that, as it could not be from another, scares the keys to the terror genre until it becomes something more morbid, more aware of even their healing power. Recall, as the religion itself, terror places the believer, the viewer, in the proud acceptance of his helplessness. We are so vulnerable when we admit the secret of faith, at the same time fascinating and terrifying, and when we abandon ourselves to the overwhelming certainty of the unknown, what makes us suffer. We have arrived. The pleasure of horror ... Who prevents it?
Date Of Update: 23 September 2021, 15:42
