1988
Women at the edge of a nervous attack
Pedro Almodovar
By
Mar García Puig
I was 12 years old when Spain cherished the Hollywood dream with Pedro Almodóvar and his
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
.
The film had already triumphed in cinemas, at the Goya Awards and in the imagination of women like my mother.
I remember her being enthusiastic about the film and outraged when it didn't win the Oscar.
The morning after the ceremony, upon learning on a delayed basis that the statuette was not ours, he blurted out, “Americans, you don't know anything,” as he ran off to work.
By then my mother had already separated and we lived in a kind of gynoecium that the men had abandoned.
Over the years, when I saw the movie, I understood what he meant that morning.
She had understood much better than the academics the film's ability to connect with an entire female universe, to stir those longings for rebellion and revenge sly by dint of accelerated routines and appearances of forced docility.
My mother had not been betrayed by a Shiite terrorist or a movie star like the protagonists, but she had also felt used and thrown away, she had experienced the madness of love and spite and she had turned to Orfidal when the pain became unbearable.
.
Like so many Spanish women who had not yet pronounced the word
feminism
despite personifying it, she had not dared to verbalize that “I'm sick of being good” that Carmen Maura pronounces and that many of us have engraved in it.
In my imagination,
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
is the film that embellished her own existence, neuroses and failures in my mother's eyes.
And that is something that is inherited, like those Almodovarian earrings that were bought without restraint back then.
I watch the movie again and I still find something of myself in all the heroines in it.
In his thirst for love and acceptance and in his infinite capacity to make mistakes.
And, above all, in the feminine ability to turn all that disaster into a shared party.
Mar García Puig (Barcelona, 1977) is a writer, philologist and editor.
Her latest book is 'The History of Vertebrates' (Random House, 2023).
Review of Octavi Martí in 1988:
Comedy of flying telephones.
1992
Belle époque
Fernando Trueba
By
Paco Cerdà
The lost paradise.
Bauman's retrotopia.
Eden vacated.
The bitter nostalgia of what this country could have been and was not, widens when we see today, in this angry present, in this grim and narrow time like a dead end, the
Belle Époque
of Trueba.
Savor its libertarian roots.
Make fun of the Unamunian tragic feeling.
Celebrate a life where desire and beauty—the classic
kalòs kagathós
of the Greeks: the beautiful and the good—relegate commitment, duty, conscience and everything that obfuscates a life, sometimes an entire society.
It is February 1931, before the Republic was proclaimed.
Long before the war, mullion of our days.
Infinitely before the postwar period and those bitter
Sighs of Spain
that are the gloomy and deadly reverse of this film filmed in 1992. The year is no coincidence.
92. The country that was going to be.
Olympic Game.
Expo.
Fifth centenary of the greatness of Columbus.
But also the angry embryo of the post-industrial hangover, well hidden under the carpet of colour, rags and hunger that The Year of Discovery
so well portrays ,
one of the best and most unknown Spanish films of the last decade.
And in that year 92,
Belle époque
.
And her cheerful zarzuela music,
La tabernera del Puerto,
when Amalia arrives and sings: “In a fabled country there lived an old artist who had his fortune in a magic flute.”
And that fabled country, all full of present and sensuality, tolerance and sense of humor, captivated the American Academy.
And Trueba won the Oscar.
And Spain added another notch in that unrepeatable and deceitful 1992, as deceitful was the nostalgia that happened to it.
How beautiful, how distant, the
belle époque
.
Paco Cerdà (Genovés, Valencia; 1985) is a journalist and writer.
His latest title is 'April 14' (Asteroid Books, 2022).
Criticism of Ángel Fernández-Santos in 1992:
The symptoms of mastery.
1994
days counted
Imanol Uribe
By
Katixa Agirre
A Nobel Prize winner said the other day that the effects of aging can be alleviated by sleeping well, eating well and exercising.
The advice is not applicable to films, whose aging depends not so much on what they do but on how the society that gave birth to them evolves.
There are films that neither sleep, nor eat, nor exercise and, yet, remain fresh even if 90 years have passed.
This is not the case with
Días contados
, a film by Imanol Uribe that won not only eight Goyas but also the Golden Shell in San Sebastián.
Revisiting the film in my mid-forties, I wonder: is it me or is it her?
Who has aged worse?
I understand that putting ETA in the formula of the almost Hollywood
thriller
attracted attention in 1994. Of course, Carmelo Gómez's erotic escapades through Madrid had nothing to do with the Molotov cocktail atmosphere that was felt since my high school.
The film then offered us more evasion than reflection, more fantasy than political commentary.
Nowadays not even that.
The adventures of the command in Madrid are somewhat laughable.
The protagonist has a very lax concept of “clandestinity”.
The police are emulators of Torrente
avant la lettre
.
But if there's one thing I find this movie sick with rheumatism, it's what my teenage mind appreciated most: the erotic scenes that seem murky but are simply sentimental.
The fact that the protagonist goes out without panties in 90% of the sequences (for example, when she goes to open the door of the house), already makes me lean towards the diagnosis of senile dementia for this film.
Except for this burning of the actors, all of them are magnificent.
And it saves me: I think I have aged better than the movie, and I don't exercise much.
Katixa Agirre (Vitoria, 1981), writer, is the author of 'No Mothers' (Tránsito, 2019).
Her latest book is 'De Nuevo Centauro' (Tránsito, 2022).
Review by Casimiro Torreiro in 1994:
Romeo and Juliet in Hell
.
2001
The others
Alejandro Amenábar
By
Laura Fernandez
I remember that there was a before and after in my conception of Spanish cinema after watching
The Others
.
Also that there was a before and after in my conception of the idea of the ghost.
As a fierce reader of just 19 years old, a fierce reader who worked in a video store and had begun to take writing seriously, and to publish articles in magazines so independent that they could not be bought anywhere, her viewing - on the day of the premiere, in the first multiplex in my city—discovered Henry James, and the kind of palpable ghost that Ryan Murphy would later explore in
American Horror Story,
encouraging me to do so in my own work.
In my case, in search of the absurd, of a comical and confusing non-distinction between life and death.
There was in
The Others
an ambition that I had not considered my own — and that, until then, was not typical of our cinema either — and, at the same time, there was an abandonment or a reinvention of what is Spanish, understood as something that, for once , had nothing to do with what was happening here but with what could happen anywhere, with delocalized, Napoleonic, universal art.
I adopted her without thinking.
As a fan of Amenábar's first cinema, as an absolute admirer of
Thesis
- a film that told you, like Stephen King's novels, "you can do it too, look at me, you just need a good story, and passion for what you do" -,
The others
gave me a powerful lesson that I remember every time someone mentions it.
I haven't consciously seen it again, because I want it to remain a kind of amulet of my 19-year-old self.
Laura Fernández (Terrassa, 1981) is a journalist and writer.
Her latest book of stories is 'Ladies, Gentlemen and Planets' (Random House Literature, 2023).
Review by Ángel Fernández-Santos of 2001:
Night in the soul.
2003
I give you my eyes
Icíar Bollain
By
Máriam M. Bascuñán
It seems very late because it is already night and a terrified woman runs away from her own home, with her son in her arms and wearing slippers.
She is the symbol of the domestic and private assailing another that is too foreign: a public sphere, that of 20 years ago, which was barely beginning to name and make visible everyday realities that, such as gender violence, crossed our lives.
This is how I give you my eyes begins
,
a film that in 2003 won the Goya for its director, Iciar Bollain, making her the second woman to achieve it in the 17 editions held until then.
But
I give you my eyes
was much more than a film about gender violence.
He knew how to capture all the narrative resonances of that reality, moving away from any fashion or political cliché.
The result is the moving and subtle portrait of the story of Antonio and Pilar, masterfully played by Luis Tosar and Laia Marull, a middle-class couple from the provinces as common as their names and the environment that surrounds them, the society of that time.
All of them make up a mosaic of perspectives where each one tells their truth.
Antonio experiences the path to freedom chosen by his wife as a minefield of his own self-esteem.
While he appears more and more lost, disconnected from his own emotions and going to therapy just to make Pilar come back, she begins to discover a new world and contemplate it from a perspective that is increasingly geared to her own desire.
The film is the story of those disparate journeys of the two characters, of the anger unleashed by misunderstood vulnerability, and of a social environment that still hid the codes of that terror.
With the vibrant tension between what is shown and what is intuited, Bollain presents it without dwelling on it, using all the narrative techniques to make the best cinema: the one that manages to involve us all.
Máriam M. Bascuñán (Madrid, 1979) is a political scientist and former Opinion director of EL PAÍS.
Review by Casimiro Torreiro from 2003:
Overwhelming and necessary.
2005
The secret Life of the words
Isabel Coixet
By
Laura Ferrero
In 2005 I left the theater thinking about a single phrase, the one Josef (Tim Robbins) says to Hanna (Sarah Polley) towards the end of the film.
It's just three words: “I will learn to swim.”
Outside the room it had started to rain and, without an umbrella, I took shelter in the arcades of Yamaguchi Square waiting for it to let up.
Josef's phrase reached me, it became real.
I was certain, while an endless torrent of water fell, that
The Secret Life of Words
was a story about the mystery that every truly significant encounter entails.
Almost 20 years later, having seen it a few more times, I would say that
The Secret Life of Words
delves into the difference between going through pain or having pain go through us.
Or so she believed until a few days ago.
Seeing it again, I noticed a song for the first time, as if we were getting to what was important by taking a detour, getting entangled in successive layers that only make sense at the right moment.
The song is called
You've Made Me So Very Happy
and it led me to think that perhaps there is a possibility that
The Secret Life of Words
is a film about two people who, in their own way, try something as complex as believing again in that all this, that is, life, is worth it.
But what do I know?
Good stories, stories that remain, have that: they are infinite in their approaches.
For that same reason, I know that I will continue watching
The Secret Life of Words
and that I will once again affirm that I know what counts.
But I will only know, like right now, what he tells me.
The most decisive thing that happens to us, not only in Isabel Coixet's films but in life, is that we inhabit mystery and that time and again we make the attempt to approach it to embrace it and understand it.
The
spoiler,
valid here for the screen and for life, is that we never make it.
Laura Ferrero (Barcelona, 1984) is a writer.
Her latest book is 'The Astronauts' (Alfaguara, 2023).
Review by Casimiro Torreiro from 2005.
Naming the horror.
2010
Black pa
Agustí Villaronga
By
Núria Bendicho
In the thick of the forest, the war still parades and moans.
In
Pa negre,
by Emili Teixidor, everything is gloomy and this darkness beats in Agustí Villaronga's cinematographic recreation.
The novel, published in Catalan in 2003, was filmed in this language and the original of this text was also written in this language, where the forest takes center stage.
In it the dead are hidden that no one is going to watch over.
A horse slides down a cliff.
With each somersault he hits the stone and tears off a piece of meat.
The car that the animal was dragging has also crashed, like a plate fired in a heated argument.
Inside were a lifeless man and a frightened child, who in his long agony has evoked the name of a specter.
He has killed them.
On this earth the dead do not rest.
And when there is war they reappear like mushrooms after a storm.
There is no combat without ghosts, reality without deception.
In another corner of the forest, a girl pulls down her panties for four guys.
Among so much misfortune, she just asks for a little attention.
She lies on a mattress that is overflowing with mud and garbage.
In her hiding place, the girl scatters her petty treasures.
On the way home, the other kids attack her with insults.
A whore can't rest.
And even less so an amputee whore, the daughter of a red man who hanged himself some time ago.
War does not forget blood.
The defeated must live with shame and remain silent.
When the kids leave, a dying man approaches a puddle.
He has found a cool, deep pool and the unfortunate man frolics, like a mad goose, in the virginal water.
The illness has disfigured his ideas.
Distraught, he has lost the will to fight.
The sunlight intoxicates him.
He tries to flap his wings and fly.
Núria Bendicho (Barcelona, 1995), philologist and writer, is the author of 'Dead Lands' (Sajalín, 2022).
Review by Jordi Costa from 2010:
Where the Wild Things Are.
2016
Late for anger
Raul Arevalo
By
Marta Sanz
Raúl Arévalo says that his cinematographic culture comes from the video store under his house.
Blessed video store that turned the boy into a versatile actor capable of transmitting overwhelming truths, and into a filmmaker with the narrative nerve and forceful imagery of the best classic cinema.
Arévalo looks from a very personal assimilation of Leone, Coppola, Saura... In 2016 he offers us an intense, fast-paced, well-rounded film.
Naturalistic and deeply aesthetic.
Elaborate.
Without that falsehood of reality television and advertorials.
Conscious of style, each formal decision shocks: Luis Callejo's face when he receives his wife at the meeting;
the camera that follows the most portrayed neck in Spanish cinema—that of Antonio de la Torre—;
car chases;
a brutal robbery seen from a recording distance;
Callejo and De la Torre exchange their gazes, between the two, a verbose man and a screwdriver on the table, fear, ignorance of who will be sacrificed;
peripheries;
the black eyes of a girl sipping her soda through a straw;
the physical expressiveness of Ruth Díaz… Tracatracatrá, among the direct sound, the music bursts in like a pulsation in the temples.
Each frame of
Afternoon for Anger
is strung together in a millimetric plot ruled by a clock.
TIC Tac.
Arrive on time.
Story of revenge and mercy.
Impossible redemption.
Greek or Shakespearean tragedy at the Carrasco bar.
The hatred of the meek, the darkness of the sympathetic, the class right to claim a family, tenderness covered with hippopotamus skins, exoskeletons, shells that move to the rhythm of the beat of an artichoke heart.
Nothing is what it seems and yet everything responds to an implacable logic.
There is a violence of small things that cannot be understood without a violence of big things.
Marta Sanz (Madrid, 1967) is a writer.
Her latest book is 'Metallic blinds go down suddenly' (Anagrama, 2023).
Review by Carlos Boyero from 2016:
Raúl Arévalo also knows how to direct.
2020
The girls
Pilar Palomero
By
Daniel Gascón
The Girls
—like
La maternal,
Pilar Palomero's second film—speaks about growing up: discovering who one is, the relationship with others, the tension between the institution and the individual.
Celia, 11 years old, goes to a nuns' school in Zaragoza in 1992. There is a tension between an already somewhat anachronistic conservatism and a climate of moral progressivism: on the one hand, the religious atmosphere and certain social conventions;
on the other, campaigns for the use of condoms or
light
discos .
It is a contained and humble film, deep and subtle, focused on the characters.
The cast stands out (and, in particular, Andrea Fandos in the role of Celia and Natalia de Molina in that of her mother), a certain melancholy and a natural and credible humor.
Aware of the references of the genre—and also indebted to less obvious works, from
If…,
by Lindsay Anderson, to
The Street of Camellias,
by Mercè Rodoreda—,
The Girls
avoids clichés and Manichaeism.
Her view of religion and school is critical without being cartoonish;
its portrait of insecurity and emotional helplessness is not condescending.
It is almost minimalist, but it manages to convey the illusion that each character has some edge, a hint of complexity.
It soberly shows fragility and also resistance.
It seems like a film about the look, but it is, above all, a film about the voice: about Celia's voice, perhaps trembling or discordant, but which is her own, and also about the singular, promising and humanistic voice of its director. .
Daniel Gascón (Zaragoza, 1981), translator and writer, is the author of 'The Father of Your Children' (Random House, 2023).
Carlos Boyero's 2020 review:
Those girls who are so authentic, confused and fragile.
2022
as beasts
Rodrigo Sorogoyen
By
Alba Carballal
I saw
As bestas
for the first time in December 2022, in the only cinemas that showed it in Lugo, at a very strange hour and in a half-empty room.
I had the second occasion in February 2023, the week after Sorogoyen's film won nine
big heads
at the Goya, at a colloquium with the director to which, apparently, all the film students in Madrid attended en masse.
I admit that the subsequent talk was interesting, especially for an intruder in the profession like me: in it questions arose about the mirror narrative mechanism drawn between two memorable sequence shots, about the directing work with a wild actor like Luis Zahera or about the relevance of the translation in the final result of a film that finds one of its main virtues in a skillful interweaving of languages.
However, seeing it and then analyzing it like this—in a room full of cinephiles commenting in low voices on the precision of a camera gesture, the genius of Isabel Peña implicit in a line with her seal, the strength in Marina Foïs' gaze— , I felt that I was watching another film, or at least that in
As bestas
two films coexisted and that, despite the technical perfection of the second, I had been more impressed by the first: that thick, unconditional silence, reserved only for poker and liturgy;
the captive devotion of those who, suddenly and without expecting it, found a reflection of themselves in the distorting mirror of someone worse;
a people with a common language finally understood by a stranger, and I'm not talking about words.
And, finally, the seats remained still and the cell phones were turned off until the last name in the credits was recognized for her contribution.
After all, that is cinema: the collective miracle of belonging.
Alba Carballal (Lugo, 1992) is a writer.
Her latest book is 'You will dance on my grave' (Seix Barral, 2023).
Review by Carlos Boyero of 2022:
A lot of art in the portrait of violence and fear.
You can follow
Babelia
on
and
X
, or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter
.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I am already a subscriber
_