Particles visible in the light of the spotlights floated in the air.
It was gunpowder that, mixed with blood, smelled like death.
The public that on November 13, 2015 attended a concert in the Parisian Bataclan hall became victims of a terrorist attack.
There were about 1,500 spectators, three Islamic State jihadists killed 130 of them.
The band Eagles of Death Metal performed.
Legend has it that at that time they were performing a song,
Kiss the Devil,
about the devil.
Paz, amor y death metal
(Tusquets), by Ramón González, a Spanish survivor, who was 30 years old at the time of the massacre ,
gave testimony of that terror lived in Paris .
That book has been the basis for the script by Isa Campo, Isaki Lacuesta and Fran Araujo for
One Year, One Night,
Lacuesta's film that shocked the Berlinale this Monday at its premiere, where it competes in the official section.
More information
Spanish cinema returns to the Bataclan attack
Unlike the previous works by Lacuesta (Girona, 46 years old), twice winner of the San Sebastian Golden Shell for
Los Pasos Dobles
and
Entre dos Aguas,
the film was born from a commission, that of the producer Ramón Campos (promoter of series as successful as
Velvet
,
The cable girls
or
Fariña
), from the Bambú company, which had the rights to the book and, although it has been making films for years, with Lacuesta's film it rises to the next level.
The same thing happens to the director, who for the first time has a large budget for a shoot carried out in Paris (including the very door of the Bataclan room) and Barcelona (the concert was reproduced in the Apolo room).
“It will be a commission, but I have taken it as my own.
Classic filmmakers worked like this, although I don't want to compare myself to them”, explains Lacuesta.
From the left, Noémie Merlant, Isaki Lacuesta and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, this Monday at the presentation of 'One Year, One Night' in Berlin. HANNIBAL HANSCHKE (REUTERS)
one year one night
It has led to fiction, in part, the protagonists: Ramón, who is played by the Argentine Nahuel Pérez Biscayart.
His on-screen partner is Céline (Noémie Merlant), a French version of the real one, who is Argentine.
If the first part of the film revolves around Ramón, the second turns towards Céline, which opens a debate to different interpretations and perspectives on the facts.
“It was the most complex script we've ever written.
Because of the sensitivity of the subject and because we had to change the structure while remaining faithful to what Ramón told and what they experienced”, reflects the director, who confesses that they spent almost two years polishing the script.
“I was always concerned about Ramón's opinion, that he understood that there were elements of his book that had to be changed.
At Ramón y Céline we have projected things from other survivors,
More information
Emmanuel Carrère's chronicles of the terrorists' trial
Lacuesta insists on praising the actors.
"A viewer will never know how well they have been on set."
Nobody doubts the quality of Pérez Biscayart
(120 beats per minute, The Persian teacher),
although at the Berlinale the depth he gives to Céline Noémie Merlant
(Curious, Portrait of a woman on fire, Paris 13th district
).
“She articulates the French feeling of a still open wound”, as Emmanuel Carrère is recounting in the weekly chronicles in EL PAÍS about the trial of the surviving terrorists, “and that our French friends have underlined”.
“It is curious that in the Ramblas of Barcelona [where there was also a terrorist attack] that feeling has not remained, but that the duel was closed before.
I do not know why.
Maybe because in Paris it happened in places
a priori
intended for pleasure, such as concert halls or bar terraces, and that has increased the social echo and has motivated people I know to leave the French capital.
A vital experience from two points of view
The filmmaker makes the best of his style in the sequences of the daily life of the protagonists, in reflecting the growing complicity of a couple that is just starting out and in how an almost unimaginable event – being the victim of an attack at a concert in Paris – leaves traces So different in both.
Or at least in how they swallow it, verbalize it and feel it.
“I have been making a documentary about ETA for more than a decade and at the beginning I already learned that there are no groups, that there are no homogeneous responses among the survivors.
The cliché that each person is a world is fulfilled, ”he says.
“It is disturbing to understand that two people who have been together in the same dressing room”, fearing that the door will suddenly open and the clatter of the
Kalashnikov
announce your death, “come out with completely different experiences.
It is that the four of them remember in an opposite way the light of that dressing room”.
By the four he refers to the leading couple and their friends, who are played by Quim Gutiérrez and Alba Guilera.
"Today they still argue about how they remember that space."
Two curious details of
One Year, One Night.
The couple, after the attack, travel to Spain to visit Ramón's family.
Natalia de Molina, Enric Auquer and C. Tangana appear there, making his debut as an actor.
“Little comes out, but I am very clear that he is going to make more movies, and not just as an actor.
He is very intelligent, I am sure he will direct, ”explains Lacuesta.
The second is a T-shirt with the motto of the filmmaker's rock group, Los Mariachis de la Nada, which takes its name from a definition by EL PAÍS critic Carlos Boyero of Lacuesta and other directors.
"It seems to me one of the most beautiful expressions published in a journalistic text."
Noémie Merchant and Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, in 'One year, one night'.
He only really bonds with Ramón and Céline in the opening sequence, when they walk home under a thermal blanket and see buses passing by with other survivors.
“I was very worried about filming the attack, because I have already touched on the subsequent relationship in other works.
Never, on the other hand, had he shot such a bestial representation of violence, and that leads you to one of the great moral and aesthetic dilemmas: what do you show, what not?
We talked a lot with cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky about it."
She because she is the daughter of William Lubtchansky, also a cinematographer and regular collaborator of Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker who has delved deeper into the Jewish Holocaust.
"We decided neither to show gunshot wounds nor to the terrorists."
And that is why the filmmaker defines his film like this:
“It's the film of someone who has seen what they don't want to see confronted with someone who says they haven't seen something, when in fact they have.
And there are two trips.
The shape of the film stems from their emotional states, not from me as the creator."
The other risk that Lacuesta faced was that it would be pointed out what a Spanish filmmaker was doing telling an attack in France.
“At first they did ask us.
Not so much because of the Spanish, but because of the recentness of the wound.
Ramón wrote his book very quickly for fear of forgetting, something that he feels is happening to him, by the way;
and that speed meant that there was a movie before.
There was a fear that when we filmed it had already been diluted and today several feature films have been shot on the subject”.
And he points out: “In the 2016 Nice attack, for example, people of 52 nationalities died, and we have included that in history.
Because these are issues that challenge us all”.
