As Bestas
is largely the dark side of
Alcarràs
, the film by Carla Simón that won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and that defends family farming as an act of pure resistance.
Basically, the Spain that both films portray is the same, a country with its land and its crops threatened by the new renewable energy economy.
The greed of the present destroys the natural wealth of a territory devoured by windmills or solar panels.
The love of the land versus money.
Presented in the Cannes Première section, created last year at the festival, the new film by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, co-written with screenwriter Isabel Peña, brings to the table the narrative strength of its director but also his weaknesses.
In fact, the best film by the director of
The Kingdom
is a series,
Riot Control
, which was a six-hour movie.
Riot Police
was the confirmation of a very solid director who managed to transcend the television screen with the standards of the best cinema.
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'As bestas', a trip to the rural hells by Rodrigo Sorogoyen
There are parallels between
Riot
and
As bestas
, especially in how the female characters break the dynamics of a story loaded with atavistic and masculine violence.
Sorogoyen's men are hard as stone, but so are the women.
A feminine force that imposes its own laws against an inheritance of violent customs.
But the great paradox of
Ace Bestas
is that it fails for the same reason that
Riot Guard
was right.
That is to say, because of those long and wonderfully dialogued sequences that make this series of six chapters a total experience on the pyramid of Spanish political and economic corruption.
The way of narrating Sorogoyen and Peña is better served by the free extension of a series than that of a film, because
As Bestas
suffers by stretching more than necessary a story that asked for more concreteness.
Rodrigo Sorogoyen, standing, between Luis Zahera (left) and Denis Ménochet on the set of 'As bestas'Lucía Faraig
It is a common evil to many of the films that have been screened in this edition of Cannes and that has to do with the narrative intoxication of the series that the language of cinema suffers.
It's not that a movie can't be long, it just lacked.
The three hours of, for example,
Drive my car
, by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, are as necessary as the 2 hours 45 of
Pacification
by Albert Serra.
But what
As Bestas
tells would have been better without those long-winded dialogues, which, although they are a trademark of the house, detract from the whole: such as the conversation between the mother and the daughter or some of the high-voltage interpretive moments of the town pub.
The actors shine, without a doubt, but the artifice breaks the inner rhythm of a film that is very good but not round.
For the rest,
As Bestas
is a brilliant film about black Spain in times of renewables.
With portentous moments, performed wonderfully and with a load of violence that mixes the events of Puerto Hurraco with the violent voltage of
Perros de paja
.
Sorogoyen and Peña have an innate instinct to talk about current affairs and to do so bravely.
Because the Spain they portray, that emptied Spain that has not ceased to be filled with a harvest of good cinema, is a propitious place to narrate the Spain of today.
This dilemma that Sorogoyen illustrates with one of the most powerful images of his film, that of the character played by the French actor Denis Ménochet at the foot of a windmill as a new Quixote facing a new and threatening giant.
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