The
suro
, cork in Catalan, is a plant tissue that grows from the bark of the cork oak.
It is a unique and strange material, light and at the same time resistant and compact.
The ancient Greeks used it to cover wine amphoras and its use has extended to the present.
The debut feature by Basque director Mikel Gurrea talks a lot about cork or, more specifically, its collection, to trace the deep vital and sentimental crisis of a young, urban couple.
The film surprised at its premiere at the San Sebastián festival for its ability to build a pressure cooker around a dream.
Located in deep Catalonia, a couple from Barcelona decides to start over in a return to the origins that reveals more than just the mirages of happiness of foreigners.
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The leading couple embarks on the adventure of leaving the city to fix up a farm inherited (by her) and invent a new life that will have little to do with idyllic and bucolic.
Gurrea opens and closes his film with two strange and tense dances in which the actress Vicky Luengo and the actor Pol López will give free rein to their tensions.
In an overly explicit way, the double dance will mark the challenge as the starting point, and the catharsis as the end.
They are the prologue and the epilogue of a very rough story, with ups and downs due to wanting to mix too many things, but dragged from start to finish by two high performances and by a stimulating narrative solidity.
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With a cast mostly made up of natural actors,
Suro
dwells on the description of how the bark is removed from the cork oaks.
The harshness of farm work is central to this film about the struggle between desire and power of a couple who collide in their way of seeing the world.
Class contradictions, labor exploitation of immigrants, caciquismo or the architectural decisions of this new rural world are part of the problems faced by the two main characters, without her pragmatism or his idealism being one piece.
Far from a Manichaean temptation, and perhaps at the cost of not giving up his empathy towards them,
Suro
strives to show real people facing themselves in an unknown space.
suro
Direction:
Mikel Gurrea.
Performers:
Vicky Luengo, Pol López, Ilyass El Ouahdani.
Genre:
drama.
Spain, 2022.
Duration:
116 minutes.
Premiere: December 2.
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