'The cold that burns': abysses of passion with a Nazi nude and Andorran hatred

The films on the most imposing, most serious themes, most relevant to the human being and to History, with a capital H, are the ones that are most in danger of ending up falling into a blush.

If continuous attempts at stylization, even sublimation, are added to the powerful height of what one is trying to tell, further underlining the relevance of the work itself, it is better that both the piece as a whole and the sum of its parts have true substance: political, social, philosophical, artistic, human.

More information

Hitler's cinema did not live golden years

Because if it is not achieved or, even further, if it stays far from that solemn dramatic height that is being marked with all the cinematographic elements of form and substance, the whole collapses until it is much more insignificant than any simple film without intentions, without great ambitions or achievements.

These, the second, can be little or nothing.

The first, the ones that go for everything, end up being less than nothing.

Exactly that happens to

the debut in the direction of Santi Trullenque.

The abysses of the landscape, the Andorran peaks during the Spanish postwar period and World War II.

Year 1943. The attitude of human beings during the fights, around hatred, quarrels, the weight of the present and the slab of the past.

Passion and love above any contingency.

The pressure of violence, of extermination, of the mechanics of Nazi power.

The flight to nowhere, to find a possible place in the world where there is no room for the abomination against the Jewish people.

They are not trivial topics or times or places.

And Trullenque and his collaborators add pomp to it without much circumstance.

A constant and very vehement soundtrack that stresses to exhaustion the supposed greatness of emotions, situations and places.

Slow motion with the snow falling on the lives of the creatures.

by Visconti.

More information

read movie reviews

And yet, all the great themes that Trullenque intends to present escape him alive, without depth, without a good dialogue to put into his mouth.

It diversifies so much that it does not focus on anything, and when it does focus on some of the more complex aspects of the story, for example, the denunciations in times of war, it turns out that they are due to issues related to fidelity and bed, and not to social, ideological or political reasons.

In other words, justifications that would be valid for any other film when it has been decided to frame them in a time of moral battle with others and even with oneself.

He wants to be

another western in inhospitable territory, but it is never enough.

Because the ultimate reasons that move the characters have much more to do with the soap opera than with the epic or the twilight.

The crossroads in which the lives of its characters are involved could have been interesting with a more measured, somber or intimate treatment.

But there is a maximum effort to raise the voice through the image and sound.

Grandiloquence, why and for what?

And besides, there remains the most stereotyped Nazi in the history of film Nazis, who are usually pure stereotype.

The cold that burns

Address:

Santi Trullenque.

Cast:

Greta Fernández, Roger Casamajor, Adrià Collado, Daniel Horvath. 

Genre:

drama.

Spain, 2022.

Duration:

116 minutes.

Premiere: January 20.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber