'West Side Story' and those winks for those of us who still care about the cinema

Seeing

Steven Spielberg's

new

in a half-empty multiplex next to the Palace of Sports in Washington the week it opens has been a strange experience.

Lying in the most comfortable armchair in the world, literally engulfed by the lyrics and melodies of one of the most beautiful musicals in history, I felt the gap that separates us from the younger generations, who are supposedly directed by a film that in a Not so distant time would have burst the box office.

A massless spectacle screeches like a ghost ship. Without queues in the bathroom or at the popcorn counter, without the religious silence of the living room when the lights go out, the weary voice of a middle-aged African-American woman who knew all the songs slipped in. I don't know if it was necessary to re-shoot this classic of the genre, but once the waste is done, it is appreciated to feel emotions from another time, although almost no one wants to return to that time.

The

Spielberg has been a flop at the box office of his country and its spectacular images are revealed as the fateful end of an era that began precisely with perhaps his masterpiece,

, the movie that changed Hollywood and commercial strategies; the cinematic experience that turned empty movie theaters into an amusement park. Spielberg is no longer 27 years old and perhaps that is why he has made a musical that is an exciting defense of an old school cinema, a dream anchored in the realism of the performances, an authenticity opposed to the hollow and conservative fantasy of recent films like

, where Lin-Manuel Miranda rewrites the role of Latinos in

proclaiming a generational changeover with new clichés loaded with the most stale ideals.

With a crushing choreography, beautiful voices, one art direction that contextualizes the historical moment of New York and its immigrant gangs in which this tragedy of Capulets and Montagues happens, the

of

is as personal as faithful to the 1961 film by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise.

But if the number of the opening and the famous chorus

have an unusual force, it is thanks to two secondary ones that eat the film.

Ariana DeBose, as Anita, and especially Mike Faist, as Riff, do everything well: sing, dance and act. So much so that they manage to give a new dimension to these two characters. Although where Spielberg demonstrates his ability to press the sentimental key is when he puts the mythical

in the mouth of a character that did not exist, the old woman played by Rita Moreno, the 90-year-old actress who won the first Oscar for a Latina for his Anita and one of the icons of this musical and of the Hispanic world. It reminded me of what Lars von Trier did with Joel Gray, the

emcee

in his throbbing appearance in

. One of those winks that works only for those who still care about movie theaters.

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