All the first times - The Province
Who prevents it, who takes its title from a musical theme of the late Rafael Berrio, to whom he honors, gives voice to a generation that, attention, has suffered the impact of two crises, the one of 2008, when they were still children, and the current one. I ask the eight actors present at the press conference to define their generation with one word. These were his answers: countercurrent, change, complicated, expressive, miracle, reinvent, novel and pifostio.
No drama. Neither idealize nor demonize it. Adolescence is the age of intense effervescence, recognition of the body, endless mirrors, viscerality, depressions, punk nihilism, bodily dreams, the first few times. On the positive, you are still far from understanding what it means to know that you are going to die.
One of the singularities of this film that jogs between fiction, documentary and non-fiction is that it has been in production for five years, from when the girls and boys were 15 years old until the pandemic. Another uniqueness is that it has two intermediates. Suddenly, the screen gives way to a yellow or green sign that indicates the minutes remaining until starting again. The projection does not stop, so the experience becomes a happening, people get up, go to the bathroom, dance, stretch, look for cover, take photos.
A rush. Jonás Trueba's cinema challenges you. And it consoles you: "I saw it in the movie Fight Club," reflects one of the boys. «Someone said: there is nothing better than hitting rock bottom, because it is after that moment that you really start to enjoy life. Because you can only go up ». At 39, the son of filmmakers Fernando Trueba and Cristina Huete is one of the best directors of his generation. Romantic, orderly, ungainly, discursive, poetic, incisive and always with exciting moments of timeless cinema thanks to the closeness he establishes with his characters. It is also as free as a filmmaker can be.
I asked Trueba about the imprint of his generation of filmmakers. «Judith Colell, Félix Viscarret and Carla Simón are directors and directors that I especially admire. I have the feeling that each of us makes the movies that we want, and can, do. We are a possible generation, we started to make films in the years of the previous crisis, in 2008, so it is a cinema adjusted to reality ».
Poetry
From Jane Campion's beautiful film The Power Of The Dog, shown in the Pearls section, the first thing that grabs you is her dazzling photography. Despite being a Netflix production, you have to see it on the big screen. It is filmed in New Zealand, but it is a western, the fiction takes place in the North American west. The beautiful imposted landscapes give it a distance that is loaded with poetry.
The action takes place at the beginning of the 20th century. Two brothers coexist in a stale, secluded ranch, one of them rude, the other educated. In a nearby village, a tall young man, whom everyone identifies as a sissy, is the son of the woman whom one of the brothers pretends. Your husband has committed suicide. Nothing is what it seems. Neither the males are so alpha nor the homosexual of honor broken an innocent guinea pig. The world is changing, the cinema has been invented and the trains that move across the plains like stretched elephant trunks are beginning to give way to winding dirt roads where the first cars circulate.
If I had come to the festival, I would have liked to ask Jane Campion about the controversy of the Donostia Award to actor Johnny Depp. After all, she is truly a feminist ahead of her time, a reputable voice. What will the first film director who won the Palme d'Or in Cannes, for El piano (1993), think that a whole campaign is carried out labeling someone as a violent male chauvinist without there having been a trial, or a sentence, until today, to confirm it?
