Luis Tosar: "We are in a moment of total transformation of what it means to be a man"
While Venice was paralyzed by Harry Styles' alleged spitting on his partner Chris Pine, the team of the only Spanish woman in Venice messed it up through the canals of the Italian city. The gossip has soon spread like wildfire among the press, and the first question for the On the Margins team was almost mandatory: did Luis Tosar fall into the Venetian water? Juan Diego Botto, Penelope Cruz and Luis Tosar could not avoid laughing And they told the story. "I don't want to take away the protagonism from the true protagonist who is Luisa Mayol -actress and partner of Luis Tosar-, who is the one who fell into the channel. Then I made a crude attempt to fall and I could only put one leg and my ass, but nothing more," said the actor causing laughter among those present.
They seemed happy, full of joy. It has been six years to raise this harsh drama about evictions and now they present it at one of the most important festivals in the world. They compete in the Orizzonti section of Venice before traveling to San Sebastián and premiering in theaters on October 7. Botto has made his debut with a film that puts the drama of evicted people at the center with a script based on hundreds of real stories and that he has written together with the journalist from elDiario.es Olga Rodríguez. The director, who is still immersed in the Spanish tour of his play a moonless night, He continued with the channel's joke and said that they spread the myth that Fellini fell and won a prize and that "they wanted to imitate him, because if you get a channel, you get prizes".
Botto has explained the process of creating this script that led them to know many true stories. Hard stories that have been captured in an honest and soulful film about those people, almost all women, who never give in to a system that kicks them out of their own homes without giving them an alternative. For this it helped to have "two of the best actors not in our country but in the world". A film that was born from a request from Penélope Cruz, who wanted to work with her friend Botto, whom she has known since they met at Cristina Rota's school when, as they remembered today, and Rota herself kicked them off the stage in the middle of a Romeo and Juliet scene.
Tosar felt the need to be on the project as soon as he read the script. "I thought it was wonderful. I think it's a movie totally attached to reality. It had an enormous impact on me. I was interested in being able to embody a guy who is genuinely good, who wasn't Manichaean, and it's not very fashionable for this to happen. Also I, who have done a lot of bad guys in the movies. Because there are people like that and Juan gave me the opportunity to meet them. There are people who do this every day and dedicate themselves body and soul to trying to make the lives of Others are a little better, a little bit, because it's the only thing they can do, they manage to scratch a vulture fund or an investment fund or a bank for one more day to let some family stay 24 more hours in their house. But for them it is already a triumph, and those small triumphs add up," he says.
His character, Rafa, is a lawyer who dedicates all his time to activism, to the point of neglecting his own romantic relationship and his day-to-day life, which is another of the central themes of On the Margins. "It's a struggle, and like this character, who is inspired by pure reality, this makes you sacrifice your personal life and your emotional life totally. All the same for a salary of a thousand bucks," he adds.
Women are the heroines of On the Margins. Resilient women, who never stop fighting, who come together, associate and fight for others. It was one of the intentions of the film, because in the documentation process they realized that, in most cases, when a man loses his job, he sinks. He feels that he has failed in his responsibility as a man, he is not what society has told him he should be. It is at this moment that women become empowered while many men, raised in patriarchy, "feel vulnerable, fragile and ashamed." "The three men who appear in this film are three good people incapable of resolving the affective in an effective way. The film is not a criticism of the totality, it is not an amendment to the totality of masculinity", ditch.
A look at masculinity that was also something that interested Luis Tosar: "It is something that we observe and that we believe is worth telling and that I believe is part of our time, which is that this is a moment of total transformation for what it means to be a man and how you have to walk. Some are already being born in that environment, but many of us have been educated and live in another way and in a constant effort of transformation to see how to transform that masculinity of the 20th century into that of the 21st century, which has absolutely nothing to do with it".
The film ends with some credits that make it clear that evictions continue to occur, even though the media have displaced them from the news focus: "Something happens in news cycles, which is that what happens every day is no longer news, and is something that we saw with the evictions, or now with the war in Ukraine. They were headlines three weeks ago and little by little those headlines are falling from the front page to the inside pages of the newspapers," says Juan Diego Botto. "Olga Rodríguez is the co-writer of this story and my partner, and she always says that what happens every day is what defines our reality, and yet it stops being newsworthy precisely because it happens every day. The fact that we have met accustomed to this continuing to happen, he has stopped bringing it to the front pages, but it continues to happen. There are tens of thousands of families who are dealing with this every day, with a situation of deep economic crisis or are about to lose their home and that It's something that keeps happening," he adds. His film returns to the front page those stories that should never have happened, but continue to happen every day in a system that looks the other way.
