'The journey to Kyoto': The longing for other worlds | Culture
Along with a lacquered modernism, the imaginary of Madrid's Movida was also ruled by a certain thirst for exoticism, which could well be synthesized in the chorus of the song Greenland of the Zombies: "And I'll look for you in Greenland, / in Peru, in Tibet, / in Japan, on Easter Island." When Fabio, the protagonist of The trip to Kyoto, a Madrid musician who achieved glory in the 80s, presents during a concert the most remembered song of his repertoire -precisely, the one that gives the film its title- defines it as a song about the yearning of other worlds, the desire to reach what is out of our lives. The impoverished present of Fabio, with the threat of an embargo and a scant number of tickets sold, makes it clear that these possible lives were not even touched with the tips of his fingers.
THE TRIP TO KIOTO
Address: Pablo Llorca.
Interpreters: Carlos Domingo, Mónica Gabriel y Galán, María Jesús Garrido, Elena Lancha.
Gender: drama. Spain, 2018
Duration: 70 minutes
The trip to Kyoto Pablo Llorca does not pose a nostalgic discourse, nor a revanchist about the memory of that movement that for some is still a lost paradise and, for others, imposture. The last feature film by Llorca is one more piece in that human comedy that the filmmaker continues to build with as much perseverance as stylistic nonchalance. The final shot, in which two antithetical figures - the musician in decline and the executor of the embargo - appear united in the evocation of their respective lives not lived, synthesizes the ultimate meaning of a work in which the fragility of conceptions of success and failure, through the contrast between a quoted plastic artist and an interpreter to whom acting ends up costing him the little money he has. It would be a pity if the director's expressive austerity dissuaded the spectators from discovering the sharp ideas contained in this miniature.
