It was an act of faith. Trusting that after the glorious Berlinale, Cannes and Venice festivals there would still be good films at the end of the year. A vote of confidence in the selection committee, in which after a thousand films they would have found not 16 gems, but at least 16 films with substance. After seven days the result is devastating. There is no terrible feature film in the competition of the official section of the 71st edition of the San Sebastián Festival, but the critical discussion will be limited to two or three films at most, and opinions will vary. Let’s see how the jury, chaired by the French Claire Denis, gets out of the quagmire. While the bright sun in the city drove people to the beach, a gentle leaden rain fell on the souls of moviegoers in the cinemas.
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The strange thing is that in the table that El Diario Vasco publishes with the critics’ ratings of some media outlets for the films in competition, none of them fail their average score. Nor does anyone achieve anything remarkable. Now the disagreement is so great that The Successor, from Xavier Legrand, director of Shared Custody, receives a 9 from the newspaper El Mundo and a 2 from the professional magazine Caimán CdC. This is a fluctuation and not that of the olive oil price. Legrand’s drama begins with a fascinating portrait of a rising haute couture star in Paris who is suddenly forced to return to his native Quebec after his father dies of a heart attack. The first twist of the script, the first surprise that explodes in the Canadian part of the film, helps the viewer understand why the designer put an ocean in the way of his father figure. Stress. The second no more, no one can buy a mess of this caliber that Legrand gets into, who decides to turn his drama into a minefield full of WTF, those famous moments that make the audience jump out of their seats and that Nanni Moretti makes fun in the recently published book “The Sun of the Future”.
The marriage protagonist of “A Journey in Spring”.
Films that do no harm include the Swedish-Danish film Kalak (about the traces of childhood sexual abuse in the wandering behavior of a father who sounded attractive a priori), the Taiwanese film A Journey in Spring (which begins with a) . beautiful shot of an old man in front of a waterfall, which represents a commitment to analog cinema, to the point that the perforations of the celluloid can be seen on the screen before the air is released), the Japanese Great Absence (about the rawness of Dementia in the Elderly over 152 minutes without having to review a new film) and American Ex-Husbands (a good script with meaningful characters, shot in an “I was over here” style that ends up driving up viewership) .
A moment from “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt” by Raven Jackson.
The two Argentine films Puan and The Practice by filmmakers such as Martín Rejtman in the first case and María Alché and Benjamín Naishtat in the second case, that is, directors with prestige and style, each look at life from a different perspective. particularly. They look good, they can get some awards in their honor, although unfortunately comedy is the least appreciated genre at festivals.
Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed in “Fingernails (This Will Hurt).”
And then there are the group of films with creators who promised big moments. “Fingernails” is directed by Christos Nikou, assistant to Yorgos Lanthimos, and features three indie stars Jessie Buckley, Jeremy Allen White and Riz Ahmed. From the first minute you know how this romantic comedy will end. Of course, its visual quality is only surpassed in the competition by Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, also known as “the film that looks like a Cologne ad” and which raised some expectations when A24 produced it: The One Bad One Digestion of Terrence Malick cinema causes these gases. And yet, with 6.8, it achieves the highest score in the critics’ table mentioned above. Another well-known name, Joachim Lafosse, has delivered a very interesting film about the traces of sexual abuse (yes, it was the dominant theme of the competition): Un silence. Although he is used to excellence in Belgian cinema, his film does not reach the emotional high of previous films.
Laia Costa and Hovik Keuchkerian, in “Un amor”.
Other heavyweights in auteur cinema: the Romanian Cristi Puiu, who made a Puiu with MMXX, a film of more than two and a half hours with long sequences with a lot of dialogue… but this time without a narrative or emotional thread. For a well-known author it would be a consensus Golden Shell. Also prestigious was the Frenchman Robin Campillo, director of 120 beats per minute, who could have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with this drama about AIDS in his country if the chairman of the jury, Pedro Almodóvar, had forced his comrades to comply. to his liking (he couldn’t win his favorite film). Now, in “The Red Island,” Campillo describes his childhood as the son of a French soldier stationed in Madagascar, and the result is a “so what?” handbook.
Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick from “The Royal Hotel”
Another possible “Golden Shell” could be “The Royal Hotel” by Australian Kitty Green, director of “The Assistant”. However, it seems difficult for a horror film that ends with a brutal revenge sequence to win the top prize. He repeats it with his muse, actress Julia Garner, once again immersing his protagonist in a hostile work environment (where once it was the office of a New York indie cinema mega-boss, it is now a bar in Australia’s mining district). , but his approach is different. And emotionally not as good as his first feature film.
A moment from the opening sequence of “MMXX” by Romanian Cristi Puiu.
Finally, the Spanish Navy. Three films directed by women that have at least provoked a debate about toxic masculinities and the female struggle to find her way physically and metaphorically. Each plays with criteria of its own category: “O como” by Jaione Camborda, in auteur cinema, which requires a greater effort from the viewer and does very well in the effort; “The Sultana’s Dream” by Isabel Herguera, a small and almost artisanal gem of animation, and “Un amor” by Isabel Coixet, an adaptation of Sara Mesa’s novel that smells of several Goya awards. And from all this menu, the jury will deliberate on a list of winners, which will be published today at the closing gala. Without an indisputable title like Beginning by Georgian Dea Kulumbegashvili in 2020 or even The Kings of the World by Colombian Laura Mora last year, let’s see how they do.
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