The cinema is often there to caress, to share, to move. But just as many, because it’s meant to provoke, challenge, even spit, and it’s good that it’s like that. Eduardo Casanova belongs to the second group.
When this challenge comes from spontaneity and frankness, as a simple and natural extension of its author’s personality, or instead stems from fraud, from a kind of fraud stamped with the simple art of fuss, in many cases it is unexplainable. For example, just as impossible and actually useless as judging a work by its external conditions are the often pompous statements of its authors, and in this sense we have two paradigms in Spain: that of Albert Serra’s controversial headlines on the state of cinema, and the by Casanova himself focused on the state of society. Movies are movies, good, average or bad, interesting or despicable, regardless of what their makers say or do.
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Accustomed to show business since childhood as a television actor, Casanova surprised in 2017, barely 26 years old, with one of those outcast films: Skins, a twisted revolt against physical homogeneity, a grotesque tale of comic horror that contained images as chilling as they were stimulating. Transgressive in the best sense; terrifying and beautiful at the same time and with an overwhelming background, without complacency and that worried you. A low-budget production with a bright and terrible sense of aesthetics that confirms what has previously been done in a handful of shorts. And something he later developed into other short interesting pieces, Martian in both the metaphorical and literal sense, in the case of the outrageous Sorry, my love (2018).
After what he achieved with Pieles, and while following basically similar plot lines, his second film, La piedad, is disappointing. Not because of its provocation, which remains firm, but because of its emptiness. A social and political tragedy whose roaring pink weather kitsch aesthetic is tempered by a lack of depth. What was an unbalanced black comedy in his first feature, with moments that put you between a rock and a hard place through artistic stratagems fraught with social challenges, is humorous here. Not everything in skins was fascinating in its ugliness, but at least it was challenging. There is more than one challenge here, what is revealed is an unfortunate naivety, almost ridiculous at times, when confronted with the doctor’s discovery of the tumor in the hospital, or the conversation about the pink ribbon of the breast cancer of the brain tumor, as yet uncolored.
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La piedad addresses the myth of the castrating mother of an adolescent son parallel (no less) to the situation of the people in North Korea in view of their dictatorial regime. And trying to reconcile both aspects is one of the cornerstones of a film, which of course confronts you with at times unprecedented images of hostility. And there the low-angle shot of Ana Polvorosa’s character offering the staff her yellow rain, perhaps the best of a lavish film despite its excesses, acts as a seminal example.
Fairly nominated for three Goya awards (art direction, costumes, make-up and hairstyling) and with a special prize from the jury in the Próxima section of the Karlovy Vary Festival, the film confirms Casanova’s terrible boyish image. What is not confirmed this time is his talent for disarmament.
grace
Direction: Edward Casanova.
Actor: Angela Molina, Manuel Llunell, Ana Polvorosa, Antonio Durán Morris.
Gender: Theatre. Spain, 2022.
Duration: 84 minutes.
Premiering: January 13.
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