Director Lucía Alemany made her film debut with one of the most fascinating and humble auteur films that the Spanish audiovisual industry has produced in recent years, despite the fact that it left empty-handed in the awards season. innocence It was, almost unanimously for those who had the opportunity to see it, an impeccable film, with the right dramatic tone in the portrait of adolescence. Now, the filmmaker changes third with a different register but a very good result in the comedy Mari(two)although it is true that the formula could not fail.
Paco León and Ernesto Alterio are the stars of this comedy with an air of westernfunny, crazy and sophisticated, which also has a script signed by Pablo Alén and Breixo Corral, responsible for titles as crazy and entertaining as 3 more weddings either Anacleto: secret agent. In this film, Emilio (Alterio) and Toni (León) meet when they go to a ski resort to look for their respective wives, victims of an avalanche that has buried several people in the snow. However, they soon discover that her spouses are actually the same woman, so they will have to wait until she wakes up from her coma to find answers. Until then, they will be forced to understand each other and live together.
Thus, while Emilio is an “authentic, sincere and visceral” man who “takes less care of forms”, Toni is “more formal, more educated and more pusillanimous”. It is impossible not to think of a multitude of comic couples from classic cinema when seeing the leading actors on stage, but there is one in which both the performers and the director herself agree: the odd couplewith Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmonin a “contrast between the grumpy and the light”, according to what Paco León has highlighted in statements to Vozpopuli on the occasion of the film’s premiere. “Establishing two contrasting characters works like a classic humor structure,” adds Alterio.
Why is it so hard for men to ask for directions? They educate you to know and just asking a street you don’t know is hard work”Paco Leon
Regardless of structures and genres, Mari(two) uses comedy to place in front of the camera a clear case of deconstruction of masculinity, an activity so fashionable among the gurus of social alternatives that this film approaches with humor and the absence of complexes. “This movie has some masculine deconstruction because the characters have to overcome humiliations that attack an inherited structure, they have to reposition before the one that comes upon them. My character has a trans son and his wife leads a double life. His floor crumbles and he has to rebuild the whole house brick by brick,” says Alterio.
Along these lines, León celebrates the possibility of connecting with “fragility” and “vulnerability”, something that he believes “all men” are looking for. “Why is it so hard for men to ask for an address? They educate you to know and just asking for a street you don’t know is hard work. There are many layers of toxicity that we should remove,” he says.
Germany: from auteur cinema to Mari(two)
Lucía Alemany entered this project cautiously and with the feeling of being a rookie on the field, but she soon saw that everyone liked the result. Her name also has a certain weight in the look at these characters, both in the air of western that exudes at the start of the film as in the layers that it removes one by one until it reaches the most vulnerable part of the protagonists.
Emilio’s trip speaks of the fact that men also cry. They’re always holding this pride and strength thing. Putting up with this all your life is hard.”Lucia Alemany
“The new Mari(two) It is not exactly the script that I read, but the elements were there and it was necessary to refocus them to be able to do something very current and very necessary. Emilio’s trip speaks of the fact that men also cry. They’re always holding this pride and strength thing. Putting up with this all your life is hard,” reflects the director.
From his debut, despite the radically different bet that it was, Alemany has taken the interpretation of the actors. “Despite being a comedy, I wanted to do everything from realism, there is a lot of improvisation and they have been very free. That way they will provide the best joke, because it is the one that comes out spontaneously. If we all go corseted, in the end the series suffocates”, says the director, who made the decision to shoot the scenes from beginning to end. “Thus, the actors are allowed to move through their emotions, they can be in the here and the now of what they feel”, he adds.
I want to use a language to be able to reach a large audience, because the large audience is the social fabric and in the end, although I know I will never be able to do it, I came to the cinema because I wanted to change the world.”Lucia Alemany
Her case is similar to that of another filmmaker, Arantxa Echevarría, awarded the Goya for best new director in 2019 for Carmen and Lola and that two years later he directed the blockbuster comedy The perfect family, with José Coronado and Belén Rueda, although Alemany does not see this assignment as a parenthesis but rather as the path she wants to take. “I said yes to Mari(two) because I want to make commercial auteur cinema“, admits the filmmaker.
“I don’t want to stay in the author for a small audience, or in the author with little budget. Even if I tell a story that comes from my heart, I want to use a language to be able to reach a large audience, because the large audience is the social fabric and in the end, although I know I will never be able to do it, I came to the cinema because I wanted to change the world, with that arrogance. I want commercial cinema to be my place”, concludes the director.
