They say that you have to know how to keep your distance and I discover that I have them held over a slow fire like a tattoo on my skin. Gran Vía and Callao are now as far away or as close to me as a bougainvillea bower in San Ángel or Coyoacán, my father’s careful gaze palpably disappears a few centimeters from the smiles of my children, now that we have met by chance in a city that is no longer a District or Federal. I am two blocks from a bookstore in Revolución that seems to be umbilically connected to the oldest in Madrid, whose shelves seem varnished by ingratitude or oblivion and the distances are also measured by the silences.
One does not think that the image of a once world-famous soccer player would provoke a flood of complaints because his figure has distanced himself from the glory of a scorer, becoming horribly close to the figures of organized crime and drug trafficking. Even though we appear together in an ephemeral photograph, we are divided by a wide space that distances us etymologically, just as the old bicycle announcer who continues carrying a ton of newspapers as if he himself had become a news cable suddenly appears in my view like a nearby comet. , stuck to me although he pedals without slowing down. The distance that unites me to the roses that I no longer offer or the white crypt where my father rests are not measured in meters but in breaths and memory, untouchable stories of memory where all distances are delimited with sometimes hollow words.
These paragraphs pass close to a country that for the first time is torn between two women to assume the presidency of its government and the kingdom of Spain where two kings occupy the throne and their crowns seems distant. How far away the cold seems that haunts the shadows of El Retiro park under the unexpected heat that seems to burn the steps of walkers in the Condesa neighborhood!
I confirm that there are screens that break distances. The one in the movie Family by Rodrigo García Barcha now seems to me to be a perfect projection of an unappealable truth: all unhappy families have a plot with timeless dialogues that redefine possible happiness, quiet and intimate, there in the plain of all the meals, dinners or snacks that unite us. The film is one more example of the immense quality of all the actors – starting with Daniel Jiménez Cacho – and the invisible baton of Rodrigo as the orchestrator of the spirit and encouragement of a long after-dinner meal in the middle of the olive trees. The garden becomes a vine of words where the three daughters of a patriarch, the archangel with Down, the Spanish muse of a widower and the linen-like ghost of his former wife spill out in hot or peaceful, joking or serious, resentful or revealing dialogues from the chance of all their lives.
It is urgent that Rodrigo García give us a new film in Spanish soon (having already established prestige and greatness in Hollywood and in English) to continue harvesting his vision of a Mexico whose families talk to each other about life and time, saving all the distances from the paragraphs read and the music that sings to us and we sing. It is urgent that Rodrigo García immerse himself in the after-dinner atmosphere of the immense Mexico City, where he also flourished before launching himself into Alta California, because Family It is a film of a tangle of family relationships like olives that fall from ancient flowering olive trees in Baja California. Beyond the vineyards and the very close distance to the United States of America and here the lesbian daughter who presumes the countless mystery of her pregnancy, the daughter who seems triumphant with a family that seems functional or the son with the syndrome that allows a child to be always a child, who never stops being one and who does not distance himself from the unfiltered innocence that allows him to say perhaps the most intelligent thing that is heard at his Family’s after-dinner table.
It is urgent to embrace Rodrigo García Barcha for so much cinema that he gives, for so many pages that unite us, intertwining the plots of the word friendship, not far from the brotherhood shared by brothers and nephews, parents and walls of an old house in the middle of the jungle from which we never move away because the nest of the best stories is always close. Rodrigo García’s cinema is close to me and Family is now projected on portable screens so that from the first sound that fills the early morning where we meet the main protagonist of the film we approach the mirror where the short days in short of a Family that is known and unknown in dialogues of desire, apathy and silence. The windows through which all the close beings look out, the stories that become intimate and the affection with admiration braided in a hug that crosses the entire belly of the planet are always very close to me.
_
